All this, in much abbreviated form, was retailed by Smirgel in his secret bulletins to Geneva, and he was even able to supply the name of the new Commander. It was Von Ritter, a stern disciplinarian and party man, as ugly as he was unprincipled. The news of his appointment caused a ripple of interest, for he was fresh from some spectacular civilian reprisals in Russia. His arrival was celebrated by a mass hanging of twenty “partisans” in Nîmes: they were actually youths who, to dodge the labour conscription, had taken to the hills where they lived like the shepherds. They were unarmed, but what matter? It would teach everyone a good lesson.
So the news of the new dispensation filtered through the opaque medium of the gossiping Intelligence agencies, and the name of Von Esslin was gradually obliterated from the reports. In Geneva as in Avignon the cold set in again with high wind and heavy snowfalls.
ELEVEN
Confrontations
AROUND THE COMPANIONABLE GREEN BAIZE OF THE billiard table moved the two figures of Affad and Toby, each with half his mind on his ball and the other on the subject in hand, namely, did Ritter’s appointment prefigure a policy change; or was it a ruse? For Toby “it smelt ratty”. The accident was an excuse merely to replace an old-fashioned regular with old-fashioned notions by an active, fire-eating young general who would ginger things up. Affad shook his head: “You over-elaborate the obvious. I believe Smirgel.” Toby sighed with resignation and said, “As always. But you just wait. That man is going to fail you.”
“I have asked for an independent medical check on the matter, so we’ll see who is right.” Then, in order to rub a little salt into the open wound of British Intelligence he went on, “By the way, I did not ask you people for the dates of the Second Front landings, I got them from Cairo. I did not want to embarrass you. But here on this visiting card I have jotted down the false dates which I have passed to Smirgel. You will find quite a response to them already – a whole lot of armour has been shunted north to contain this hypothetical landing – but I am sure you know that.”
Toby swore silently for as a matter of fact he did not know, though it would not have done to say so; he looked vexed, however, and Affad smiled, for he liked teasing him. The result was that Toby missed his shot and vented his spleen with an audible oath which did service for both groups of sentiment.
The Secret Service was really no fun at all. One was always being upstaged by some other agency and one was forced to accept old-fashioned histrionic methods of work, some of them elaborated at the turn of the century. It was the influence of bad fiction like the Sherlock Holmes series (which he adored); the Foreign Office believed that every spy should carry a big magnifying glass with him night and day in case of footprints. And here this blinking Gyppo Prince went about openly tapping telephones … “Nobody tells us anything,” he said plaintively, and by a lucky shot broke even.
Constance who watched them thoughtfully from the corner where she was answering letters in her swift shorthand said, “I find it galling to hear you two talk – you know more than I do about Avignon, and yet I live and work there, and my job takes me everywhere. Poor old General; how sad to lose your sight!”
But the new General had wasted no time; he had sacked subordinates right and left, signalling for new staff appointees whom he could personally trust to be “firm”, and had spread terror into all departments including those which dabbled in counter-espionage. “Smirgel himself is scared and wants to shut down his transmitter for a week or so to let the simmering settle down. I must say when I see these whopping reverses and withdrawals in Russia I can’t help feeling that that little embalmed head we supplied is giving Hitler pretty destructive guidance.”
“Let me tell you the most important news of all – for the first time I see a faint hope that we might just win the war. Lord Galen has been sacked.” Both men burst out clapping with delight. “O not that we don’t love him,” explained Sutcliffe. “But really we want to win, don’t we?” They explained that Lord Galen, in order as he said “to show up the other side for the rotters they were” persuaded the War Cabinet to announce that no monuments of historic or aesthetic value in Europe would be subjected to bombardment. Moreover he had this piously announced over the radio. The result was not hard to foresee for at once the Nazis took advantage of this knowledge and turned it to account in their ammunition stockpiling. Toby said, “For example that mysterious dump they have coded as W.X. in Avignon is being burrowed out slap under the Pont du Gard – you must have noticed a vast increase of activity around the Remoulins area. Huge teams of foreign workers are being housed in makeshift huts all round about in the garrigue. It’s quite an operation. But finally somebody has tumbled to Lord Galen’s role as a hot potato, and he has been invited to abstract himself from the task of Information. May God be with him in his new post in the colonies.”
“No colonies for him. He is too clever for them. He will suddenly emerge as an admiral.”
“But tell us your news,” said Toby, turning to Constance apologetically. “How have things been?”
“It sticks in my throat,” she said. “It’s an unheroic story of discomfort and sadness, with sporadic little outbursts of danger or outrage, shootings and disappearances. Bread from maize full of straw and other sweepings. Coffee made of mud. Hungry children. Queues for medical attention. I feel ashamed to live where I do, eat what I eat, thanks to Blaise and the office and the black market in everything.”
“And Livia, is she really dead?”
“Yes.” And she told them how and when.
“And no clue to why?”
“I could think of none, save that such a stark gesture was in her character, and that it may have been somehow connected with the failure of her central beliefs – though she said not. But who could see the face of Nazism from close up and not want to retch? She was not a fool. But I am aware all the time that you probably know more than I do about everything. Perhaps you have answers to all these questions.”
