Everything, even her work, seemed suddenly insipid; the chance collision with Sutcliffe now filled her with conflicting emotions. She wanted to avoid talking about Sam with half of her: with the other half she realised that it might help her to find her way out of this temporary numbness, the way back into life. So here he came, patient as an old dog, to ask for news of the pale slender girl, who was now sliding away down the long slopes of melancholia which would lead only to mania.
“I should not visit her at the moment. She will only start wringing her hands and weeping again – all day long.”
“But you know as well as I do, she holds me responsible for everything, and it is not fair.”
She shook her head. “Nothing is fair with the insane.” Sutcliffe placed his hands on the top of his head like King Lear and said, “I destroyed her dolls. How could I have been such a fool?” But the trouble went deeper than that, much deeper.
“The negress calls every day, and with her she seems a little better. They play noughts and crosses.”
“It’s appropriate to the day and age,” he said bitterly. “Indeed when one sees the state of the world one wonders why one should call her back to it – supposing we could.”
Before going to join Toby in the bar they walked a while in the gardens which border the lakeside and she told him of Blanford’s wound, which made him, rather unaccountably, chuckle.
“I must get in touch with him again,” he said, nothing more. But when she mentioned Sam’s death – as a therapeutic measure in order to take its pulse, so to speak – he looked at her with sympathy and a certain rough affection. “It’s just the beginning,” he said. “Have you seen what they have reserved for the Jews?” Who had not? “Anyway,” she said, “Freud is safely away even though all the books are lost; but copies exist here, thank goodness.” He looked at her with interest and said, “Did you know him?” She nodded and smiled, as if at the memory of a pleasant and rich meeting. Indeed it had been the great turning-point in her life and she was prepared to defend the old philosopher to the death. Sensing this, Sutcliffe was prepared to tease her a little; under his breath he sang a stave of “Dear old Pals” in an amended version.
“Dear old Fraud, jolly old Fraud,
We’ll be together whatever the weather.”
“O cut it out,” she said, “I am sure you don’t believe it.” He grinned, for he did not. “I got to know him quite well,” he said, “and he was no humbug. He gave me several interviews and outlined his system with great elegance and modesty. He emphasised its limits. He gave me half a dozen consultations on the couch to show me how the thing worked, which was jolly decent. The thing is it doesn’t – not for anything really serious, anything like psychosis.”
“He never pretended it did.”
“But Schwarz did, and it is his messing about that aggravated the condition of my wife; but that’s not your affair, I suppose, since you are only a locum.”
“Well, I can’t pronounce on his cases,” she said with the light of battle in her eye. “But I am glad you met Freud himself.”
“He was very amusing with his Jewish moneylender touch. I teased him a bit about love being an investment – invested libido. But the old darling was serious. Jews can never see themselves from the outside. They are astonished when you say that they are this or that. They are naive, and so was he, very much so. The way his hand came out for the money at the end of the hour, when the clock struck, was a scream. I asked him if he would take a cheque but he said, ‘What? And declare it to the Income Tax?’ He insisted on cash and when he put it in his pocket he shuffled it until it tinkled, which put him in a great good humour. He looked just like Jules Verne at such moments; indeed there was a sort of similarity of imagination between the two fantasists. Anyway the idea amused him for he had read and admired Jules Verne. But when I told him that the whole of his system was a money-making plant, to be paid for just listening, and by the hour, he chuckled. ‘People want to suffer,’ he said, ‘and we must help them. It’s the decent thing to do. It’s not only Jews who like money, you know. Besides, the hand-to-hand payment is an essential part of the treatment. You feel the pinch or the pain in your infantility.’”
Constance mistrusted the depth of his knowledge in the clinical sense. It was one thing to talk all round a subject in terms of philosophy; it was quite another to adapt it to a therapy. “I am boring you,” he said, and she shook her head. “No, I was thinking of other things, of that whole period when I started medicine. Tell me more.”
Sutcliffe, when they had retired to the bar once more, called for drinks and said, “There is little more to tell. I was with him for such a short time – sufficient however to foster a great respect. The biggest pessimist since Spinoza. For the last session I brought him the fee in coin of the smallest possible denomination. I had a little leather bag with a drawstring round the mouth, which I filled with farthings or their equivalent. He was quite surprised when I presented it and told him that it was his fee. ‘Good Lord,’ he said with a laugh, ‘you’ve got diarrhoea!’”
