“I knew this would happen,” she said much later, combing out her hair in the mirror. “I simply knew that I could be something to you.” Then added, “Bloody fool that I am!” Almost every day now they dined at her flat, which enabled her to show off a culinary aptitude which was fair to good for a bachelor girl, and which he appraised as well as praised with discrimination; then he helped her stack the washing up for the servant and played a little on the sweet, small upright piano which was her solace in times of melancholy, and on which the ponderous Sutcliffe amidst sighs swathed himself in the moods of Chopin. Affad did not play as well as she did – good!
He stood up and said, “Were you happy as a child? I think I must have been because I never asked myself the question. I stood between my father and mother, each held a hand, as if between a great king and queen, two gods. It would have been unthinkable to regret or doubt. I lived in a dream, and it is still going on in the depths of things, for me. Yes, still going on.” And he softly repeated the word which he did not like others to use: “Sebastiyanne.”
They lay down side by side on the couch, fully dressed and thoughtful. He said, “You know, this war is coming to an end, slowly but surely. Italy has been turned inside out like the sleeve of a coat. I have been checking the reports of all posts. We have a date now for a landing in Europe in full force. It is all coming together, becoming coherent, and the Germans know it. They will turn very nasty now before they are finally convinced. How right Tacitus was about their national character. How marvellous the British have been to hold on, how can we ever thank them?”
“What do you see beyond – what sort of world?”
“A smashed Europe like an old clock; it will take about six or seven years to get it working again, unless the Russians decide to prevent it ever working. They will emerge from this thing strong, while we shall be exhausted.”
“I shall stay here,” she said, “and operate from here if I can. We shall see. But meanwhile, for the present, we mustn’t forget that Aubrey arrives tomorrow at dawn. Sutcliffe has panicked and retired to bed with a heavy cold. He dare not look upon the face of his Maker, it would seem.”
He slept quietly where he lay, and she in her turn also did so, though she first made herself more comfortable in a silk dressing-gown, and combed out her unruly hair in the bathroom; the little radio was on but turned quite low. She heard Chevalier singing “Louise” and for some reason she felt moved, tears came into her eyes and threatened her make-up which she was too lazy to remove. She restored her looks and her composure with the help of a tissue and told her reflection, “All this will end in a fine neurasthenia, you see.”
She unlaced his suedes and drew them softly from his feet, while he hardly stirred; what had he been doing to get so tired? Then she arranged a rug over their feet and crawled under it, nestling beside him, trying to remain quite still, almost breathless like a bird, so as not to disturb him. In the middle of the night she woke to find him staring at her with his eyes wide open, so intently that for a moment she wondered if he were still asleep. But no. “How marvellous!” he whispered and in a flash was asleep once more. She felt proud and contented, as if she had suckled him. Her own sleep was troubled lightly by questions about the future – intellectual nest-building which she reproved. It seemed hardly an hour before the little alarm clock squealed and they woke reluctantly upon the darkness, to envisage the distant airfield in its remote valley under the snows. The car was sluggish, too, but at last they got it going and crawled across the sleeping town towards the lakeside where there was much more light, with a distinct promise of a clear dawn coming up apace.
“Can I smoke?”
“No. Or I shall too.”
“Very well.”
They drove on in sleepy silence, until he asked: “Have you precise plans for Aubrey Blanford’s treatment? You said you had seen a detailed dossier.”
“Yes I have; there may be one fairly big operation and two minor ones to do, but the picture is not without hope. I have invoked the aid of Kessley and his clinic – he is by far the cleverest surgeon for the job. Aubrey is young still and in quite good physical shape. There is no need for a gloomy prognosis in his case, as in some of the others. I have made all the arrangements – a pleasant lakeside room, and of course the hot water spa right at his elbow. Let’s see what he says.”
