by Unknown
Then she starts screaming.
The tapestry (‘French, late Louis XV pastoral, by Aubusson’) depicted a gathering of stylishly dressed aristocrats, sitting on the grass in the shade of some broad-leaved trees. Approaching the group were two servants, an elderly man and a young woman, bringing meat, bread, wine and fruit.
A dog lay asleep in the sunshine. In the distance (‘Some fading evident, texture of weave slightly hardened’) was a flower-filled meadow. The border was intricate (‘Formal frame pattern: escutcheons, roses and oak leaves’) and the colours (‘Reds, blues and greens on a neutral ground’) soft and pleasing.
On a cold spring morning in London, Anthony Verey stood in his shop, Anthony Verey Antiques, warming his hands on a mug of coffee, staring up at this tapestry. It had been in his possession for some time. Four years? Five? He’d bid for it at a private sale in Suffolk. He’d wanted it badly enough to pay more than a thousand pounds over the reserve price of £6,000 and when it was delivered to the shop he’d hung it on a wall at the very back, opposite the desk where nowadays he sat all the time, pretending to do work of some kind, but in fact existing in a shallow state of reverie, keeping watch over his marvellous possessions – his beloveds, as he called them – and sometimes peering beyond them to observe the passers-by on the Pimlico Road.
Once the tapestry was in place, Anthony found that he was dismayed by the idea of selling it. The sale-price he put on it – £14,000 – was intended to discourage buyers, but in fact this price only existed in Anthony’s mind and wasn’t written down anywhere. Sometimes, when people asked him about the tapestry, he told them it wasn’t his, he was just looking after it. Sometimes, he announced that the sale-price was ‘in the region of £19,000’ and waited for dealers to wince. Sometimes, he just said baldly that the tapestry wasn’t for sale. It was his: his own Louis XV Aubusson. He knew in his heart that he’d never part with it.
Anthony was a sixty-four-year-old man of medium height, with abundant grey crinkly hair. Today, he was wearing a red cashmere polo-neck sweater under a jacket of soft brown tweed. It was never very warm in the shop because the beloveds had a tendency to crack, bulge, fade or split in temperatures above 60° Fahrenheit. But Anthony himself was thin and he feared the cold. By his desk, he kept a heavy old oil-filled heater, which creaked companionably on winter afternoons. He drank a lot of very hot coffee, occasionally spiked with cognac. He wore thermal socks. Even scarves, sometimes, and woollen gloves.
He knew that this inconvenient palaver for the beloveds was eccentric, but he didn’t care. Anthony Verey had no wife, mistress, lover, child, dog or cat. Across his life, at one time or another, in various pairings and combinations, he’d possessed all these things – all except the child. But now he was alone. He was a man who had grown to love furnishings and nothing else.
Anthony sipped his coffee. His gaze remained on the tapestry, in which the aristocrats sat on the right with the trees behind them and the servants approached from the left. The dog’s slumber and the happy expectation apparent on the faces of the people suggested a moment of undisturbed, hedonistic contentment. Lunch was arriving. The sun blazed down.
But there was something else. At the very edge of the scene, to the extreme right of it, almost hidden among foliage, was a sinister face, the face of an old woman. On her head was a black cap. She was directing towards the people a look of exceptional malevolence. But nobody paid her any attention. It was as though they hadn’t seen her.
For long periods of time, Anthony found himself looking at this old woman’s face. Had she been part of the original design? She seemed insubstantial: a disembodied face, a gnarled hand on her chin, the rest of her hidden by the trees. Had the tapestry weavers (‘Probably from the atelier of Pierre Dumonteil, 1732–1787’) alleviated the monotony of their work by adding this small but telling detail of their own devising?
Anthony drank the dregs of the coffee and was about to walk over to his desk, to make a half-hearted beginning on his weekly accounts, when something else caught his eye. It was a loose thread in the tapestry.
A nearby halogen lamp illuminated it. This black thread hung down over the old woman’s brow, as though it might have been a lock of the crone’s hair. Anthony put down his mug. He reached up and took the minute silk filament between thumb and forefinger.
The filament was less than a centimetre long. The feel of it was exceptionally soft, and Anthony kept his hand there, rubbing the little thread for a short space of time which could have been a minute, or could have been three minutes, or four, or even seven, but which was in any case long enough for him to come to full consciousness of the shocking and incontrovertible fact about his life that it had suddenly revealed to him: when he died, not one shard or splinter from any one of his beloveds would he be able to take with him. Even if some afterlife turned out to exist, which he doubted, he wouldn’t have with him anything to console him, not even this black silk thread, less than one centimetre long.
