She lay on her right side, facing away, all white, the blonde hair like straw in a sunny field or the thin filaments of flax Rumplestiltskin span into gold for the king’s daughter. Her legs and arms were graceful, long; everything, breasts, belly, buttocks, neat and under-used. He looked again at those small breasts with their pale pink nipples, touched her shoulder gently, lifted her hair. Her face in repose was delicate; did have, indeed, the features of one of Sassetta’s angels. She still wore her ribbon. The black band tight around so long and white a neck disturbed him; he was not sure if his unease was spiritual or sexual; but ‘I’m quite godless,’ she had said. Curse the inaccuracies of the English vernacular! Did she mean ‘moderately’ or ‘totally’?
He touched the velvet ribbon gently, noticing how its silken edge bit into her neck.
The curious book she’d been reading on the ferry lay there, with her bits and pieces on the chair. He got up softly to fetch it; lay down and opened its lurid cover.
‘The Evil Life of Lèni la Soie.’ Inside was a frontispiece taken from a contemporary sketch; it showed a dishevelled beauty kneeling in prayer before a crucifix. Curious, he thought, how ready we are to accuse every whore and make of her a repentant Magdalen at once attractive and repellent. He turned the pages and found a short introduction.
‘France,’ it began, ‘called La Belle. Imagine two wide rivers and a city of tall stone houses, great squares where people walk, art galleries, churches, gardens, a ruined Gallo-Roman theatre high above the city. This is Lyon today.
‘Now let us imagine another scene. It is the latter half of the nineteenth century and the houses which cover the hilly quarter of Fourvière are falling down. This is the oldest quarter and those who live here, above the city but below the site of the new basilica, are also decaying from the harshness of life, from drink, from hunger. There is so little that even the rats have moved out, away to the Croix Rousse with the whores. Some of these evil-living women are thin, some fat; some even, to cater for all tastes, very old, wrinkled, dry; some are pregnant and some are as beautiful as Aphrodite. Lèni was such a one –’
Guy stopped reading, irritated by the present tense, drama-documentary style; plagued by recollections which streamed up as unstoppably as mist from wet ground in the sun. He had never known Lèni – how could he? She was dead – like the first Alice. He had not known Lèni, but he had read her diary, all the closely written confidential pages of it and could visualize her neat letters exactly and the brown limp-covered book itself, soft leather binding worn bald. It used to live, a landmark amongst the paperbacks, on the little shelf above the bed-place in the gypsy vardo and Helen, rising from him in her resplendent nakedness, had brought it down and shown it him, revealing at the same time her inmost thoughts, for she kept her own diary in it, and also in French. Somewhat bewildered he had read there that he, Guy Parados, was un trésor and also mon amant très fort et infatigable. Schoolgirl stuff on reflection, these days. He had grinned at her and said ‘Thanks! I hope I am,’ and had asked her why she wrote in French, not Romany.
‘It’s the language of lovers, isn’t it?’ she had replied.
He remembered some of Lèni’s entries. She had, he thought, compared her priestly lover to a stallion and herself she had personified as his breakfast. She had also implied that he was stupid: quel imbécile, quel désastre! Nothing else could be retrieved – except – yes, a homily as vapid as every cliché: ‘Fortune favours fools’, in Helen’s translation; but the French was Aux innocents les mains pleines which, translated literally, meant ‘To simpletons, filled hands’. The innocent, the idiot son of the family downstairs certainly had those, clasping tight his bread and biting into its crust. Guy leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes.
‘Pleine’ had another meaning, probably several, for sense in French was, as in English, governed by context. Ah! It meant ‘complete’ or ‘whole’.
Complete hands to fools. A good hand, a complete flush. No! Nonsense. He was dozing when there was work to do. He skimmed the short introduction, noting the facts: Lèni’s lover, Father Paon (absurd name! – but how it characterized him) was the nutter, a slave to every vice and luxury and deeply involved with other Satanists of the time, in particular Olivia des Mousseaux and a second priest, Henri Renard. They were famous at the time: the decadent novelist, Huysmans, had interviewed them and it was said that their erotic practices had inspired both the Marquis de Guaita and Aleister Crowley. Paon took Lèni to live with him and abused her – yet she remained with him, loyal as a spaniel, and more, she watched him bloodily murder the girls they lured to his Black Masses. Petites rosses insaissisables, Elusive little nags: that was what she had written about the girls! Guilt and revulsion kept Guy fascinated: that this obscure Lyon seamstress whose diary he had held … But the place to which they were brought, that had not sounded like a maniac’s lair. It had another, haunting, name, un paradis inconnu.