The airport was hardly awake, and the bar provided them with deplorably weak coffee and a croissant. But they were glad of the shelter and the warmth, for outside on the field a chill wind was blowing. In a while they heard the distant droning of the three Ensigns which were bringing the chosen fifty to safety and medical aid. They circled the field once or twice before making their run in one after the other. They came to rest and taxied up to within hailing distance of the terminal before releasing their occupants – a cluster of uniformed nurses and orderlies, followed by a mass of stretchers and wheelchairs. They waited patiently, trying to sort out the throng with their eyes. “There!” Affad said at last; as a matter of fact it was not Blanford he had recognised, for he was huddled in his wheelchair, covered in a rug, and deeply asleep. It was the snake-headed valet, Cade, who wheeled him out of the plane and towards them. He wore a kind of desert uniform with a bush-jacket, and his service cap sported a cock feather. “Good morning!” he cried cheerfully as he saw Affad. “Here he is all safe and sound. But sound asleep,” and as if to explain, Cade groped at the feet under the rug and produced an empty whisky bottle. He frowned and said, “Too much of this for my liking, but what can I do? I have to obey orders.” He gave a brief canine smile, full of yellowish teeth. The sick man stirred.
He seemed to Constance to be very much thinner than she remembered, and indeed more youthful in a strained sort of way, but surprisingly brown, which gave the tone of fitness to the general impression he made, lying there asleep.
Presently he woke, due perhaps to a slight jolt of his wheelchair or some unaccustomed change of silence or sound or temperature – a cold wind blew across the airfield and the air was full of cries and greetings. Yet he woke smiling a trifle shyly, to give each a hand, saying, “I’m sorry to be in this disarray; it was a long twelve-hour flight and my backache drove me to gag the pain with whisky, which annoyed Cade.” She told him with genuine delight that he had not changed – yes, he had allowed a small moustache to grow, that was all. Nor had she, he said, and blushed with a sort of delighted confusion, with emotion at meeting, so to speak, with a survivor of that last Provençal summer. Yet both made the same disclaimer: “Ah, but inside!” she said, and he agreed that the change was there, though invisible. They felt aged in the heart of their experience. He held on to her hand as they talked, as if to draw from it warmth and support; and Affad, feeling that a third party would increase the dilemma of constraint and shyness, said a brief fond word and took his leave, on the understanding that she would ride in the ambulance with Aubrey, and that he himself would send a duty car to the clinic for her.
Some provision had to be made for Cade and the wheelchair, and this she arranged with the driver of the ambulance, squeezing in beside him so that she could keep Aubrey’s hand in hers while they drove in companionable silence to their destination. “It’s quite unbelievable!” he said once, and that was all; but she noticed that he was feverish and a little hysterical, no doubt due to fatigue and the claustrophobia of the journey in an old-fashioned plane. At any rate he berated Cade for trivial lapses or oversights with an unusual violence and outspokenness. The hireling did not reply, but simply drew his lips back to expose his teeth with an expression of pain, or as if he were a dog about to snap. His resentment he showed by breathing hard through his nose. Aubrey saw that she remarked this departure with curiosity and coloured as he said, trying to laugh the matter off, “One becomes a bit of an old maid, as you see. We quarrel like an old married couple – Cade is the wife.” Disgusted, the valet pretended not to hear. He looked out of the window with his dogged expression, impatient of their arrival at D
r. Kessley’s clinic. It did not take very long before they turned into a well-tended property full of green grass and firs, and dotted about with elegant chalets. At one of these they disembarked and found their way to his quarters which delighted him by their seclusion and the beauty of the view. “I was hoping for snow,” he said. “I wanted to see snow again.” Dr. Kessley made his appearance and created a most favourable impression on the patient by his modesty and by the fact that he was fully abreast of the case. Constance he called by her first name, which increased the sense of intimacy, of being among friends. “We want you for a few days to do nothing but take hot water massage in the spa waterfall and sleep a great deal; we want you completely at ease and relaxed before we go any further. You have received excellent attention in Cairo for the first stage – there is no work to be undone. We can continue from the present state of affairs with some confidence. I suppose you know about your condition.” He said that he did; Dr. Drexel in Cairo had given him a thorough brief as to the general shape of things. “Good,” said the surgeon and took his leave.
They busied themselves in getting him washed and put to rights before tucking him up in his bed. While the valet was out of the room she said, “You know you will have expert nursing here; you could get rid of Cade for good if you wished.”
He shook his head. “Not yet.”
