by Rodney Hall
You ask about the dog? Well, that bewildered little dog grew tinier than ever, finding itself enlisted as assistant investigator on both sides and confronted on a daily basis with the agony of choosing between rival enticements as the ladies competed for its loyalty. When the dog died it was just them, each rousing her mind to review a retrospect of betrayals too numerous to count but none of them slight enough to be let go.
Sad to say, the story had no end. The pattern was set. There was no way out. With their skills thus refined Mavis and Arabella proved, to a remarkable degree, equally tenacious till they only ever heard each other’s voice by eavesdropping on phone calls (calls being made, no doubt, to or by conspirators of one complexion or the other). So, they reached the consummation of their passion in hatred—hatred measured out by the scruple—filling each other’s lives with unasked-for assistance, wordless unwanted services and mute courtesies as venomous as they were delicate.
Sunken liner
Divers guide their deep-sea bell to swoop down through the green shafted gloom of a netherworld as ancient as the planet to prove that death can have its compensations which had never been thought proveable, for among them death has always been accepted as final and without value, they being scientists who keep their superstitions secret and rely on the material world as the repository of all things precious and a definition such as it may be of eternity. So down they go this day in their innocence to dispel a commonplace mystery deep among plants of an underwater forest, their searchlight stabbing diagonal flashes among towering trunks until on the ocean floor they discover the message they seek, the bold calligraphic curve of a hull inscribed in mud, the long-bladed keel a declaration of disaster, ranks of wafered decks tipped on one side and the cylinders of defunct funnels all colossal, all motionless. Blind to the myriad griefs which hang innumerable and suspended like so many exhausted fireflies they cross her stern which bears the name CELESTIA in letters taller than the tallest man to glide into the vast shadowy vagueness of a ghost ship sunk in ruin, a gaping hole in the hull revealing glimpses of the engine room with massive sludge-embedded pistons till farther round the sheer steel cliff they find themselves peering in through portholes bearded with weeds, transported back to the grand days of sea travel when escape from pursuit seemed possible. All around the wreck giant stems tower three hundred metres up to an undulant crown of foliage protected from air by a thin sheath of waves, stems as vertical and chain-like as some category of computer built on repetitious parallels, some cuneiform abacus secreting solutions to the origins of matter, some giant brain which might eventually crack the code of our prodigious ignorance of a shitty destiny. The new arrivals scan a fungus-grown honeycomb of drowned decks where passengers once strolled and sought to mask disquiet at the fate of family and friends by chatting sociably, the diving bell homes in on the head of a companionway and following once-brass rails down into the belly of the vessel its pencil of light spills along a line of fallen-open doors where tipped-up bunks prompt investigation, the capsized chairs and exhibits of such necessary junk as mirrors safety-razors quilts and cushions of mud and keys to doors forever shut against the owners’ return and clocks with mechanisms set going in 1936, tools and trinkets and wind-up gramophones and a shellac disc of Caruso singing about sunshine O Sole Mio as he first sang it all those years ago into the ear of a recording horn—a tumbled museum of neighbourliness in the mementos of the disinherited whose belief in the future was buried along with their latched trunks of folded clothes and books of Mosaic law so deep that only the most tremendous shifts of current could cause the least disturbance, lured as these refugees had been by the promise of freedom to live according to their beliefs and a blind eye turned to the objection that some such journeys in search of justice involve displacing the least fortunate of those already there—thus the deep sea bell with its single probing beam tracks along riveted steel plates and the folded-aside flaps to kitchens where domed burial mounds of pots and bowls were left in stillness by the doomed crew scrambling for survival. Subsequently they float up the other companionway to reach the First Class decks again and the light lances in across public saloons which were once noisy with predictions of a cataclysm disastrous enough to overwhelm Europe even as the ship itself was overwhelmed by the ocean and so suddenly drowned that the whole company went down with their dreams unspoiled and their misgivings about the life awaiting them in cities built by the convict labour of an earlier time intact and uncorrupted by knowledge of what was to come: the utter strangeness of civilised men being able to stomach their own bestiality even while consigning children to experiments that rats were not sufficiently evolved to satisfy, of the self-styled master race flaying human bodies for lampshade skin. So at least those who perished aboard Celestia did so in the dignity of ignorance, with their belief in redemption embalmed as was their meagre baggage of necessities in the last enveloping echo of an uproar and a plunge to the bottom, their prayers bottled up in the air vents and their cries for help preserved in brine, while whales sailed overhead unstoppable as clouds among membranous strands of plankton. And, strange to report, these scientists in their deep-sea bell, even now abandoning such systematic investigation as they’ve begun, as if feeling themselves intruders, intentionally float straight past the bridge from the era of horizons encrusted by living growths, float away among the shadows of a giant brain active with attendant fish, a dislodged manta ray having revisited the rumour of blood feasts in the stillness of decayed light sent winging out from the wreck among the trunks of that fairytale sea forest, and they float up escaping the cosmic cold ceaselessly tucked around unused lifeboats returning without explanation to the surface to confirm that the disappearance was a mystery and the Celestia lost without trace having left no message to shame the world when she went down.