An unknown Paradise. Death, he supposed, and the Otherworld: Heaven, Hades, Hell, Avalon, Elysium and the Land of Youth. The Isles of the Blessed. It had many names, as many as man’s fears. He read the denouement of the extraordinary tale:
‘Their own over-confidence betrays Lèni and Paon. They kidnap the daughter of a consul, a dark Mexican lovely. Respectable Lyon and the demi-monde are equally horrified but, even so, it is necessary for the arresting civil guard officers to bribe the militant Canuts or silk workers and to have their protection in order to enter the district, find and arrest the couple, and discover the horrors they have perpetrated. This is what they found:
‘The door of the apartment wide open and Paon, dressed like a dandy in silks, reclining on his ornate bed of shame, his new telephone receiver in his hand and the noise from a disconnected call the only sound. He wore a blank look and offered no resistance. In the kitchen, Paloma Diaz del Castillo lay in a welter of blood on the scrubbed deal table, horribly maimed and quite dead.
‘Paon was guillotined in Lyon in 1884 but his mistress, the beautiful devil Lèni la Soie, was never brought to justice. Helped by her silk worker friends, she had fled into her native territory, the local warren of alleyways or traboules, and there disappeared.’
He wondered how Paon had defended himself at his trial. Historic Lyon was a depository of hatred, a place in which many had been brought to book. He had visited it three years ago with his wife: for a day and a night, time enough for Jilly to spend an afternoon in the Silk Museum, for him to find and choose the best restaurant. They had left the children in England with Thérèse and were trying hard to live harmoniously together. It wasn’t a second honeymoon but they had a good holiday and went on to the Alps. In Fourvière he had explored some of the alleys or traboules with a sense of trespass, for many were gated, others obscure and damp and all along them stairways and doors led to inhabited apartments. He had found a likely restaurant and was standing contentedly in the warm afternoon sun reading the menu when, further down the narrow street, there was a flurry of cars and heavy motorbikes ridden by helmeted men.
A wide façade, cramped up against the pavement, was the back of the Palais de Justice. He had witnessed the departure from it of Klaus Barbie whom the Lyonnais were trying for his crimes against Jews and gypsies in the War. They had even found a lawyer who would defend him.
Who would, or could, defend Lèni? He began to read the narrative which was couched in her words and taken from her journal intime:
‘You, man or woman of the future time, you my Reader and my Judge, will observe that my spirit, like the traboules of the Croix Rousse, goes in as many directions as the compass needle. As for my heart, that too has its yearnings, for my father, for my lover, but most of all for the unknown paradise. I liken it to the hills beyond Fourvière in whose long shadows we lived happily before these centuries of revolution
And I am in Arcadia, he thought suddenly. What have I to do with this miserable stuff? He looked at the girl asleep beside him. Et in Arcadia ego – where, in a perf
ect, sylvan paradise, Death intrudes. He would wake her and comfort himself with her body.
The black ribbon was tight. He wondered, fingering its soft surface, how she could bear such tightness and he felt under her hair for a fastening. There was a bow, which he untied, and the ribbon slipped off and fell upon the bed while he, recoiling, saw the mark it had concealed, a dark ring of blemishes about her neck. Ghostly Alice wore such an ineradicable necklace, her hangman’s keepsake.
Alice Tyler opened her eyes, blinked pale lids across the blue and put both hands up to her throat.
‘You beast,’ she said.
He was not able to respond. Alice sat up. She switched on the bedside light and retrieved the ribbon. With electric light to illuminate it, the mark diminished. It was not very big.
Alice tied the ribbon and covered the mark.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘What does it look like?’
