The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  There was a smell of sewers and rotting meat, of maggot-ridden offal. At first he thought it came from himself and feared for his undoctored wounds. He saw, when Lèni changed the bandages, that his stumps were covered in a dirty green paste with a smell of ditch bottoms. ‘All the herbs of St Jean,’ she said. ‘You are ready for anything.’

  She was combing his hair which, like his beard, had grown into an untidy thicket. He looked closely at her, noticing upon her face lumps and pits which the candlelight had hidden from him. Her skin was sallow and slack and her breath sour. The shadows under her eyes were craters and she had lost two of her front teeth. The bed and the room were in the same state of decay, the sheets and silken bedspread full of holes, the bed hangings tattered. At night he heard mice running on the furniture, leaving their dirt and their footprints scattered over the dust. The smell was part of the room, a manifestation of its antiquity, and its essence. An antique telephone stood with the candlestick on the bedside table and he manoeuvred it closer with his arms and, putting his ear to the fallen receiver, listened to silence. He stared into the murk. The statues of two deities flanked a huge credenza. They looked Egyptian, sinister. One had the mild head of a heifer and was crowned with a crescent moon. He knew that one: Isis, the moon goddess, in her animal manifestation, Hathor. The second was male, stiff-legged, carried a staff to which a glass lamp-shade was incongruously attached, and wore the head of a hawk. He had seen its like before but he could not remember where, nor could he remember the god’s name. He felt the mild-eyed heifer to be friendly and was fascinated by the hawk. He did not know why, but his interest in it troubled him, as did his forgetfulness.

  The food was still soup, but it was thicker and full of pieces of meat and vegetables. Lèni picked up the spoon to feed him.

  ‘I can feed myself!’ he said vehemently.

  ‘How? You cannot hold the spoon.’

  ‘Hold up the bowl.’ He bent his head and grasped the rim of the bowl with his lips. He sucked and lapped, burning his mouth and sending hot dribbles of soup down his chin and chest. ‘Bravo!’ said Lèni. He ate bread in the same animalistic way. Next time, she brought him a piece of veal and he bent his head and took it up in his teeth like a dog. Lèni fed him pieces of peach as a reward. He was pleased with himself. His strength was returning. When it had come back he might think constructively. He did not know how long he had been a prisoner and, when he asked Lèni, she would only say ‘Some days.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Some.’

  He ate another meal and slept another sleep: day or night, it was all the same. Lèni carried in a bowl of warm water and washed him. Then, delving in her pocket, she pulled out a crumpled piece of newspaper which she spread beside him on the bed. What was she up to now? He looked at the piece of paper and started when he saw the heading, Weekend Times. Lèni answered his unspoken question.

  ‘Dominic brought it me,’ she said. ‘He is not all self.’

  The date! That was the crucial information. Guy read it carefully: ‘Thursday, October 10th 1990’ – almost four months since he was – since he was in Coeurville – with Helen. With Alice, yes.

  ‘This is today’s paper?’ he asked Lèni.

  ‘Oh, no. A little while ago.’

  Guy, reading on, saw his name in heavy, black type. He thought he was reading an obituary, his own; but the article was impudent and slangy. The headline detained him and he frowned over it:

  FANTASTIC TRIP?

  Guy Kester Parados, fantasy author or paradox? No one has seen him since June, no one in his home village, Maidford Halse, Hantons., will speak out. He left few clues behind him, and the pages of his newly published novel The Making of Koschei give nothing away, save the dark deeds and motives of Parados’s evil hero, the magician Koschei, enigmatic hellish entity and manipulator of guilty and innocent alike.

  Koschei’s creator, born Christopher Guy Young, Alfrick-on-Severn, 1941, was himself enigmatic, in ambition, in life-style. He went to the Cathedral School in Caster but wrote of black magic and beastliness, sometimes of bestiality. He did not use his Christminster First as a stepping-stone to the soft beds of academe but dwelt in rural obscurity writing, at first, indifferent verse and later (in 1973), after resurrecting himself as Guy Kester Parados, a fantastic and Fantastic first novel, The Magician Koschei, the first in his wholly successful New Mythologies sequence. His books have attracted the praise of both Valentine Vernon of The Face and Trevor Nursling of the TLS.

