A Love Like Blood

  I entered the walls by the gate at the Place Crillon, and, without the breeze that had scoured me raw outside the city, the heat grew worse. The square was crowded, heaving with people on all sides, and everyone seemed to be in couples or groups. I felt very exposed, as if everyone was looking at me, though at the same time I felt utterly invisible. Everyone was hurrying somewhere, or just standing and chatting, or walking arm in arm to a restaurant. It felt very different to Paris, in a way that I could only pinpoint with one simple word: danger.

  I crossed the square and took a small street that led from the far corner. Within five minutes I was lost as I found myself in a network of twisting alleyways and small cobbled roads that turned around and in on themselves, cutting between high blank walls of stone with only occasional windows, which were frequently barred.

  A strange fear crept into me that first evening, and it never left me. There was something about the city I could not place, some oppression, some terror.

  I don’t know how much of it was my state of mind. I was tired, very tired from the journey. I had not eaten much. The sudden, more intense heat of the south, that hot wind, was blowing in my eyes, across my lips, and all the while, the thought lingering at the back of my mind of what I was doing there, and why.

  But maybe there was more to it than that. The city did have an air about it. It felt alive, it felt dangerous. It felt old, somehow older than Paris, somehow more primitive, despite the various grand buildings I saw.

  I passed out of the network of alleys and stumbled into a large open square, at the far end of which I saw a building I took to be the Palais des Papes; beyond it, the Cathedral.

  Again I found myself a paradox, both invisible and terribly exposed all at once, and I ducked down another small street, trying to look like I knew where I was going, avoiding eye contact with everyone.

  The walls around me grew higher, leaning in towards each other at the top, almost touching. They turned about and I found myself taking dead ends, having to retrace my steps. It seemed as if no path ran straight for more than twenty paces, and the hot and foetid air from kitchen doorways blew on to me, again making me want to retch.

  My mind began to dissolve.

  The city had become the entrails of the animal that I’d entered, through which I was walking, or struggling to walk. I heard footsteps behind me and quickened my pace, taking turns at random until I suddenly realised I was in a small street I’d been in five minutes before. I stopped, and made my way to look in a jeweller’s window, dark and barred now, and with nothing on view. Feeling foolish, I turned, and bumped into someone.

  He cursed at me but walked on and I mumbled an apology to his back, in English. By the time I managed to turn it into French, he was gone.

  I found myself hurrying down more alleys whose walls were black with age and covered with obscene graffiti, images of rampant penises and hanging breasts. In red paint were scrawled words that I could not understand, and which I took to be dialect, or curses.

  At one moment I was jostling for room past thronging crowds, and the next I was alone in a long narrow street that curved gently like the back of a bow, with high blind walls, making me feel as if I was walking through a canyon.

  I stopped, my breath heavy, my feet sore, and tried to decide what to do.

  A figure stepped into view in a pool of lamplight at the end of my street, a thin woman. She walked quickly down the street towards me, staying on the opposite side, and I thought she was coming for me, but she gave me no more than a glance as she passed me by, a look that told me not to look back at her.

  So I began a retreat to my hotel, eventually finding my way to the city wall. As soon as I stepped outside the old town I felt better. I felt in less danger and there was that breeze again, which had at last cooled enough to provide a little relief. Tracing the wall round to the river, I found the bridge by which I’d crossed the Rhône, and hurried back to my hotel, my head bowed into the wind.

  I snatched my key from the night porter and locked myself in my room, where I fell asleep almost immediately.

  Yet my sleep was not good. The heat of the room and the rumble of freight trains just yards away from me woke me frequently through the night, until my dreams and my waking thoughts became one long disturbed vision, and it was a vision of the city.

  It started from the feelings I’d had that evening, and I saw the city as a beast, though one of stone. I kept walking around inside it, more lost than if I’d been in a maze, and I felt that it had a dark heart, which for some reason I was looking for, but would never find.

  The little history I knew of the place fed my delusions. I knew that Avignon had been the home to the antipopes who had rivalled Rome for a while, and my dream saw it become home to the opposite of the light of the Church. Here was darkness, filth. If Paris was glory, Avignon was squalor, depravity and cruelty. Here, crusades were launched not just against the infidel of the Holy Land, but against Cathars and other heretics. Here the Inquisition came and extracted confessions of witchcraft and devil worship from the screaming innocent.

  Here blood had flowed, and would certainly flow again.

  Chapter 6

  I woke the following morning, late, and somewhere in the night I had had enough sleep to feel better. I felt embarrassed with myself for the way I’d become so jumpy the night before, but what I felt above everything else was hungry, terribly, terribly hungry.

  I ate a vast breakfast, and washed it all down with strong coffee, so that by the time I headed back into Avignon in daylight, I was no longer afraid or paranoid. The morning was cooler, though the wind across the river was ever-present. My fear was replaced now by determination, and I took in the city in a single glance as I crossed the bridge.

  He was here, somewhere, I thought. In front of me was the whole city, and he was here.

  I wondered how to start, how to find one man in a city of tens of thousands of people. All I had was his name, so that was what I used to begin my search.