Toby drew on his pipe and listened with half an ear; he was not really abreast of the subject and knew little of the personalities under discussion, but Sutcliffe seemed well enough informed. “And then we left Vienna, and old Fraud moved back to his flat to a new consulting room, abandoning his gloomy rooms and the old couch where she had set out all the elements of our married life like someone sets up toy soldiers for a battle, or dolls for a picnic. But when I spoke to the old boy about us he simply shook his head and said, ‘The story of narcissism is always the same story.’ I felt an absurd temptation to weep for myself and wring my hands, but to what end? He told me that I must sublimate the distress in a book, which God knows I have been trying to do from the very beginning – even before I felt the distress, so to speak. I have from early adolescence suffered from Schmerz, Angst, and for good measure piles. My first publisher gave me an advance to write a cookery book about Egyptian food. I was wild with joy and took ship for Egypt at once. But the very first meal I had – there was a French letter in the salad. And things have gone on like that ever since.” Under the rather lame banter she felt the massive depression and the stress. In his rough lumbering manner she found something comforting and helpless; he was like an old blind bear tied to a post. For her own part she had her own share of distress to cope with; she realised that she did not want to go back to her cold sterile little flat with its over-flowing bookshelves and undone washing-up. Since she had received the letter from Sam she had suddenly taken it into her head to flee across the lake; at least at the clinic she had the company of other consultants and nurses, while even the presence of the insane all round her seemed to afford a paradoxical sort of comfort. But now the evening was drawing on and Toby had a dinner engagement. He bowed himself away with solemnity, hoping to have the pleasure once more … The seventeenth-century sentiments became his vast form very well, he was made for awkward bows and gawkish scrapings. That left Sutcliffe. She thought: “It must be strange to exist only in somebody’s diary, like Socrates – we only have Plato’s word for his existence.”
He was thinking: “And this book which I have always had in deep soak, when will it be finished? When I stop breathing? But the idea behind this furtive activity has always been that ideal book – the titanic do-it-yourself kit, le roman appareil.
After all, why not a book full of spare parts of other books, of characters left over from other lives, all circulating in each other’s bloodstreams – yet all fresh, nothing second-hand, twice chewed, twice breathed. Such a book might ask you if life is worth breathing, if death is worth looming.… Be ye members of one another. I hear a voice say, ‘What disease did the poor fellow get?’ ‘Death!’ ‘Death? Why didn’t he say so? Death is nothing if one takes it in time.’”
She was thinking: “To be instructively wounded is the most one can ask of love. What innocents we were! Now I see it all so clearly. Some marriages just smoulder along, ot
hers chime by couples, but in ours we were blissed out. What luck! But how hard to pick oneself up after such a knockdown blow. What now? I shall live alone like Aubrey, sleep alone, on my right side, pointing north-south; yes, quite alone.”
He thought: “To commingle and intersperse contingent realities – that’s the game! After all, how few are the options open to us – few varieties of human shape, mental dispositions, scales of behaviour: hardly more numerous than the available Christian names used by the race. How many coats of reality does it take to get a nice clean surface to the apprehension? We are all fragments of one another; everyone has a little bit of everything in his make-up. From the absolute point of view – Aristotle’s Fifth Substance, say – all persons are the same person and all situations are identical or vastly similar. The universe must be dying of boredom. Yet obstinately I dream of such a book, full of not completely discrete characters, of ancestors and descendants all mixed up – could such people walk in and out of each other’s lives without damaging the quiddity of each other? Hum. And the whole book arranged in diminished fifths from the point of view of orchestration. A big switchy book, all points and sidings. A Golgotha of a book. I must talk to Aubrey about it.” He bowed his head while an imaginary audience applauded lengthily.
She thought: “To wake up one day with a vision of Absolute Good! What would it be like?”
Sutcliffe, who sucked a pipe in order to supply a substitute against smoking cigarettes, threw it down and lit yet another Celtique, snapping his fingers defiantly at his own reflection in the gloomy café mirror.
The drink was beginning to tell on them; she felt quite unsteady and all-overish. “We must eat something,” he said and bade the taciturn waiter produce his dismal menu. He read it through, groaning: “Plat du jour, baked beans on toast. Let’s have that.”
She was too weak to resist for they must eat something or be completely dismasted by the alcohol. Besides, it prolonged the evening, for she had not yet decided whether her courage would permit her to resume residence in her flat which was hard by, or whether she would need to go back to the clinic across the lake. This at least set a time limit upon the decision, for the last ferry left at eleven at night. Her heart was beating much faster and from time to time she felt flushed and a trifle incoherent. The food was produced and they fell upon it with zeal. “What a swiz life is,” said the big man between mouthfuls, “I saw an advertisement for a smart secretary for my office, and I answered it only to find that the girl in question – O dear! Masses of dirty hair attached to a broomstick. So I sent her to Toby’s department where they are all colour blind.” She was not listening. She was thinking: “How intensely one dreams of the past.” She said aloud, “I keep dreaming of the last summer we had in Provence – it is so vivid. Small things come out so clearly. Sometimes very trivial things about Hilary my brother and Aubrey. Do you know, when Aubrey became absolutely insufferable with his preaching about how superior to us the French were we set up an ambush for him. The one subject which he always brought up at the end of one of those futile arguments about Art or Sex was the richness of the French language. It had many more pejorative epithets than English, he would assert loftily. It got on our nerves so much that we rehearsed a little act and whenever he brought this up we used to chant in unison, with terrible facial grimaces, the half dozen or so which he always cited. It doesn’t sound funny but if you saw the grimaces and his own crestfallen blush …”
“What were they?”
“Cuistre! Mufle! Goinfre! Rustre! Jobard! Goujat! Fourbe! Gniaf!”
“Good. I didn’t think his French was up to much.”
“At any rate we cured him that summer.”
“Good.”
