Emmet Buffo put his head round the door and blinked.
“Come in, come in!” he said.
He took Ashlyme’s hand as if he had never seen him before, and, under the impression that he had been sent from some committee to explore the funding of a new telescope, led him up the stairs. He had, he explained, almost given up hope of ever getting money for his experiments. He did not blame the High City for this. “Every six months I go to the patents office and sit for an hour, perhaps two, on the benches with all the others. I understand the needs of the bureaucracy. I understand its inertia. What can I do but maintain a philosophical attitude?”
Up the stairs went Ashlyme behind him, listening to this monologue float down, unable to find any opportunity to speak and in any case hardly knowing what to say. There were pockets of dust in the corners of the landings.
“Still,” said Buffo. “They’ve sent you. That’s something!”
He laughed.
He lived in a kind of penthouse, much of which he had built himself. It was cold there even in summer. In one room he cooked his food and slept; it was tidy, but a stale smell hung in the air about the low iron bed and the homemade washstand. He ground his lenses in another smaller room. Little pieces of coloured glass like the petals of anemones littered a table, some set in complex frames made of whitish metal. The astronomical charts had peeled that morning from the wall and lay in folds at its foot. (Mouldy patterns in the plaster suggested that another universe had been hidden behind them.) “It’s the damp,” apologised Buffo. He showed Ashlyme around like a tourist in the Margarethestrasse. “This is my ‘exterior brain,’ ” he said. “I call it that. I can refer to it at any time. It’s more than just a library.” He indicated an ordinary set of shelves on which were arranged reference books and instruments, models of telescopes and bits of paper with technical drawings on them.
The adjoining room, where he spent most of his time, was a flimsy structure like a greenhouse, with a complicated system of ratchets and rods that enabled him to lift its roof and poke out his telescopes. It was composed of odd panes of glass, some coloured, some milky; they were cracked, and of different sizes.
“This is the observatory itself. From here I can see twenty miles in any direction.”
Ashlyme looked out. A quarter of the sky was obscured by the bulk of Alves, with the cracked, threatening copper dome of the old palace askew on it like a crown. From the other side he could look down across the Pleasure Canal at the famous graves on Allman’s Heath. “It was built to my own design, ten years ago,” said Buffo. It was full of contraptions. As Ashlyme moved from one to the other, pretending not to have seen them before, Buffo sat on a stool. But he couldn’t sit still. He hopped to his feet to explain, “These are the plans for the new device,” and sat down again. He was like an exhibit himself in the odd light.
One of the contraptions was a maze of copper tubing into which Buffo had let two or three eyepieces, apparently at random. Ashlyme bent to look through one of them. All he saw was a sad reticulated greyness, and, suspended indistinctly against it in the distance, something like a chrysalis or cocoon, spinning at the end of its thread. Buffo smiled shyly. “Success is slow to come with that one,” he admitted. “You’ll agree it has vast potential, though?” He went on to explain his experimental method, but soon saw that Ashlyme didn’t understand. He left the observatory for a moment and came back with a tray. “Would you like some wine? Some of these pilchards?” Thankfully, Ashlyme sat down and took some. They ate in silence. When he had finished, Ashlyme rubbed his hand over his face.
“Buffo,” he said. “You know it’s me, not some clerk from the patents office. It’s Ashlyme. I’ve seen all this a hundred times before.”
“Pardon?” Buffo stared at him, his expression changing slowly. “I suppose you have,” he said thoughtfully. “I suppose you have.” He sighed. “I expect I knew all along really. I’m sorry, old chap.”
Ashlyme explained how he had become entangled with the Grand Cairo.
“Now this dwarf wants to come with us to the Rue Serpolet,” he told Buffo. “He won’t take no for an answer. What are we going to do?”
Buffo looked bleakly round the observatory.
“You wake from one nightmare into the next,” he said in a quiet voice. He inspected the palm of his hand as if it was his whole life. “I’m sorry, this fish is awful. Leave it if you like.” Suddenly he laughed and pushed his plate on the floor with a clatter. “We must lay new plans then!” he exclaimed. He touched Ashlyme’s arm. “Come on, Ashlyme, it cheers me up just to see you!”