  He lived quietly with his wife, the sculptor Jillian Meddowes, at the Old Rectory where they raised a family of six children and a ‘torpid’ Labrador named Pyewacket after a 17th Century witch’s cat.

  Maidford Halse is quiet, sleepy. The beer is warm, the village team was playing cricket and I passed three elderly spinsters on bicycles. As did Guy Parados most likely. His car was an expression of his personality, the ultimate hot saloon, a tornado red Audi Quattro 20v (see Motoring Section) with a distinctive, egoblaze of a number-plate, GUY5.

  The disappearance has its own set of paradoxes. Guy Parados was seen leaving home about 9.00 p.m. on June 24th, and was not seen again until 11.00 a.m. next day, boarding the Calais ferry at Dover. Three of his readers who did not want to ‘spoil his holiday’ by speaking to their hero refrained. But in the Camargue Lounge Etta Travis, TV traveller and tribal diarist, enjoyed a drink with him. At Calais, Pierre Roger, a passport official, stopped GUY5 to admire both car and driver, who was seen later near Senlis picking up a girl hitch-hiker young enough to be a friend of his 16-year old daughter, Phoebe. They headed for Paris on the A1 but were next glimpsed on the A6, at the Nitry péage 190 km south. And were not seen again, though Jillian Meddowes later received a card posted in Avallon, Yonne département, on June 26th.

  ‘Hi darling, here I am in the sun. Hope it is shining on you. See you soon, love Guy.’ A husband’s cheerful greeting? A deceitful ruse?

  When he disappeared, Guy Parados was dressed as usual and as seen in his publicity photographs. Faded jeans, cream linen jacket, black Armani tee-shirt with the words ‘make it’ in grey lettering. But clothes do not entirely make a man. Guy Parados is 6’1”, lean and fit, blue eyes, thicket of iron grey hair, 49 going on 40. He cannot magically vanish like his chief character, Koschei, and anyone spotting him is asked to contact New Scotland Yard or a local police station.

  Not an obituary, quite. A tribute perhaps and news, old news. Guy looked up from the page and caught Lèni’s eye.

  ‘They are looking for you then,’ she said.

  ‘You have read it?’

  ‘Oui. I have some English. You are a famous man.’

  ‘I might as well be dead.’

  ‘Pas de tout! You are alive. I see that you are, and I will care for you until –’

  ‘Until?’

  ‘The time comes.’

  ‘Turn the paper over!’

  She complied. The reverse of the sheet was, he saw, completely taken up with an advertisement for a computer. I had one of those, he thought. I wrote my stories on it.

  Lèni sewed long cuffs of blue silk to his jacket, washed and dressed him and helped him walk about the room. His legs were stiff. She sat him on a dusty chaise longue, set a row of candles on the marble mantel shelf and, on a table inlaid with ormulu and mother-of-pearl, laid out the implements for smoking: pipes, multi-coloured Egyptian cigarettes, tobacco, matches, knife, and a scarlet, lacquered box. She carried in a tarnished silver-gilt tray with a queer glass, two bottles and a dish of sugar cubes on it.

  ‘Let us be comfortable,’ she said, and sat beside him. She cut a slice from the block of tobacco and began to prepare a pipe. It was, he saw, no conventional pipe but a strange, thin metal object with a bulbous bowl.

  ‘Opium,’ she said. ‘You have been drinking laudanum.’

  He watched her take powdered opium from the red box, mix it with the tobacco and prime the pipe. Then, turning to the bottles, she made her other drugs ready: sugar, clear w
ater and yellow-green absinthe. The water slowly dripped into the liquor, turning it cloudy and bringing with it the sugar it leached from the cube.

  ‘Yours,’ she said, ‘and mine. A woman’s thighs are softer than horsehair. Take your ease.’

  He stretched out on the couch: there was room for him to lie at full length, if he rested his head on her lap. When he was comfortable, she gently put the narrow stem of the opium pipe between his lips. He sucked at it while she held the pipe close by her breasts and bending over him, kept it steady. The first taste made him cough and she moved the pipe a little in his mouth, bending lower.

