Days had begun to melt and fuse together in the heat of Provence, their impressions of heat and water and light absolutely forbade them to keep a mental chronology of their journeys, jogging about the gorges of the Gardon in the old pony-cart, or taking the little toy train down to the sea to spend a night on the beach and attend a cockade-snatching bullfight at dusty Lunel. Ah! the little pocket train, which plodded down to the flat Carmargue, to take them to the Grau du Roi. It had such a merry holiday air; the carriages were so bright – red for the first class, yellow for the second, and green for the third. All with the legend PLM modestly painted on them. The long waits in tiny silent stations where the guard sometimes braked to a walking pace so that he could loiter in a field beside the track and gather a few leeks. When you were dying of thirst how good the fresh water from the pump at Aimargues tasted; it was really intended for the engine, but once the machine had drunk its fill it was the turn of the passengers. Once Hilary even used it as a shower while they were waiting for the connection which was to carry them down to the Saintes. In the dry heats of summer the odours of the sand and the sea came up to them from the beaches – and from the inland maquis that of thyme and rosemary bruised by the flocks of sheep. Sometimes they sat in a siding and let a train pass through from Nîmes which was full of the little black Carmargue bulls used in the cockade fights. Small stations on the roads to paradise, signal boxes at the end of the world; they would return after these excursions dazed with the sun and sea. And then in the evening Blanford would hear the sweet voice of Livia intoning the AUM of yoga as she sat in the green thicket behind the tower, recharging her body, re-oxygenating her brain. Remembering a phrase from another life, “The heart of flesh in the breast is not the vagra heart; like an inverted lotus the valves of the flesh heart open by day and close by night during sleep.”
The sleep of the south had invaded also their love-making, giving it a tonality, a resonance of its own; with Livia it was simple and rather brutal. He would never forget how she cried out “Ha” as she felt the premonition of the orgasm approaching; it was the cry of the Japanese swordsman before the shock of his stroke. And then, so extreme was the proof that she lay in his arms as if her back were broken.
Eating their picnic lunch among the brown rocks above the Pont du Gard, watching the eagles wheel and stoop, they all – as if by sudden consent – felt their minds drawn towards the thought of the impending future with the inevitable imperatives which choice would force upon them. Blanford was perhaps the luckiest for he would inherit a modest income which he would have no difficulty in supplementing by academic work – or so he thought. The brown-skinned Sam was less self-assured as he mused. “I shan’t have a private income, and with the little intelligence I have inherited I don’t suppose I could get anything sensational in the way of a job. To tell the truth the Army seems the likeliest pis aller – though I am not very militant.” He had been an active member of the Oxford Officers Training Corps and could with luck get a commission in a line regiment. Constance rested her arm lightly in the crook of his brown arm and smiled up at him, confident and at ease. There was no stress in their loving, while between Livia and Blanford there was a kind of premonitory hopelessness; they were in that limbo where destiny, like an undischarged bankrupt, waited for them. They had gone too far to retreat now even if they had wished.
Hilary said: “I am going to surprise and perhaps pain you. I have been seriously tempted by the Catholic faith. I have the notion of really taking it up – if that is the word. I thought after next term to go into a retreat and receive instruction in it. I can easily do a little tutoring for a living. Then we’ll see if the thing is lasting or wears out.” He smiled round at the others, feeling suddenly abashed and unsure of himself; once these sentiments had been uttered aloud they seemed far less substantial and enriching than they had been before. He climbed down to his favourite diving plinth, above the river, poised, and suddenly fell like a swift to furrow the jade water far below. Sam sighed and rose to follow, followed by Blanford. Suddenly, by this brief conversation, the future had materialised before their eyes.