He had an idea already, he continued. “Let him push the handcart if he is so keen to come! We need someone to do that, after all; and it’s our plan, not his.”
Ashlyme wiped the condensation off a pane of glass and looked out. The Artists’ Quarter was barely three hundred yards away across the Pleasure Canal and Allman’s Heath. He stared at the dark loop of water, the jumble of roofs to the west, the leaning gravestones that filled the heath between. (Had Audsley King set her easel up among them to paint “On the bridge at New Man’s Staithe,” anemones and sol d’or burning at her feet? Now the graveyard was full of briars and plaster dust blown in from the senseless renovations on Endingall Street and de Monfreid Square.) The canal was quite shallow. You could see the bottom on a sunny day. They had intended to wade it after the rescue, and bring Audsley King directly to Alves. His long experience of conspiracies had enabled the dwarf to guess this immediately.
“I don’t think he would be content with that, Buffo. Even if we could persuade him, he is untrustworthy. He is subject to moods, fits of enthusiasm, distempers, sudden hatreds. He is in love with plots. Even his masters, the Barley brothers, he believes, are plotting against him.”
“Never mind,” said Buffo. “We’ll think of something.”
He went out for a minute and came back with what looked like a bundle of rags, wrapped around something more solid.
“Don’t look for a moment,” he said.
Ashlyme was forced to smile. He closed his eyes; ran his tongue round the inside of his mouth to dislodge a piece of pilchard. When he opened his eyes again he saw Buffo standing there wearing a kind of varnished rubber mask. It covered his head completely, and resembled the stripped and polished skull of a horse, two pomegranates set in the empty sockets to simulate eyes. It was ludicrous. Buffo had taken off his clothes and wound strips of green swaddling round his body. His arms were like sticks, his rib cage huge. Two great branched feathery horns came up out of the forehead of the mask. He did not look human.
“They’re rather well done, aren’t they?” he said, his voice muffled by the rubber which was forced down over his nose. “Don’t you want to look at yours?” He had another mask in his outstretched hand.
Ashlyme backed away. “No,” he said. “I don’t want to see it. Why must we dress like that?”
“I thought the old man had done rather well. We will look just like beggars. No one will recognise us!” He pounced on Ashlyme and took him by the shoulders. He whirled him round and round in a clumsy dance. “What an idea!” he crowed. “What a success!”
Ashlyme was helpless. The skull of the horse was thrust into his face. It was hard to believe that Buffo’s familiar features were somewhere beneath it. He was as frightened by the strength of the astronomer’s thin arms as he was by the sound of breath sobbing in and out of the mask. Then he began to laugh despite himself.
“Well done, Buffo!”
Buffo, encouraged, sang a lively but mawkish popular song. They finished the bottle of wine and even the pilchards. The sun set. Crowing and singing, they pranced about the observatory, bumping into things and falling down, until they were exhausted.
Later, with the proper fall of night, the observatory became cold and uninhabitable; but the two men sat on, talking at first, then contemplating their plan in a companionable silence. They discussed the future. Buffo would move out of Alves and into the High C
ity, where he believed his work would be better appreciated; Ashlyme would share his studio with Audsley King and they would do great work together. The flimsy structure of the greenhouse creaked around them as the wind rose. Damp air blew through the cracked panes, giving Ashlyme the impression of motion, of racing travel through some ramshackle but benign dimension. Where would they end up? He smiled over at Buffo. The astronomer’s head had sunk on to his chest; he had fallen asleep with his mouth open and begun to snore. Turned down, the lamps emitted a queer crepuscular light. Ashlyme got his cloak and folded it about him. It was too late to go home. Besides, he felt somehow responsible for the astronomer, who looked even more honest asleep than he did awake. He wandered about for a while, squinting into the eyepieces of the telescopes. Then he sat down and dozed. Once or twice he woke up suddenly, thinking about the pile of clothes and masks on the floor.