‘Horrible – I’m sorry. It reminds me –’
‘Of something nasty in one of your books – in your imagination! It’s a birthmark, stupid. Usually I cover it with make-up, but sometimes I wear the choker instead.’
‘I see.’
The girl switched off the light and lay down.
‘Go to sleep,’ she said and then, more kindly, ‘Save your energy till I wake – properly.’
A blighted angel, child of Hell scarred by the woodcarver’s chisel – but he was asleep and dreaming, miraculously able to walk on air amid the wooden seraphim which held up the roof of St Edward’s Cathedral.
Guy stood at the mirror in the curtained enclosure which held the washbasin. He lathered his face. They had ‘made love’ again though it had felt like war. Alice had clawed and bitten him, arousing him to a brutal response. He had not tried to please her, only himself. When he had finished he had looked down at her and found her gritting her teeth.
‘Hell,’ she’d said.
He had apologized and found then that he had opened a door, the way which led to her. She had wriggled and twined herself about him. More sex followed and now it was eleven o’clock. He was exhausted. He was too old.
He looked into the reflection of his own blue eyes. There were shadows there, a dark cast in each eye; his eyelids had a cynical and oriental droop. The white lather made a substantial beard and the gloom behind the curtain had taken the English pallor from his face and replaced it with darkness. Christ, he almost looked like Satwinder staring balefully across the bridge table. He blinked rapidly and shaved away stubble and the foam. The familiar wide-open eyes gazed steadily back at him.
‘Aren’t you ready yet?’ Alice, beyond the curtain, asked.
‘Almost.’ He dried his face, came out.
‘You’ve read some of the Malthassa books,’ he said. ‘What does Koschei look like – the Mage, the chief male character?’
‘Well, if you don’t know –’ she began.
‘I do. I just want you to describe him for me.’
‘OK. Um – he is very dark, hair I mean and skin. A bit Arabian, I suppose. His eyelids droop, to make him look really sinister – and he has a big scratchy beard. Yuck!’
‘You wouldn’t like to be in bed with him?’
‘No way! He’s a nasty piece of work.’
‘Is he? Is that how you read him? He began as a noble man, although a questioner. At first, he was a simple adventurer.’
Pleased by the manner in which my adventure away from the route between Tanter and the battle at Myrah Pits had ended, I sat beside the horse-butcher on his flat cart. It was our raft of oblivion and good will, both conditions induced by our astonishing sojourn in the village and by the stupendous quantities of alcohol administered to us at the end of the midsummer fest.
The cart belonged to the butcher. It had been commandeered by the villagers and used to transport the summer brides in their procession about the fields. An arch of withies had been nailed to it and this, still hung with wilted grasses and small field flowers, remained. The butcher said he might fix a tarpaulin to it, to keep off the sun. He was a slack fellow. He had promised to buy me a meal, but we never stopped at an inn.
In addition to the withered garlands and we two men, the cart carried two dead horses. These, a red and a red roan, lay quiet but nodded their heads – which hung over the tail of the cart – to the jolt of the ruts. The live horse which pulled them snorted and tossed his head to keep the flies in motion.
‘You’re a good horse,’ the butcher said and wrenched on the reins. When the cart stopped he leaped from it through the gathering cloud of flies and into the ditch, where he pissed copiously and plucked a large bunch of herbs. These, he carried to the horse’s head where, standing with legs akimbo and shirt and breeches gaping, he tucked the leafy stems into and under the straps of the bridle. He made a noise, Waahorhorhor! to the horse or in relief, scratched his belly, fastened his buttons and mounted to the driver’s seat.
‘Perhaps they would also like to be decorated,’ I dryly said.
‘Naw.’ The butcher was emphatic. ‘One bunch should do for the lot of us, dead and alive. Strong stuff.’
The flies which had made a sortie to examine the effect of the herbs rejoined their companions and helped them annoy me. But the butcher seemed impervious and soon began to sing in time with the jolting of the cart,
When I _____ was a lad
I __________ loved a lass
But she loved another
MAN
Oh
When I ______
I took off my hat and beat the air with it. The flies rose up like a whirlwind, and descended again. I, too, sang.