There was a silence during which she was wondering whether her suggestion had upset him in any way; Cade reentered the room and went about his tasks in silence. His presence imposed a constraint upon them, so they smiled at each other and said nothing. Then the valet left the room again on some pretext and Blanford was able to say, “I can’t sack him yet. He is my only link with my mother. Every day he tells me some little thing, some little incident about her which enables me to see a bit further into why I hated her so much and so unjustly; I must have, to find myself in this situation – I don’t believe in chance accidents. It’s a situation which might keep me childless.”
“But that’s Freud on women,” she said with some surprise.
“Everything he says about women is true of men,” said Aubrey Blanford with a sudden return to the old curate’s tone for which they used to tease him so remorselessly in the past. It was so delightful, the serious way he said it, that she clapped her hands and laughed as childishly as she would have done had they both been at Tu Duc. She could not refrain from kissing him warmly, which made him blush with pleasure. “O childless one!” she said, adopting for a moment the mock-papal tone of Sam. “Will you let Cade psychoanalyse you?” And he made an impatient gesture.
The duty nurse came in to be presented to her patient and it was time to take her leave, so Constance felt, for her car had already been signalled as waiting in the drive. She would leave him to acclimatise and return on the morrow, she said, and he acquiesced. Kissing him again almost rapturously she said, “Thank God you haven’t changed – still the old sobersides Aubrey Blanford Esq. I am so happy about that.” He was less so: “I have changed profoundly,” he said gravely but with twinkling eyes, “but for the worse; I have become a cynic. I want you to take a message of disdain to Robin, for his cowardice in not daring to face me; I know he has retired to a flat with a lift too narrow to accommodate my wheelchair. There he is throwing a fit of influenza as an excuse. Tell him that he will be punished by the visit of a dark woman of unexpected force and glory with whom he will be forced to couple.” But she decided that she would leave him to deal with Sutcliffe on his own, without her interference. She bade him goodbye without precisely saying so. “Don’t be too annoyed with Robin, he really is under the weather.” Yet Blanford answered darkly, “I am annoyed because my power is not absolute over him – he is after all my creation; but he can sometimes break loose and show traces of free will. My domination is incomplete, damn him. I told him to come to the airport. He mutinied. He must be punished!”
Leaving him, Constance drove back to her old clinic to find Schwarz, who was delighted to see her, as always. Pia and Trash who were passing through a relatively tranquil period, were working together on an ambitious tapestry. The subject was Clément’s celebrated painting from Avignon, The Land of Plenty: Cockayne, which had been commercialised by Gobelin among other masterpieces. The quiet work, the skeins of colour, absorbed them both and they sat before the white window, quiet as nuns. Constance had to wait awhile for Schwarz to finish with a young ardent American analyst who was working with him, and who was submitting to his “control discussion” concerning some patients who were giving him trouble; they were apostates from the Rudolf Steiner groups so numerous in Geneva, and their astral theology was unfamiliar to the young man. His voice carried plangently and plaintively through the door of Schwarz’s office: “So I gave him the suppository you prescribed, but in his present state he can’t keep anything down.”
“Down?”
“Sorry, up.”
“I see.”
Apparently, though apostate, the patient still had fragments of theosophical belief clinging to his thinking. “What do you propose?” said Schwarz.
“He’s the most religious of the two; he’s been deep into what he calls Astral Communication – so deep he had an attack of Poetic Apprehension – that’s what he calls it. After that his wife refused to sleep with him. She said his breath smelt of embalming fluid. Boy, that Apprehension was certainly a bitch. I’ve locked him up with a sedation mixture.”
“What else can we do?” said the old man; it was a question he always uttered with a strongly flavoured Yiddish accent; and he repeated it now to Constance. “Aber, Constance, what can we do?” He had half a mind to try an insulin shock convulsion-therapy on Pia but Constance had pleaded so earnestly against it that he had abandoned the idea. “You’d blow out what little brain is left,” said Constance. “After all there’s a whole situation attached to the matter of her illness, and it concerns several people.” Since the discovery of Affad and the vertiginous glories of their affair she had become much more sympathetic to people in love – had even begun to see the elephantine love of Sutcliffe as moving rather than grotesque and preposterous; while the manoeuvres of the innocent and warm-hearted negress added both charm and despair to the whole business. Pia whined and whimpered like the sick child she had become, while Trash answered her with force and energy, saying stupid things with great conviction in that sweet dark voice, heavy as a bass viol. “I wanted us to sleep in one great bed,” she told Schwarz once. “There’d be room for everyone, for Robin and Pia, and even their friends could come for a fix when they felt that way. My mother always said Never Refuse; and the preacher at the church said Give It All You Got. But Robin won’t and Pia won’t. Would it help if I went away?”