For a week he felt debauched and bilious, uninclined to commit himself. Was the dwarf still having him watched? Was Emmet Buffo a broken reed? The plague, he wrote in his diary, permeates all our decisions, like a fog. He put the rescue attempt off again and again, and for the most part stayed in his studio, watching morosely as the unseasonable rain swept across the Low City and lashed the fronts of the houses at Mynned. This summer is a travesty, he wrote, as if the trivial might allow him to forget his situation. And, on finding water among his belongings in the attic, I am appalled, but it is my own fault. I have not repaired the roof. Neither had he repaired his opinion of the High City art cliques. Is anything worthwhile being done? In short, no: up here it is all dinner arrangements and affaires. Rack has had the set designs for The Dreaming Boys for two months now, yet there have been no auditions, no readings. He wishes (he says) “to consult the artist”; but he never goes to the Low City.
He could not work on the portrait of Audsley King. Instead he began framing the pictures she had given him. He discovered with delight the early landscape “A fire this Wednesday at Lowth,” and what appeared to be an incomplete gouache of the notorious “Self-portrait half clothed,” in which the artist is seen peering slyly into a mirror, her long hands touching her own private parts. He hung the paintings in different places to find the best light and stood in front of them for long periods, thrilled by the stacked planes of the landscapes, the disquieting eros of her inner world.
At last an oblique sunshine broke through the clouds above the city and filled it with a shifting, fitful brightness. There was a rush to the banks of the Pleasure Canal. The High City emptied itself onto Lime Walk and the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves, and there, in audacious proximity to the plague zone, took the sun.
Little iron tables were set up and the women drank tea out of porcelain “lucid as a baby’s ear”; while those poets who had escaped exile in the Californium and the Luitpold Cafe recited in musical voices. Everyone had a theory about the plague. Everyone had it from a reliable source. Most agreed it would never reach the High City. Imagine the scene! The women had on their muslin dresses. The men wore swords and meal-coloured cloaks copied carefully from those fashionable among the Low City mohocks two or three centuries before. A wet silvery light fell delicately on the white bridges, limning the afternoon curve of the canal and perfectly disguising its shabbiness. Everyone enjoyed themselves thoroughly; while down below, among the ragwort on the towpath, writhed the thousand-and-one black and yellow caterpillars of the cinnabar moth, some fat and industrious, rearing up their blunt, ugly heads, others thin and scruffy and torpid. The Barley brothers ate them and were sick.
Ashlyme, who had been out buying mastic, wandered onto the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves and could not find his way off again. The crowds confused him. He ran into Paulinus Rack, who was sitting at a table with Livio Fognet, the lithographer, and their patron the Marchioness “L.” A shy young novelist stood behind the Marchioness’s chair, admiring the famous curve of her upper arm. They were all delighted to see Ashlyme. What a stranger he was!
“Has the plague lifted, then?” he said, staring puzzledly about him. It was the only reason he could think of for a celebration.
They were amused. Had he never heard of sunshine? He accepted a cup of tea the Marchioness had poured especially for him, but declined to watch the antics of the Barley brothers down on the canal bank. He could not think of them, he explained, as a sideshow.
“Aren’t you being a little naive, old chap?” said Livio Fognet. He winked at the Marchioness’s novelist.
“After all,” chided the Marchioness, “we must think of them as something!” She laughed shrilly and then seemed to lose her confidence. “Mustn’t we?”
A bemused silence followed. After a minute her novelist said, “I don’t think Rack himself could have put it better.” He blushed. He was saved by a general movement toward the railings. A murmur of laughter went up and down the terrace. “Oh, do look, Paulinus!” cried the Marchioness. “One of them has fallen in, right up to the knees!”
Rack gave her a mechanical glance and a twist of his fat lips. He shrugged. “My dear Marchioness,” he said, and moved his chair closer to Ashlyme’s. He could create a small eddy of intimacy in any crowd. We, he was able to suggest, with a touch of one plump hand, have nothing in common with these people. Why are we here at all? Only because they need us. It was a flattering device, and he owed to it much of his social and financial success. “Fognet’s a buffoon, I’m afraid,” he murmured, leaning forward a little. “And the Marchioness a parasite. I wish we could have met under better circumstances.”