But she sighed and said, “I wonder what he is doing now, all alone in that palace with the Nile flowing on his ceiling.”
“I can tell you,” said Sutcliffe, “but it’s only a novelist’s guess. He is listening with ever-increasing irritation to the nasal whine of Cade, his servant, who is massaging him reproachfully. Cade has found out about the goings-on with the Greek nurse and he is saying, in his lugubrious Cockney accent, ‘For my part, sir, I never go with a girl without wearing a conundrum.’”
“I must try and get home,” she said, “but I need help after all these drinks.” They negotiated the gloom of the place with its vast dusty clumps of furniture and arrived in the street only to find that it was raining – an autumn drizzle for which neither was prepared. “The quickest is my flat,” she said, glad that the issue had been decided for her by an extraneous factor. “It’s just around the corner.” They scurried with as much despatch as their condition permitted and reached the house in somewhat unsteady shape. Here she had a struggle to find her key, but find it she did and they took the lift up to the second floor. The place was very dusty and had clearly not been inhabited for a while; there was washing-up about and through an open door one saw an unmade bed. But the little studio room over the lake was pleasant and the sofas were comfortable, which invited Sutcliffe to relax while she went in search of further drink. There was only vodka left in the drink cupboard and this, she realised, was going to be fatal to him; but it was obvious that he had already decided to fall where he stood – he had shaken off his clumsy shoes and was examining the big toe of his left foot which protruded from a torn sock. “I like these Swiss suburban flats,” he said, “they are homey. There is always a membre fantôme on the hallstand and a Valéry open in the loo. They are inhabited by psychoanalysts and abortionists.”
“Thank you.”
“Not at all.”
“I see you don’t believe in science.”
“I do, though; but in the poetry of science.”
“And happiness?”
“Has nothing to do with the matter. You cannot create this obscure and marvellous field of energy – le bonheur – by advocacy or the whip, by force or by guile, but only by pleading. Poetry begins there, and prayer also; they lead you to a thought, and science comes out of that thought. But the pedigree is long.” He broke off and erupted in a string of hiccoughs which rather alarmed him. Then he went on: “The sixpence in the plum pudding must be taken on trust. We must believe. It is really there. It is the holy Inkling.”
“You are babbling,” she said reproachfully, and he shook his head sadly over her, saying, “You have received a tremendous shock with Sam’s death.” And at this, quite involuntarily, they both burst out crying simultaneously, joining hands. It was such a relief to discover that she could produce so human a reaction at last; he cried like an old horse, she cried like a humble adolescent, awkwardly and noisily. And while she cried she thought: “The arrival of death on the scene brings an enormous sense of the sweetness of things – the richness of impermanence which one has always avoided, feared. ‘The dying fall’ is true for all of us: clowns, heroes, lovers, cads, fools, freaks, kings, commoners, the sane, the mad, or the silent.”
She laid her distraught drunken head on his shoulder while he, unmanned by emotion and exhausted by his potations, stroked it with his coarse palms and repeated helplessly, “There, my dear, there.” And all the while she was thinking: “The long studied suppuration of confessional analysis! The fatigue and intricacy! The weeping wall of the Jewish spybrain hovering around schemes of investment; picking the scabs off wounds and wondering why they bleed. Scar-tissue of un-assuaged desires!” Then she burst out: “He wrote me such a foolish letter with nothing in it but schoolboy jokes and just one good sincere passage. Wait, I’ll get it. I left it in the loo.”
She had wanted to tear it up and flush it away but instead had put it beside the bath where the steam had gummed half its leaves together. Now she picked up the flimsy mass and peeling it like an onion found a sheet. She read out: “ ‘Connie, death is nothing and that is the truth. Pain of course one fears a bit, but amnesia comes with it. Our great weakness, the place where we all cave in, and can’t take it, is love.’”
“But the letter,” said Sutcliffe, �
��it’s all glued together.” She replied: “I know it by heart. But it came too late. That is why I am so terribly upset. In it he told me that whatever happened I must keep the child, for we both practically knew for certain that I was pregnant; at that time I told him that I would certainly not hold him up by having one, in case when he came back he no longer felt keen on me.”
She knocked on her forehead with her knuckles. “I was being noble. I did not wish to risk that he might stay with me against his will because of a child begotten in haste and by accident during the war. After all, I thought, when our love reestablishes itself there will be time enough to have another one.
So I made away with it. I made away with it. And hardly had I done so than the news of his death came, and of course the child became infinitely precious – if only I had kept it!”
He realised now the full extent of her distress and guilt. She stood in the centre of the room with hanging head and relived that cold afternoon in the little apartment of the old doctor – lying spreadeagled in a dentist’s chair hoisted against a white pane of glass where the clouds from the lake surface reflected themselves. Lying with her legs apart while the old man talked rapidly, confidentially. Pain and anaesthesia melted and blended. Then the mountains of wadding to stay the bleeding. The old man came with a slop-pail in which the foetus lay, the fruit of their love, like a little greenish tree-frog, with perfectly formed fingernails and toes. It was still alive but tremendously exhausted. It lay like a half-dead swimmer washed up on a forlorn coast.
The Avignon Quintet Page 68