“No. You’ve tried that; Pia is still too fragile for anything drastic. She would withdraw again. We want to keep her in the field of vision still.”
It was an unearthly waste of time and talent and medicine. Doctors nowadays are supposed to cure everything, even soul-complaints. But what could a priest have done anyway?
TWELVE
A Visit from Trash
THE AFFLICTION WHICH LAID ROB SUTCLIFFE LOW WAS of his own making, compounded for the most part of sheer alcohol and tabac gris in immoderate quantities, irregular meals and unusually large doses of medicines like aspirins and vitamins plus a geriatric invention of the Swiss called Nix which was supposed to make you younger. Now he lay, feverish and snorting like a billygoat in a rumpled bed, smarting under the sallies of his co-sharer and workmate who resented having to play nurse to a man who would not see the Embassy doctor because he was called Bruce Hardbane. “I am superstitious about names,” he explained. Nor would he see a Swiss because that would mean his having to pay for a consultation; the Foreign Office provided free medical supervision. Toby was already late for the office but he stayed to mix his colleague a grog to take with his aspirin, and then swept into his threadbare overcoat and smartly disappeared from the flat. Sutcliffe sighed; another long day to spend supine wi
th too much of a headache to read, and no company to divert him from gloomy and aggressive thoughts about Bloshford who lay also supine with a hole in his back, but in incomparably prettier surroundings, looking out upon the lake. He would have rung Aubrey up to insult him but the telephone was out of order for the nonce. There he lay like the Brothers Grimm, like the Brothers Karamazov, like the whole tribe of guttering Goncourts, steeped in sadness.
He was surprised to hear the lift start to mount in its cage, and even more so to hear it stop at their landing while its occupant vacated it and sent it down again before advancing up to the door of the flat and giving a little tattoo of the finger-nails upon it before pushing it open – for it was always ajar. He was delighted to think it was a surprise visit from Constance and called her name aloud triumphantly, but who should walk in with dramatic slowness but the negress Trash? “The ogre!” he cried aloud, swearing a little. “How did you find me?” She looked utterly beautiful, like a black pearl – as a matter of fact she wore large pearl earrings which looked divine on that black satin headpiece. Then the most magnificent furs in which she was sweating lightly, giving off incensuous musk of gorgeous body odour. Robin raised himself and snuffed her like an equatorial balsam wafted from the still vexed Bermoothes of his heart. He knew that she did a little mannequin work for Polak’s, and that they let her borrow furs sometimes – so this sombre plumage worthy of the helm of the Black Prince must be on loan. “I jest had to see you Robin, honey,” she said, advancing to sit on his bed, and at the same time laying a large hand, graceful as a coffee table, upon his forehead. “You’re quite a mite feverish,” she told him, and he lay back, putting on his haughty and disagreeable expression. “What brings you here?” he said, trying to “rasp” as one would if one wrote it in a novel. For a while there was no answer to his rasp. He watched rather uncharitably while she took a swig at his grog, burning her cherry-red mouth. “Is there anything wrong with Pia?” She shook that black mausoleum of hair in a negative sense. “She is being sedate until two,” she said. “But we’ve been talking and I told her I was coming to see you and tell you what we think.” She opened her red maw like some great sea-whore in search of some plankton; modelling furs had brought out the seal in her. She said confidingly, “You ain’t ill, Robin, you jest ain’t strivin’ enough; you gotta latch on to the affirmative, man, like the song says, and eliminate the negative. You gotta be it Bing’s way! I guess you are jest sad cause you ain’t got a good girl to plough, Robin. Them Embassy dames are mighty cold turkey, isn’t that it?”
The Avignon Quintet Page 89