The Beef steak Room
The actual invitation when delivered was perhaps only a shade less surprising than the event itself, which followed a week later. In brief, Alice, Sir Richard Burton’s wife, and Sir Richard himself—adventurer, explorer and translator of The Arabian Nights in sixteen volumes—were invited to dine at the Beefsteak Room, by Abraham Stoker of all people. Their host, poised ready as he was to claim celebrity in his own right as Bram Stoker, creator of Count Dracula, met them at the restaurant door with some ceremony, winsomely and with a certain bashful self-assurance seeing them settled in their appointed seats. That they might have harboured reservations about the bother of walking abroad and appearing in public for the sake of noblesse oblige was now beside the point. Plainly they were determined to make the best of what could turn out to be a pleasant enough occasion after all.
Certain it is, at any rate, that the evening got off to an acceptable start, their host’s deference remarkably in accord with the Burtons’ opinion of themselves. Indeed, rather more charmed than either seemed likely to admit, their conversation began casually and personally, even to the degree that Sir Richard did not react against a sly mention of his imminent retirement from the diplomatic service, a retirement which public opinion and elementary politeness ought surely to have avoided as too ticklish a matter for a new acquaintance to raise. He, Sir Richard, in fact took quite the opposite view—not only because he had ‘had enough’ of diplomacy but because vengefully he looked forward to the prospect of abandoning his detractors and colleagues alike to manage as best they could without him, for the world in general conceded that though difficult and short-tempered he was nevertheless indispensable, with comprehensive experience of the entire region from Arabia to Afghanistan, experience garnered with the aid of a phenomenal mastery of twenty-five languages which he had put at the service of the British Empire.
Mr Stoker being Irish born had quite other loyalties and his slyness was not to be lightly brushed aside. He was besides even more consumed by an appetite for heroics than for the splendid dinner he had provided. The initial pleasantries being soon exhausted he pulled himself then at last together for the purpose of steering talk to the
larger and less easily defended territory of the past in general. Behind his mild smile the fellow was on his mettle and gratified to find himself not at all shaken now he had fairly set the plan in motion. Next with disarming frankness he confessed that his family tendency to repeat anecdotes had become accepted among friends as a cross to be borne, as the price of friendship, a friendship, so he hoped but could not for reasons of modesty affirm, in many respects generous and sincere.
‘Though, of course, you are the master storyteller,’ he insisted and appeared convincingly humble. Then with the air of a man not wishing to be thought a mere flatterer he justified this claim, surprising Sir Richard with mention of a similar dinner party at the same restaurant many years earlier, ‘ …a dinner party at which you are rumoured to have enthralled the company with an account of how, as a young man, you joined a pilgrimage to Mecca disguised in Arab clothing, wasn’t it!’
It was beautifully expressive, the way their own silence made the murmurous surrounding conversations seem doubled in volume. At the clatter of many knives and forks, Stoker himself turning somewhat away from the table lamp to shield his face in shadow, the prospect of the evening before them darkened. To both the Burtons some unwritten contract had been in different ways breached as this faux pas seemed strategically predicated on common report that the great man never refused a challenge.
‘What’s that to you?’ Sir Richard snapped coldly, thrusting his face across the crystal and silverware closer than conventional good manners allowed.
Promptly a cluster of waiters arrived in a show of efficiency to clear away soup bowls stained with delicate tidemarks of consommé. Their intervention granted Lady Burton her chance to thwart the looming conflict so, colouring, she gave Stoker wild-eyed, wavering signals. It was one of those moments at which she had, in her extraordinary way, most the air of designedly siding with her husband in order to rob him of his massive forcefulness.
‘Well, my dear, everyone does remember! Everyone!’ she hazarded in the hope that her placatory impulse might avoid detection and that with the intuitive flair for which she was notorious in her own circle if not her husband’s she might restore the prospect of a pleasant but innocuous evening—also for no better reason than that she was slower than Sir Richard to take a dislike to their host, in whom however she began to sense a curious, perhaps unhealthy, fascination for Burton’s violent nature. Having both men turn their attention her way she took it up again more soothingly and, as it were, to close the matter: ‘Everyone remembers, you goose. Everyone admires you.’
‘What seems to have been so much remarked by your admirers,’ the intrepid Irishman seized on her word, to all appearances unaware of his blunder and as if helping cover her unguarded ‘goose’, ‘was the desperate and exciting aspects of the climax rather than the arduous length of the journey you undertook. Although for the whole of that journey you maintained your disguise as a pilgrim, if I’m not mistaken. Weren’t you said to be the first European to gain entry to the holy city, birthplace of Muhammed? … the first Infidel to enter the al Haram mosque? … to see the Kaaba, I declare to God! … the risk, man!’