“No,” said Sutcliffe. “Perhaps Affad has, though; we don’t use the same source of supply as he does.”
“Smirgel?”
“Yes.”
“But Quatrefages is surely just as likely to be untrustworthy; remember all his romancing about Galen’s child and the Templars? He would tell you anything.”
“He is not alone, there are others.”
They rose to play and she returned to her correspondence, pencil in hand, making draft notes for the replies to letters which would later be typed. Toby opened the game with a magistral flourish. “It’s all very well for you to jabber about the Jews, MacSutcliffe, but I find it sometimes most irritating the way they go on; why, the last bunch of intels were extraordinary. They were not only reporting each other in Paris, but some had actually joined the Milice. As if it were not enough to be more industrious and more conceited than everyone else!”
“Whatever you may think of Jews,” she said, “you would not stand by and see those trains pull out and hear Smirgel’s snigger.”
“Speaking as a historian,” said Toby, “if the whole thing weren’t tragic it would be risible. Do you realise what the Germans want? They want to be the Chosen People – they have announced the fact. They want to do away with the Jews so that they can take their place. It is quite unbelievable – if you told me I would not believe you. The Chosen Race! Whose blood is thicker than whose? Washed in the blood of whose lamb if I may ask? This is where Luther’s great worm bag has led them. It’s like children snatching at each other’s coloured balloons. But to descend to the total abolition of Jews – it would take a really serious metaphysical nation to do that!”
“According to Affad it has a metaphysical base: it is an involuntary organic reaction, like the rejection by the stomach of something disagreeable, against Judeo-Christianity as exemplified by our present world philosophy which as you know is dominated by brilliant Jewish thinkers.”
“Illustrate, please,” said Toby, trying an awkward shot which lost him the
match. “Damn!”
“The triad of great Jews who have dominated thought – Marx, Freud, Einstein. Great adventurers in the realm of matter. Marx equated human happiness with money – matter; Freud found that the notion of value came from faeces, and for him love was called investment; Einstein, the most Luciferian, is releasing the forces sleeping in matter to make a toy which …”
“O God,” she said in dismay, “don’t tell me you are half-hearted about Nazism? I’ve just come from a country which can’t make up its mind. So many French seem indifferent to this purge which Laval calls a ‘prophylaxis’, if you please.”
“I don’t think the Russians are any better,” said Sutcliffe. “We have a number of distasteful choices – the world as a kibbutz, with obligatory psychoanalysis lasting a lifetime and replacing Catholicism … and then atomic robotisation I suppose. It makes me feel all old-fashioned; I don’t know what to say.”
“Honi soit qui Malebranche,” said Toby.
“And it’s all very well you being pious, but all this started with the French, the Republic having no need of savants. And Jews like that foul painter David presiding on committees to cut off the head of Chénier. Tumbrilitis has slopped over and reached the whole world now. To think that the first statue which was erected by the revolutionaries was one to the Goddess of Reason!”
“It still goes on; I used to wait for her outside the ivy-covered building in Raspail which houses part of the University, against which wall I taught her how to hold her chopsticks. Love was never the same again, in the light drizzle falling on our faces, sticking our kisses like postage stamps upon each other’s lips. Above us, written on the wall, nay, engraved in it were the fatal words: ‘Université. Evolution des Etres Organisés. Ville de Paris’ It was the equivalent of ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’, though we did not know it at the time … and now Schwarz has her in dark keeping which harmeth not. Or so you say.”
“I can’t follow,” she said.
“Wait till Aubrey comes. He will tell you all about Hitler and his ideas.”
“It will be your first meeting? No?”
Sutcliffe looked at her in a curious fashion but said nothing. At that moment a familiar voice said, “They arrive next Monday by air from Cairo.” Affad stood at the door cleaning his glasses with a pocket handkerchief. Her heart turned over involuntarily, which surprised her: she did not as yet know how to behave in the presence of other people. But he came lightly across the room, avoiding the two players, and after kissing her sat down, putting his arm in hers. “All this confusion and talk about Hitler and Jews comes from one factor – the refusal to see that the Jewish faith is not a confession but that the Jews are really a nation bereft of a homeland and forced to become the world’s cuckoo. This is where we have permitted ourselves to work against the British and further the claims of Palestine. Of course the British are scared about their Arab oil, but nevertheless it is of world importance that the Jews be housed nationally. Then it does not much matter what form their Judaism takes, monotheism or whatever. But we persist in treating them as simply a confession.”
“Well, as a convinced Freudian analyst I feel a bit compromised; perhaps I am Jewish from this point of view.”
Sutcliffe said, “You know what Aubrey would say – he would say that you are simply running what the Americans would call a massage-parlour of the soul. You cannot analyse Psyche without coming upon Cupid.”
“But that is exactly what Freud says.”
“Does he?”
“Of course.”
“But Cupid is simply an investor, not a god.”
“That’s another matter.”
“A Luciferian remark if I know you.”