“But I love the Marchioness,” said Ashlyme loudly. “Don’t you?”
Rack looked at him uncertainly. “You surprise me.” He laughed. He raised his voice. “By the way,” he said, “how is Audsley King?”
“Oh, yes,” said the Marchioness plaintively. “We are all appalled by her situation.”
The Barley brothers, egged on by the laughter from above, linked arms and jumped into the canal together, showering the tables along the terrace with bright drops of spray. They had found a spot where the water was deeper. It surged and bubbled; then their great red faces appeared, puffing and blowing, above its greenish surface. “Gor!” they said. “It i’n’ ’alf cold!” They coughed and spat, they shook their heads about and stuck their fingers in their ears to get the water out. The little screams of the women encouraged them to thrash about (it could hardly be called swimming); to blow bubbles; and to push one another under. Presently they dragged themselves out, water gushing out of their trouser legs and running down the towpath. They grinned stupidly upward, too exhausted now to go back in for their shoes.
Ashlyme was enraged by this display.
“Audsley King is coughing her left lung up, Marchioness,” he said bitterly. “She is dying, if you want to know. What will you do about that?” He laughed. “I do not see you abroad much in the plague zone!”
The Marchioness blinked into her teacup. It seemed for a moment she would not answer. Finally she said: “You judge people by unrealistic standards, Master Ashlyme. That is why your portraits are so cruel.” She looked thoughtfully at the tea leaves, then got to her feet and took the arm of her novelist. “Though I daresay we are as stupid as you make us appear.” She adjusted her dove-grey gloves. “I hope you’ll tell Audsley King that we are still her friends,” she said. And she went away between the surrounding tables, exchanging a word here and there with people that she knew. Once or twice the young novelist looked angrily back at Ashlyme, but she touched his shoulder in a placatory way and soon they were lost to view.
Paulinus Rack bit his lip. “Damn!” he said. “I shall have to pay for that later.” He stared across the canal. “You’ll find you’ve carried this attitude too far one day, Ashlyme.”
“What are you going to do when the plague reaches the High City, Rack?” asked Ashlyme with some contempt.
Rack ignored him. “Your work may be less fashionable in future. If I were you I would be prepared for that. Never insult the paying customers.” He made
a dismissive gesture. “You cannot save Audsley King anyway,” he said.
Ashlyme was furious. He grabbed at Rack’s arm. Rack looked frightened and pulled it away. Ashlyme caught him by the fingers instead. He twisted them. “What do you know?” he jeered. “I’ll have her out of there within the week.” Rack only curled his lip. He made no attempt to free his fingers, so Ashlyme, horrified to have committed himself to the rescue attempt in public, twisted them harder. “What do you say to that?” He wanted to see Rack wince, or hear him apologise, but nothing like that happened. They sat there for some time, looking at one another defiantly. Rack must have been in considerable pain. Livio Fognet, who did not seem to understand the situation, winked and grinned impartially at them. It came on to rain. The High City opened its umbrella and took itself off to Mynned, while the Barley brothers put their arms over their heads to protect themselves from the rain and, groaning, watched their shoes float away towards Alves. Ashlyme let Rack’s fingers go. “Within the week,” he repeated.
“I’ll just go and have a word with Angina Desformes,” said Livio Fognet.
“There is a certain time of the afternoon,” said Audsley King, “when everything seems repellent to me.”
The city was unseasonably dank again, the air chilly and lifeless. Tarot cards were scattered across the floor of the studio as if someone had flung them there in a fit of rage. Audsley King lay in a nest of brocade pillows on the faded sofa, her thin body propped up on one elbow. On the easel in front of her she had a grotesque little charcoal sketch, in which a conductor, beating time with extravagant sweeps of his baton, cut off the heads of the poppies which made up his orchestra. It was full of overt violence, quite unlike her usual work. It was unfinished, and she regarded it with flushed features and angry, frustrated gestures. In her preoccupation she had let the studio fire burn down, but she did not seem to feel the cold. This wasn’t a good sign.
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