  ‘It will relax you, bring you pleasant dreams,’ she whispered. ‘Let me take a sip of my Lethe-water. Ah, it is good!’

  He smelted the mould in her clothing and felt her sagging breasts close against his cheek, comforters as near, but for the decayed silk, as the pipe and more familiar to him than his vanished hands. He sucked again and felt his head invaded by the awful ghosts wakefulness held back. He was in the cathedral again, walking in the nave. But, he paused in his tracks, someone was speaking, a she-someone, Lèni la Soie herself, standing up before him at an eagle-headed lectern and reading to him from a leather-covered book. He was content, in his confusion, to recognize and know her as the original of the Evil Life which he had read sometime – in Avallon was it? – and the author of the diary Helen kept in her vardo – but wasn’t that burnt and Helen and the diary with it? Helen, ah Helen who had such a slender waist –

  ‘Listen to me!’ Silk Lèni was speaking again.

  ‘I shall never find peace until I have told my true story!’ she thundered, so he lay down on the nearest pew and rested his head on the black hassock someone had left there. He listened to the silk worker’s tale:

  Father Paon was an idiot, un imbécile, but fortune favours fools, does it not? Sometimes he was like a stallion who devoured me as a mettlesome horse does its oats; and what a stallion, what a lover – at first.

  I am before myself.

  A fine fellow, my sinful priest, as exquisite as the peacock which gave his family its name. A dandy – truly! His family were wealthy landowners, farmers and then winegrowers, ambitious as the old Burgundian kings, and Paon, who had no more interest in agriculture and viticulture than confit of turkey itself except when the results of both were presented at table – he, poor fellow, was made to study and turn himself into a holy Father. For a time he served the church, in one small village or another, but then, seeing how the hierarchy of the church favoured some at the expense of others, made application for a change – So he came eventually to Lyon.

  Lyon, my city: she is old and filled with centuries of magic filtered through the dusty summer air, swept along her two rivers; deep in her earth. I am of Lyon like my mother and my mother’s mother, like my father a silkworker. I am the daughter and the descendant of Lyonnais, one myself. Paon met me here, in the Croix Rousse district. That was the start of it. It was on a Sunday, after Mass. I was walking on the Boulevard at the top of the hill, a gay place then and bustling with families, lovers, Sunday strollers; I had a new gown, I remember, and my lovebird. Paon took my arm when he saw me, like a good Father with his daughter in religion; we went to drink wine and, when we had drunk and talked and were saying our goodbyes, he told me how much he wished to become my confessor. I should find him at St Michael’s, he said, in the fourth confessional on the right.

  We complemented each other, Paon and I, like the pricking of lust and blind will. He had strange ways, and an odd way of speaking, for a man of God.

  ‘I see a woman with the smile of Circe,’ he said, when I was seated in his confessional. ‘The loveliest of my penitents. She might be the most refined of tender maidens – who could guess she is a common silk worker, a clever seamstress and a prostitute as well? The little perching bird she wears in her hat crowns her as regally as gold or diamonds – it is as pink as her lips. Now, Silk Lèni. I want you to visit me in my house: I have a devil for you to exorcise.’

  ‘What kind of a devil, Father?’ I asked.

  ‘A carnal imp, daughter. It interrupts my meditations and my sleep; it rises up when I pray and when I look at you.’

  ‘Will you forgive me, Father? I may be about to sin,’ I said and listened as he prayed for me, which he did rapidly and also guiltily, I judged, though I could not of course see him. He left the confessional and I waited in the church a few moments, pretending to pray, and then followed after him at a discreet distance, my parasol up to conceal my face, though the sky was cloudy. I knocked at the door of his house, a little fearful for I knew he shared it with another priest and that they had a housekeeper who, for aught I knew, was a dragon.

  Father Paon was standing in the parlour. The sweat ran down his face but he raised his biretta – for all the world as if it were a silk opera hat – and bowed to me. I looked about me. Though Mother Church is so rich the parlour was poorly furnished and I noticed at once, it was so strange – it did not accord with what I expected in a priest’s dwelling – that there were no holy pictures, not even one of the Blessed Virgin. Then I saw a statue in a niche by the chimney and was lifting my hand to cross myself when I realized that the statue was naked, and black.