Blanford had brought a pretty little ring which he hoped to give to Livia, but the act seemed somehow embarrassing and confusing; he had not sufficient courage to indulge in definitive declarations – the only kind which would approximate to what he felt. And Livia needed none; she stared at him, smiling her hard little smile, holding her hand in his. They would meet again in Paris! Ah! in the cafés of that great epoch one arrived, distraught with love, and called for ink and paper, envelopes and stamps, while a concerned waiter, having supplied them, rushed for a cassis. Thus were great love-letters born – they would be sent by pneumatique and a helmeted motor cyclist would deliver them, like Mercury himself, within the hour.
Blanford decided to send her the ring by post when she had returned to Paris. On the last evening but one they went for a short walk together among the olive groves and Livia surprised him by saying: “I always think of you as a writer, Aubrey; people who keep copious diaries like you always have – they are really writers.” She had noted his habit of scribbling in a school exercise book nearly every night before he got into bed. It was a self-indulgence he had, like most lonely people, permitted himself from early adolescence. And it was here, unwittingly, that Sutcliffe got born. Once at school one of his diaries had been pilfered from his locker and a teasing youth read out some passages aloud to a circle of laughing and taunting schoolmates. It was fearfully humiliating; and to guard against a repetition of such a torture Blanford had attributed his thought and ideas to an imaginary author called S. He also firmly lettered in the title “Commonplace Book”, and put a few genuine quotations into it, to suggest that he was simply copying out things which struck him from the books he read. But slowly and insidiously S began to take shape as a person, a flippant and desperate person, a splintered man, destined for authorship with all its woes and splendours. To him he attached the name of the greatest cricketer of the day – also rather defensively; Sutcliffe was, in the cricket world, a household name. Yet over the years he was fleshed out by quotations which suggested the soliloquies of a lonely and hunted intellectual, a marginal man; Blanford took refuge in him, so to speak, from a world which seemed to him quite insensitive to intellectual matters, in fact calamitously philistine. Later when the great man actually emerged on paper and started his adventurous life of sins and puns Blanford was to adapt a hymn for his use, the first line of which was “Nearer My Goad to Thee.” But this was much later. Now he simply looked into the eyes of Livia and replied steadily: “I don’t think I could be imaginative enough, I’m too donnish I think.”
But she was right.
And looking at her, watching her smiling at him, a simple thought came into his mind, namely how marvellous not to be blind! Livia said: “Who is this S you are always quoting?” So she had been reading his exercise books behind his back! He answered “Schopenhauer” without a flicker of expression. But in the back of his mind was already looming a large fleshy man with pink knees pressed together, penis en trompe-l’oeil as he might say, whirling dumb-bells before an open window. The original Sutcliffe who was to keep his emotions in a high state of chaos; one of those novelists all out of shape from too frequent childbearing. Perhaps he was a poet? Yes, he wrote verses. Some had been published in Isis. He would send some to Livia in order to bolster her faith in him as a creative person. She had taught him several yoga asanas and now every morning he obediently performed them while he thought of her sitting somewhere out among the olives beyond the tower in the lotus pose which seemed to cost her no effort at all, intoning the Aum; or lying in the corpse posture, snuffing out her whole will and body, and by her meditation “swallowing the sky”. He was rather afraid that all this was very much a fad, though he admitted to feeling better after it.
It was by these strange byways and unfrequented paths that years later he was able to track down that corpulent soak, that ignoble ape, Sutcliffe, w
hose vulpine quivering nose reddened at the approach of whisky, and whose shaggy body rejoiced to feel the warm thrust of alcohol in the nerves. Where did this extraordinary alter ego come from? He was never to discover.
Livia was looking at him curiously – a snake with a trigger in its tongue, a cat with afterthoughts.…
And now Felix Chatto came up the drive on a derelict bicycle and brought them an invitation from Lord Galen; it was for a farewell dinner before he took his own departure for Berlin. It would be agony to squeeze their swollen feet into socks and shoes, to unearth shirts and ties.… But they could not refuse the old man. Anyway it would be a good training for their return to the city after this bemusing Provençal holiday.