In this manner, we travelled some eight or ten miles. The Plains and their mean margins were behind us and I was cheered; but the forest lay before and this knowledge was death to the brief springtime of my heart. I looked at the butcher, whose flushed face was covered in beads of sweat and flies.
‘Do you not fear the forest?’ I said.
‘It is but trees. I have trees in my garden. In the forest there are many more, but they are the same things of trunks and branches.’
‘Then, do you not fear the Beautiful Ones?’
‘I have never seen a puvush.’
‘Hush! There may be one nearby. I think you are a city man who knows the stone street better then the forest track.’
‘All but a few leagues of the forest is trackless, so I have heard. But you are correct. I am a man of Pargur.’
‘Pargur!’
‘It is not quite as marvellous as they say; perhaps only half as much – perhaps half equal to your wildest dreams.’
The forest closed in as we talked. It seemed to me that puvushi might well be hiding under the forest’s canopy, green and brown as the shadows and, beside, that each rill and boggy place was the home of a nivasha. As well as these spirits, I feared the Om Ren, the Wild Man, which might lie in ambush awaiting unwary travellers; and the Duschma, she of plague and agony. I had seen her twice, once in a sleepy village where she watched our column pass and smiled horribly and, again, stalking the battlefield in search of fresh young men to feed on. My sword was blunt against such and, from past and recent experience, I knew I would not be proof against the allure (false though it is) of the earth and water spirits. Soon, I must leave this gross but, nevertheless, human horse-butcher. Ahead, the dwarf Erchon had told me, the ways parted in a wide Y and the left-hand fork went towards the town of Myrah, while the right-hand veered across a tract of forest fringe. Somewhere beyond this, the battle raged. A mighty chestnut tree grew in the cleft of the Y and under this Erchon had promised me he would wait. I should not be alone in the forest; but a dwarf is not a man. They keep their own customs. Erchon, disregarding the duty Nemione had impressed upon him, had left me for three weeks to meet his fellows at one of these arbitrary gatherings.
The chestnut trailed its leafy skirt upon the ground. Erchon was nowhere to be seen; in hiding, no doubt. He fears the forest folk as much as I, despite his boast th
at the nivashi cannot scent dwarves, I thought. I said goodbye to the butcher, his raggedy, weed-bedizened cart, his dead horses and the flies.
‘Goodbye, Master Wolf,’ he replied, screwing one of his eyes into a hideous wink and confounding me with his words. I had been careful to reveal neither identity nor allegiances; I wore an old shirt and jacket over my cuirass and, further, had tied a dirty length of cloth I’d bought for a farthing in Tanter slantwise about my body to suggest to any bold jack that I was a brigand. My beard was growing fast.
‘I see it in your eyes,’ the butcher explained. ‘A look of confidence – nay, arrogance – under the dirt.’
‘I suppose it’s useless to ask you to hold your tongue,’ I said.
‘I’m not such a gossip as you suppose, not even in my cups. I leave that to my wife.’
I gave him more than he deserved, a silver threepenny bit, and wondered what kind of woman would allow him to bed her. The butcher tested the coin on his teeth.
‘A good one,’ he said. ‘Thank ye. I’ll keep it in case I meet a werewolf.’
I watched him drive off, watched him till he was out of sight. Then I called softly,
‘Erchon, Master Scantling.’ He liked his nickname and usually answered it at once; but there was no response. I called again and, pushing the pendant branches of the chestnut tree aside, crept into its shadow. All I found was a dappled green shade, empty. I circumnavigated the tree. Nothing.
I cursed Erchon. The universal reputation dwarves have for carousing is fully justified. I supposed the wretch lay drunk in some alley or fleet. I wished he would awake with the father and mother of sore heads and a sick stomach as well.
I did not know what to do. Soon, it would be dusk; then, dark. I had planned to set up temporary home with his help, a camp where we might rest safe by the light of a good fire with one to watch while the other slept. The track looked quiet enough, striking off amongst the trees, a band of late sunlight illuminating it and picking out the colours of the summer flowers which grew beside it. I resolved to walk along it until the sunlight gave out, or I reached a corner.
The Memory Palace Page 6