“I did not mean it as such.”
“How about Libido?”
She sighed a long sigh and decided not to deliver the heated exposé which seethed inside her. She rose.
“Let’s go, I’m hungry.”
Delighted, Affad sprang to his feet at once. “I was just about to say the same. Where shall we go?”
Sutcliffe said, “Somewhere where we can join you for coffee, before the office opens.”
“The Old Barge”– everyone echoed the name of a familiar haunt, a boat converted into a restaurant and anchored against the quay, hard by the elegant and well-tended gardens. It was central to the town, not too smart or expensive, and very close to the Embassy. They took their leave of the billiardaires, as Toby called himself and Sutcliffe, and drove to the appointed place. They were suddenly, unaccountably, shy with each other. It was difficult to understand. “I know,” he said at last. “It’s because you seem so different all of a sudden, sort of sophisticated and well turned out, and far too beautiful for safety.”
“Whose safety?”
“Mine! Everyone’s!”
“I suddenly felt I needed to get away from you, to stand off from you in order to see you more clearly; I am going to desert you after lunch and visit my old clinic to see how they are getting on with my old patients.”
“And tonight?”
“I must sleep in my flat, alone.”
He used a lot of bad language under his breath, swearing in French, Arabic, Greek and English, but what the target of these objurgations was he could not say – it had nothing to do with her, and everything to do with this strange love-predicament. Just when he most wanted to seem a man of the world, sincere but experienced. “What are you mumbling?” she asked suspiciously, but he only shook his head and said, “I was swearing at my own lack of subtlety. I should have got tickets for a concert. It would have been one way of being together without chewing each other with our eyes.”
It was hardly surprising that they lacked appetite as well, though she found an excuse in the fact that she had only just arrived from a starving country and was not used to all this abundance. But she drank a couple of stiff whiskies – a fact which he noted with disapproval. They were joined fairly soon by their two billiardaire companions who were indulging in their usual desultory wrangling. “Just because our old friend Blanford is about to manifest, Robin here has set up as a new Einstein, just to épater him. On the bathroom mirror he has in lipstick E = mc2 with the legend ERECTION EQUALS MEDITATION PLUS CONNIVANCE SQUARED. As if that were not enough he had added on the mirror in the hall, MEDITATION OVER FORNICATION LIKE MASS OVER FORCE YIELDS REINCARNATION. I do not think either Blanford or Einstein would approve, but there it is.”
“It’s the fruit of my inmost supposings,” said Sutcliffe, a trifle coyly. “It’s such a bore just going on being a cricketer.” He was referring to his famous namesake, now in honourable retirement. “Can’t one change hearses in mainstream? Why not Jack the Stripper or someone more colourful? I shall ask Aubrey when he comes if it’s all the same to him.”
“Will you come to meet him?” she asked curiously, and he said, “Of course I will, if you will drive.” But she did not believe him. Somehow she thought he would avoid the meeting. On an impulse she decided to go home to bed, but once she walked into her flat a terrible desolation seized her by the hair. She telephoned Affad and he came to her, as swift as magic.
They looked at one another for a long moment; and then, no word said, they went outside and got into the car. He felt as if he was hardly breathing, he was pale. Once they reached the hotel they rang for the lift, and still silent went up to his room where he at once drew the curtain to shut out the daylight, while she was naked in a flash and in his arms. She was so excited that she wanted to live out a sort of expiation, and through clenched teeth she whispered, “Fais-moi mal, chéri. Déchirez-moi.” To hurt her, to drive his nails into that firm body – yes, but he wanted to bide his time as yet for their breathing was not in synchro. They would scatter the precious orgasm, mercury all over the place like a smashed thermometer. “Ah, you are holding back!” she cried in anguish, and scratched. “I’m not, Constance.” She began to laugh at their precipitation, and their disarray, and then the laughter turned to tears and she
buried her face in his shoulders and planted a dejected blue bruise on the fine brown skin. Two arms, two legs, two eyes … an apparatus both for surfeit and for bliss. Tristia! What a tremendous novitiate loving was – no, she was taking it too seriously. It was just beauty and pleasure. He was saying to himself, “It is like drinking a whole honeycomb slowly. O Divine Entropy – even God dissolves and melts away. Ah, my poor dream of a committed love which is no longer possible because of the direction women have taken.”
Suddenly he gave her a tremendous slap across the face, and almost before she could react with surprise and pain he was on her, had taken her by the shoulders and penetrated her; and to still her cries of rage and injured pride he sealed his mouth upon hers. There was no doubt who led, for now he mastered her and inflicted orgasm upon orgasm upon her like welcome punishments. And suddenly, after a struggle, she accepted the fact, she played the role of slave, knowing that her perfect submission would tire him sooner and bring him down to her feet once more. The charm of that inner compliance excited him beyond endurance almost; later he told her it was like being covered in honey and tied down to an ant-hill, to be devoured slowly kiss by kiss, ant-mouthful by ant-mouthful. So the time ran on until the two exhausted creatures fell asleep.
The Avignon Quintet Page 88