FIVE
Lord Galen Dines
WHEN I WAS A BOY”, SAID LORD GALEN WITH A massive simplicity, “I read a book called The Romance of Steam and I have never forgotten it. It had a red and gold cover with an engine on it and it began, “The steam-engine is a mighty power for Good.” Nobody could tell if he were joking or not. He fell into a muse and pulled his upper lip. Max the chauffeur, now transformed into something between a major-domo and an Italian admiral by a costume specially created for him, diligently carved the roast chickens in their chafing dishes before serving them. His black dress-trousers had a broad gold piping, and in the lapels of his dress coat he carried the insignia of a sommelier – a master of Cellars. It was he who had trundled up to fetch five young people in the Hispano, and they had been very grateful for the lift, for the walk was a long and dusty one from Tu Duc.
The house Galen owned and occupied sporadically throughout the year was as characteristic as the old man himself – it had been built quite recently by a Greek armaments king with whom he had business dealings; one old tower was all that was left of the original chateau which had stood on the site. All the rest had been rased to clear the ground for the modern villa – architecture of calamitous joviality – which, however, stood in handsome shady gardens. “Nothing old-fashioned does for me,” said the old man forcibly; adding, “I have never drunk life through a straw, you know.” Jutting out his chin.
The original name of the house had been “The Acropolis”, but Lord Galen, with characteristic Jewish modesty, had renamed it “Balmoral”; the large painted board which announced the fact always gave Felix Chatto a twinge of horror as he turned into the drive – his taste had been educated to a very high pitch of refinement. The inside of the house also caused him pain by its exuberance; it was the kind of house that a successful but ignorant actress might order in Cairo. Masses of marquetry and leather and cretonne; the salon was raised on pillars so convoluted and painted that they resembled barbers’ poles of the old style. It was wonderfully modern and slightly profligate in atmosphere. And on this particular evening they found a new visitor present who seemed to belong to it, to be most appropriate to the satin and damascene and scarlet leather. They had none of them met the Prince before, nor even heard of him; but it soon transpired that though he was an Egyptian prince of the blood he was also a business associate of old Galen. His presence lent a singular and appropriate touch to all this oriental décor for he wore dove-grey clothes, and dove-grey London spats over tiny boots polished like mirrors. His grey waistcoat sported pearl buttons, and he wore a stock which set off to admiration a lean and aquiline face which was almost as grey as the rest of him. In his lapel he wore a gold squirrel, on his finger a scarab ring.
Lord Galen performed the presentation with just the slightest trace of unction, adding afterwards, “Prince Hassad is an old business associate of mine.” The Prince seemed extraordinarily meek, he ducked shyly as he shook hands; his hands were small, bird-like, twiggy, and he seemed glad to reclaim them after every action. Beside him on a chair lay a richly chased fly-whisk and a gorgeous fez with gold tassels of great lustre; the green band indicated not only his royal antecedents but also the fact that he had made the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca. At first blush it seemed that what was striking about him rested on the fact that his dress was exotic, his person foreign. But within a few moments the impression changed; they felt they were in the presence of some sort of oriental saint who sat so modestly but vividly before them, his face bowed, looking shyly up under his brows as he gazed from face to young face. His English was almost perfect, his French without a trace of a foreign accent or intonation. If ever the fact was commented upon the Prince was apt to say, smiling: “I learned both languages young. There is nothing else to do in the Royal harem but study.”
“Champagne,” said Galen with a lordly wave and there was a suggestive popping among the rock plants in the winter garden where the dumb secretary presided over a cocktail cabinet; and what a treat it was in all that summer thirst! The Prince sipped a glass and placed it beside him on the table; he was much reassured by the fact that they all talked French as well as English.