  Given his wealth and his status in Paris, I made the assumption he would be living in a large house at the very least, something grand. It might be in the city or, I supposed, outside, in a chateau or villa.

  I began at the central post office, where I explained as best I could that I was trying to deliver a parcel to the Margrave Anton Verovkin, but was not sure of his address. Either my French was bad, or the woman behind the desk did not feel like helping, for I left not even knowing if she hadn’t understood, or had refused to help. She just lowered her eyes at me when I pushed, and said ‘Non, non,’ repeatedly, until I left the counter.

  There was a telephone booth in the corner of the bureau de poste. A telephone directory sat glaring at me, and I scoured it every way I could think of, but found nothing.

  In desperation, I went to the Hôtel de Ville, and asked if they could help me find an eminent local person. A man at the enquiry desk was a little more helpful and told me it was not something they could do officially, but that, for my information, he had never heard of such a person.

  By mid-afternoon I sat in a café in Place Crillon, and wondered if I had been defeated. I had tried everything I could easily do, and I wondered what was left to me. That the clerk at the Hôtel de Ville had not heard of Verovkin proved little, but it did make me start to doubt everything, and I supposed, with an awful lurching feeling, that the margrave could have changed his name. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more likely that seemed. It appeared he had done his best to cover his tracks after Paris; the very least he would do in Avignon would be to take a new name. With his money, who would doubt him? The super rich have no need to prove who they are, though I supposed that if he left France he would have to have a passport in some name or other, but what name?

  I sat in the café for a long time that afternoon, until the sun began to lower in the sky, and I felt a return of the oppression of the night before. I scuttled back across the river and ate in the hotel, possibly the worst meal I’d eve
r eaten in France, but I felt better there, on the far side of the running water, as if that would somehow stop him from knowing I was there, stop him from finding me. I felt better. I felt safer.

  I went to bed, and was woken every hour by the rumbling of trains behind my head.

  Chapter 7

  I had been in Avignon a week. I had found precisely nothing, despite all my efforts to locate him, and I was in a terrible mood.

  I was physically exhausted from walking the streets every day, checking the little brass plaques of every professional doorway in the city. I had made two excursions out of the city to nearby villages by taxi. I had asked not just those taxi drivers, but several others if they had ever heard of the margrave. None had.

  I made my questions more vague, not asking after him by name, but asking if they knew of a foreign nobleman who’d arrived in the city around eight years before. I asked in taxis, I asked in bars, cafés, shops, hotels, and people began to look at me as if I was mad, and I, in turn, began to wonder if I was.

  Then, one afternoon, four days before I had to return to England, I went into a café in the Place de l’Horloge, near the palais, which I had not visited before, and as the waiter approached me, I knew him.

  I cannot believe that he didn’t recognise me, or that even if he didn’t it wasn’t obvious from my reaction that I had recognised him. It was the barman from Paris, Jean, who had claimed to be Marian’s friend.

  A decade had passed, I had changed a little, but I suppose that he was not expecting to see me, and it was that which made me unrecognisable.

  ‘Monsieur?’ he asked, and I ordered a coffee, trying to keep my voice calm, to ignore the way my heart was beating erratically, the way my blood seemed to have suddenly grown cold.

  I wondered whether to make a bolt for the door before he returned, but stopped myself. Wasn’t this why I had come? To find him, or someone who led to him. And Jean had not recognised me. I determined to be strong and see if I could use this meeting.

  As he returned, I thanked him, as casually as I could, though I didn’t meet his eyes, and it was that that led me to see something. As he placed the coffee cup on the table, his sleeve rode up above his wrist, and I saw he had a strange tattoo there.

  I saw it for only a moment, and saw it was an animal of some sort, though I could not be sure what.

  He left.

  I drank my coffee, wondering what to do next.

  If he was here, I knew I was right. The margrave was here somewhere too; they must know each other, or it was too great a coincidence. It confirmed that the barman had lied to me when he told me about Marian leaving Paris. I wondered if it was a story he had been told to tell anyone who’d asked after her. Or whether I had been the only one.

  There seemed to be only one thing I could do, which was to leave the café, return when it closed, and follow him. If that did not take me to Verovkin, it might take me one step closer.

  As I thought these things, another waiter came by, an older man, and he began to clear some cups from a table next to me. Like Jean he was short-haired and thin. He had a striking face, with two deep lines in his cheeks that might once have been dimples but which were now creases as long as his fingers. He was dark-haired, had black bristles for eyebrows and heavy stubble, and I was immediately afraid of him.

  I lowered my gaze to his hands, and, looking hard at his wrists, I saw that he had the same tattoo as Jean, though still I could not make it out exactly. He turned to me, and saw me looking at his tattoo.

  I downed my coffee, left some coins on the table, and hurried out of the door, trying not to break into a run as I did so, but not stopping until I was once again lost in that maze of alleys.

  I leaned back against a wall, trying to catch my breath, staring at but not seeing more strange graffiti opposite me. Suddenly a gang of four young men bowled down the alley, loud and drunk though it was still only the late afternoon. They bawled something at me as they passed that I didn’t understand and was glad not to, and I decided to keep walking.