  ‘Oh!’ I cried out before I could stop myself. ‘Oh, Father – she is just like the Negress, Lisette, at Mother Jupon’s!’

  Father Paon’s mouth twitched but I could not tell if he was amused or angry. I made haste to correct myself.

  ‘I mean, Father,’ I said, ‘that she is like the Black Sara who rescued Our Lady from the sea; she the gypsies still worship in the Camargue. Perhaps not such a strange lady to find in the parlour of a priest.’

  He stared at me as if I mesmerized him – waiting, I daresay, to see what stupidity should next fall from my lips.

  ‘It is a curiosity, an antique, my child,’ he said. ‘You admire her? Come, you may touch her. She does not bite.’

  I went up to the statue and touched it cautiously. I could see, now I was close to her, that the black lady looked more like a demon than a woman for she had an ugly face, very badly carved in my opinion, and as for her hands, her legs and feet – they were mere suggestions because the sculptor had concentrated all his skill and attention on her female parts which were rendered exact, only much larger than is normal. Clearly, too, she liked her food – or was pregnant, since her belly was big and round. It made me think of the fate of all women and I stroked it with my fingertip, the priest watching my every move. Such close attention made me uncomfortable: the meeting of a priest and a prostitute is usually not prolonged by a lesson in aesthetics! I turned about to stare back at him and saw that the sweat still poured off him and, more, that he looked red and troubled.

  ‘You are not well, Father,’ I said. ‘Let me call the housekeeper.’

  ‘No, no,’ he answered. ‘It is not her I want, not today – it is you.’

  So the time had come. I was quite calm; it was business after all. I remembered his words in the confessional.

  ‘Ah!’ I said. ‘It is the imp of course. It is bad today, I can see that, but I am quite sure, Father, that you have made a friend of someone well able to deal with it.’

  He had the nerve then to argue about my fee but eventually we agreed a price which satisfied us both, so I went swiftly to him and lifted his soutane. It was not the first time I had helped a priest. Afterwards, when I was washing my hands in his kitchen and his sense had come back to him, he gave me my money and a pretty hat pin, not at all the kind of object you would expect a priest to know of. He had chosen well; it wasn’t a cheap affair but one from the jeweller’s on the Boulevard.

  ‘When will you return?’ he asked. ‘I should like to tell you more about the Lady in my parlour.’

  ‘Whenever you like,’ I told him; his gift had pleased me that much.

  ‘This evening then,’ he said eagerly. ‘Father Renard will have returned and I know he will find you as charming and as – skilful as I do. The stat
ue belongs to him in any case and he should be the one to instruct you in its use.’

  I left laughing: coin and an amethyst set in gold on the end of a good gold pin – for half a minute! And, I thought, what a pair; what a couple, those two priests, Father Peacock and Father Fox! Soon I was laughing on the other side of my face. All that had passed between Paon and myself was an overture to the main drama; a test, if you like, of my mettle.

  Guy, drained of the priest’s lust, lay still.

  ‘I have been dreaming,’ he said. ‘Is it the opium?’

  Lèni laughed. It was a richer sound than he expected from such a dusty, worn body.

  ‘I amuse you,’ he said, ‘– at least I can do that.’

  ‘It is your innocence which delights me,’ she said. ‘Here, I have prepared a new pipe. Breathe the smoke in deeply. I shall drink another absinthe.’

  Her eyes were bright with the alcohol already, he saw; two shining pits. He remembered something.

  ‘I have read your diary,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed? How is that possible? – it is lost.’

  ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘I have seen it and I have read it; and there must be other copies of it because someone has made it into a book.’

  ‘A book! Then I am famous, like you?’ She laughed. ‘Where did you read my diary, Guy Parados – in your fevered dreams was it, or have you the power to creep inside my mind?’

  ‘Your diary is on a shelf in a gypsy caravan not a hundred kilometres from Lyon. You have no need to worry: it is quite safe.’

  His statements seemed to strike her as absurd because she laughed again and eventually, putting one hand to her head, said,