Constance, of course, won his immediate attention and admiration by her smiling good sense and swift French; it was to her that he chiefly addressed himself in order to explain himself and expound his habits to all of them – aware perhaps that he must seem a story-tale figure in the French countryside. “I am travelling north into Germany in my carriage, and Lord Galen is coming with me to transact some business on behalf of Egypt.” Galen looked rather doubtful about this; he had offered to drive north in his elegant car, but the Prince had quietly insisted on the huge state landau with its four horses – a desperately slow method of getting about. He had also expressed a somewhat alarming wish, namely to visit a cathedral or two on the way north – a sentiment that Lord Galen found slightly morbid. But the little Prince was proposing to enjoy himself as a deeply civilised oriental should do when abroad, and there was nothing for it but to fall in with his wishes. But at night, in bed, Lord Galen gave a groan when he thought of their slow progress across Europe in this royal contraption. At the moment it reposed in his garage where the two uniformed black Saidhis were currying the horses and watering them.
Needless to say, the Prince made an instant hit with the inhabitants of Tu Duc, though hardly less markedly with Chatto and the taciturn Quatrefages who had put on a tie for the occasion and whose flushed face suggested that he had perhaps had a drink or two to stimulate his courage for such a frightening occasion. Perhaps the Prince sensed this, for he at once paid the boy some special attentions, questioning him softly in his patrician French, and soon the clerk was quite at ease and sufficiently self-confident to venture on talking in an English which was not bad despite his marked accent. So the exchange of politenesses proceeded until Max with a grunt announced that they could come to table if they wished. The Prince put down his gold-tipped cigarette and asked permission to wash his hands; his body-servant, a tall Nubian clad in the scarlet sash of the royal kavass, helped him, holding the towels for him to wipe his hands on, and then sprinkling the royal fingers with scent at the end of the operation. The Prince dabbled some scent on his face also. Then he came modestly to table, where they all stood and waited for him; Lord Galen placed him between the two sisters which seemed to please him very much as he instantly engaged Constance once more in small talk.
From the kitchen came the clatter and chatter of the three young farm women who had been conscripted for this fête by the secretary; he himself took his meals apart in the study. “Every year”, said Lord Galen happily, “I have this little beano as a farewell treat before leaving France. But it’s the first time I have welcomed the Prince to my table.” He beamed round him while Prince Hassad with his shy smile made a little self-deprecating moue of the lips, as if the allusion embarrassed him. “I am glad to be here,” he said, and added: “particularly because of the work you are doing on your romantic project, in which I find it very hard to believe. We Egyptians are very suspicious people.”
“Quite right. Quite right,” said Galen with approval, “but our little project is not all fancy, you know. We have certain definite lines of enquiry laid down. This treasure is not a will o’ the w
isp, eh Quatrefages?”
The Prince shook his head doubtfully. “As an investment?” he murmured, almost under his breath. He motioned to his servant, who had taken up his traditional food-taster’s position behind his chair, to leave. It was as if he did not wish for an eavesdropper in the room in case the conversation became confidential. He looked prudently round the table and said: “Perhaps after dinner I could be given some facts about your search. Then I will be able to judge.” Then, turning aside with a more definite air, he asked Livia to tell him what monuments he should see in the vicinity, and in her usual forceful way she offered to be his guide if he should so wish, at which he looked hesitant but grateful. “There is so much to see,” said Lord Galen with a regretful sigh, “but I never seem to have the chance.” The grotesque cat of the household which lay on its velvet cushion in the corner of the room gave a croak. It had smelt the chicken. Lord Galen regally cut a piece from his own portion and had it despatched to her by Max who got a serpentine hiss for his efforts. For such a frail-looking man the Prince was surprisingly adroit with knife and fork, and was soon deeply involved with second helpings and vegetables which he forked on to his side-plate, preferring to eat in the French fashion – to enjoy meat and vegetables separately. Nor did he neglect his glass of Tavel, which he held up to the light with a professional expression of appreciation, to admire its topaz glow. “Though a Moslem,” he confided in his host, “I am anything but a fanatic. But I never overdo things in case my wife catches me.” He gave a small sweet chuckle and lowered his eyes again.