Sir Richard Burton leant back and took his time sampling a swig of claret before setting his glass down with deliberation and, as waiters scooped breadcrumbs from the cloth with silver trenchers, shook the remnant folds from his napkin with a brief and decisive whipcrack. ‘Have you quite finished?’
Most men would have backed down but with his robust reasonableness Abraham Stoker was not so easily dissuaded, nor were his motives either open or transparent. That indeed he had now, almost gaily, further implications to pursue, was revealed as tactical forethought in having chosen a venue so very crowded. ‘No, by God,’ he declared, ‘you are too reticent altogether. That fascinating story of yours, so I’m led to understand, held the entire company spellbound.’ He wagged a finger with the friendliest familiarity and sniggered soundlessly. ‘You did survive, after all … despite the fact that the least failure of nerve would most likely have revealed the deception, called attention to your disguise, your false identity n’est pas … even the slightest hesitancy—surely?—in the subtle observances of that creed, I mean … and then the climax, sir! The climax!’
Again the establishment’s waiters interrupted to surround the table with the business of serving whole plaice, incidentally blocking the curious glances directed that way. Sir Richard growled at the plate set before him as the babble subsided to a murmur and he growled again at the apportioning of butter sauce while his wife went public, casting resentful glances from one corner of the room to another. ‘Really!’ she objected sharply.
‘ …the slightest hesitancy would have aroused suspicion, I suppose, at such a time,’ Stoker mused on, meanwhile running his fish-knife down the spine of the poached creature on his plate, ‘so you risked actual death, was it? … which is to say, supposing we are to believe the rumour …’
‘What are you hinting, man?’ Sir Richard barked. ‘That a tiny lapse escaped me?’
Lady Burton clashed her wineglasses together with a blundering hand now the challenge exposed them more humiliatingly than ever to the curiosity of even the most phlegmatic diner. She was in her husband’s interest, naturally, and it fully came up in her determination not to countenance further talk of his adventures. Nonetheless she suffered a spasm of resentment at her sensation of being empty of interest on her own account. The moral, as she well knew, of course, being that the more one gave oneself the less of one was left. So be it. But Abraham Stoker, despite the loophole her contrived clumsiness offered him, his expression betraying in roughly equal measure both the enthusiasm of the hunter and the fear of the hunted, kept the subject alive.
‘ …a momentary,’ he prompted, ‘failure.’
‘Failure?’ the great man thundered, his black brows drawn together and his black moustache bristling. ‘Or are you perhaps suggesting loss of nerve?’ He slashed at his fish, splitting its frail white flesh and propelling a glazed wafer of lemon across the tablecloth. ‘Could you concede loss of nerve?’
‘Or loss of nerve, for sure,’ Stoker agreed affably. ‘As you yourself just said … a lapse, as such. Granted great courage, a lapse brief as the flicker of an eye.’
The Beefsteak Room, redolent already of cigar smoke, paused in the tremendous interest of someone’s having, of his having, at last fired a direct shot. Yet nowhere could have so asserted its British opposition to the luxury of foreignness, the indulgence of harbouring the least sympathy for—let alone respect paid to—Islam, for example. It fully came up for the assembled company then that the longueurs of dinner were to be enlivened by the relief of someone pulling down the roof on their heads.
Sir Richard Burton, not a man to waste energy in sentimental regard for his neighbours, least of all where their polite affectations were concerned, bellowed, ‘What of it? Let me repeat the story, just in case there is anyone, anyone within earshot, who has not yet heard! I did travel in disguise to Mecca with a caravan of the faithful. And there came a point when I realized one young man had taken particular notice of me. In that instant of silence I knew he had seen through my disguise. And when he then stole away into the shadows, naturally I went after him, though in such a way as not to awaken the suspicion of the others.’
‘You stuck a knife into his heart,’ the incorrigible Lady Burton shrieked.
It had made him, this ancient peril, what he became as a diplomat, and the remembrance was not easy; it had taken its toll for, ill-advised though he might be thought, he was not cruel. Well, anyone there to witness, while hesitating over their own meal, could judge the pride of his confidence. And although, in what he next said, the great man’s tone baffled interpretation, it resounded penetratingly enough despite being quietly spoken.
‘As one hears you have literary pretensions,’ he remarked with the calm of pantherish energy, addressing the air above Abraham Stoker’s head, ‘I wonder do you share my enthusiasm for The Portrait of a Lady
?’
The surprise was less that he so abruptly steered conversation in this harmless direction than that he had left the attempt so late: this high, distinguished, polished, unrepentant reprobate who viewed history itself from a personal eminence was now fully in control of his voice. But his host was too far gone in envy.
‘’Tis said to be a fact, too,’ Stoker persisted, even while drawing back as if he might be next to find a knife in his ribs, ‘on the occasion when you yourself recounted this remarkable story, that several dinner guests stood up. They left the restaurant in protest, did they not?’