  I walked for a long time and found myself at the river, where I stared deeply at the passing waters.

  I forced myself to wait there until my heart rate had subsided, and my mind had settled again, though in truth it felt as turbulent as the river, which was muddy and full of competing currents.

  They were here. The margrave. A cohort of his. And the other waiter, I realised now, could almost be an older brother of Jean’s; they even shared the same tattoo.

  Sometimes, when you dream, you have a series of symbols presented to you, but though you know they must have meaning, you do not see what that meaning is. And then, much later in the day, as if from nowhere, that meaning will leap at you, and you see that the room you dreamt about is in fact a representation of your head, your mind. That one room, the one you couldn’t get into in the dream, is that part of your mind you can’t access, can’t understand. Or maybe you dream of a boat at sea, but only later that day do you understand that you are the boat, and that the sea is your confusion.

  It was like that with the tattoo. In truth, I had seen the animal, and I had seen it clearly, but it took some time for me to process it, until suddenly, as I stared into the brown waters of the river, I knew what I had seen, though unlike the revelation of a dream, I did not yet understand its meaning. For that I would need help, but I now knew that what I had seen was a bird. And a strange bird at that. I had seen one in London Zoo as a boy. A pelican.

  Chapter 8

  ‘A what?’

  I could picture Hunter’s face as he barked down the phone at me from Cambridge.

  I stood in the small booth in the lobby of the post office, the only place I could find to make an international call. It was costing me a fortune in francs that I had balanced in a tower on the counter in the booth, and was shovelling into the greedy mouth of the machine.

  ‘A pelican.’

  ‘How’s your holiday?’

  ‘Indescribable. Listen, Hunter, I just need to know. What does a pelican mean?’

  ‘What does a pelican mean? Are you feeling all right? Probably best to drink bottled water down there, you know?’

  ‘Hunter! What does a pelican symbolise? It’s a symbol of something, isn’t it? What does it mean? Hunter, hurry, I’m running out of francs.’

  There was a silence, and again I could see his face as he dredged up what he knew about the pelican.

  ‘It’s a heraldic device, for one thing. A vulning pelican.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Vulning. From your Latin, Charles! What did they teach you at that expensive school of yours? Vulnerare. To wound. The Ancients believed that the pelican was so attentive to its young as to wound itself to give them blood to sustain them. It’s a religious symbol too. For the Eucharist, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously,’ I said. ‘Hunter, you’re a genius, how do you know this stuff?’

  ‘It’s the symbol of Corpus Christi, in both Cambridge and the other place. One gets to know these things. Take my place, for example. We have a blue and gold porcupine, which—’

  ‘Never mind the porcupine, Hunter, stick with the pelican. Is it ever used as a tattoo, or body marking?’

  ‘Jesus, man, what kind of holiday are you having?’

  ‘Hunter! I’m running out of coins. I—’

  And there the conversation ended.

  Corpus Christi. The name of a college, but literally the body of Christ, as eaten during the Eucharist, during which wine is also drunk. Wine that symbolises his blood. Hence the pelican.

  That was why I’d phoned Hunter, because he was the sort of man who knew something about everything, and a lot about some things.

  But it told me little else, except that I knew I had to follow either Jean or his ‘brother’ and see if something would lead me to him.

  I forced myself to waste a couple of hours because I didn’t want to sit down to dinner until late, and I had already decided where. There was a restaurant with a terrac
e beside the café. I would eat late, and spin out my drinks, and wait for the café to close.

  And then?

  After that, I wasn’t sure.

  Chapter 9

  I walked back to the hotel to fetch a pocket Kodak camera I’d brought with me. I wanted at the very least to get a photograph of Jean, and the other man whom I presumed to be his brother. That would feel like I was doing something, like I was making progress.

  I walked slowly to kill time, and that was easy enough, because it was another stifling evening and I was already tired.

  When I recrossed the river and made my way to the Place de l’Horloge, the clocks were chiming nine and I had a little trouble getting a table where I wanted, outside, but facing the café next door.

  It didn’t take me long to realise that neither Jean nor his older friend were there. After fifteen minutes had gone by, I saw every waiter in the place come out to the customers outside, and I knew they weren’t working that evening.

  Angry with myself, I ate quickly, knowing I’d have to come back the next day and start over again.

  I paid, leaving a large tip to apologise for being so rude as to take such a short time over my meal, and had set off back to my hotel when, in a narrow street that ran down the side of the Palais des Papes, I saw both men walking straight towards me. Instinctively I turned into the doorway of a tourist shop, still open despite the hour, and saw I was in a bookshop.

  I grabbed a book from a narrow shelf inside the door, pretending I was fascinated by it. From the corner of my eye, I saw them pass the shop entrance and stop. I set the book back on the shelf, and ducked further inside.

  They didn’t seem to have seen me, but were smoking and talking; the shop was at a small junction and I guessed they were about to separate.

  ‘Vous voulez quelque chose?’ asked a voice. I turned to see a young woman behind the counter, eyeing me suspiciously.