The door buzzer sounded and woke Anthony from a trance which, in all the days and weeks to come, he would see as being of paramount importance. A man in a pinstripe suit and wearing a pink tie came into the shop. He looked around him. Not a dealer, Anthony concluded swiftly, not even an amateur collector, just one of the Ignorant Rich, looking first at this thing and then at that, not knowing what he’s seeing . . .
Anthony let the ignoramus move towards the most expensive piece in the shop, a marble-topped giltwood console table (‘The top assorted specimen marbles within verde antico moulded borders, first quarter 19th century, Italian. The gilt frames and supporting standing Atlas figures, 3rd quarter 18th century. Also Italian.’), then wandered slowly towards him.
‘Need any help, sir?’
‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘I probably do. Looking for a wedding present for my sister. They’re buying a house in Fulham. I’d like to give them something . . . I don’t know . . . for the hall, I was thinking. Something everybody will . . . erm . . . notice.’
‘Right,’ said Anthony. ‘For the hall. Well . . .’
He saw the man’s eyes bulging in startled appreciation of the gilded Atlas figures, so he moved straight to the console table and caressed its marble top. ‘This is a beauty,’ Anthony said in a voice which still had about it an unfashionable English drawl he could no longer be bothered to suppress. ‘An absolute dreamboat. But it needs space to show itself off. How big is your sister’s hall?’
‘Haven’t a clue,’ said the man. ‘Haven’t seen it. But I really like the gold cherubs or whatever they are. Quite a wow-factor there! What’s the . . . erm . . . price?’
Anthony put on his glasses and bent down, searching for a minute label taped to the marble plinth on which the Atlas figures stood. He straightened up and said without smiling: ‘Twenty-eight thousand.’
‘OK,’ said the man, fingering his pink silk tie with a meaty hand. ‘Let me have a wander, then. I guess I was hoping to find a bargain.’
‘A bargain?’ said Anthony. ‘Well don’t forget this is Pimlico.’
Pimlico.
No, not Pimlico itself. Still Chelsea. The westerly end of the Pimlico Road, London SW3, Anthony’s home, his living, his life for the last forty years, the place where his knowledge, shrewdness and charm had once made him rich. Not only rich. Here, he’d become a star of the antiques world. Dealers said his name with awe: Anthony Verey; the Anthony Verey. There had been no important auction, no private sale, no gallery preview to which he was not invited. He knew everyone: their place in the dealer or owner hierarchy, their weak spots, their failures, their maddening triumphs. He was like a spoilt prince in a small but opulent realm, courting invidia.
At the height of his celebrity, he’d been able to lull himself to sleep by counting – one by delectable one – the people who envied him.
And now, on this cold spring morning, he’d suddenly seen . . . well, what had he seen? He’d seen how alone everything was. Not just the man who’d once been a princ
e, once been the Anthony Verey. But all the beloveds, too, all these wonders, made with such care, with such dedication . . . these things which had endured and survived for so long . . . even these were tragic in their separateness and solitude. All right, he knew this was a sentimental thought. Furniture couldn’t feel. But you could feel for it. You could worry about that day when you had to leave it behind, to the mercy of other people’s neglect and ignorance. Particularly now, in these times, when there was a universal letting-go of objects like these, seen as belonging to an old, irrelevant world. What awaited them? What awaited?
Anthony was seated at his desk now, on a hard Windsor chair, but with his still-narrow arse carefully placed on a green silk cushion. This cushion, bought at Peter Jones, was moulded so perfectly to the shape of his bottom that he seldom dared to plump it up or shake the dust from it. Nobody else came into the shop. Outside, the day was lightless.
Anthony took down his accounts ledger, put on his glasses and began staring at columns of figures. The ledger was old and thick and worn and was one of seven that contained all he had of a written history: every purchase, every sale, every tax payment, every expense. Ledgers 2 to 5 held all the dazzling figures. In Ledger 6, prices began to fall away and the volume of sales to diminish in a horrible descending curve. And now, in Ledger 7 . . . well, all he could do, frankly, was to avoid looking at bottom lines.
He turned to the Sale Entries for the month of March: an undistinguished portrait (‘English School, early 18th century. Sir Comus Delapole, QC, and Lady Delapole. Pastel with touches of watercolour’), a majolica jar (‘Ovoid, Italian 17th century, decorated with large scrolling foliage clusters’), a George III silver teapot (‘The circular body engraved with a band of anthemions and wrigglework’), and – the only thing of any real value – a Regency mahogany sofa table he hadn’t particularly wanted to part with. These things had earned him slightly less than £4,000; barely enough to pay the month’s share of the repairing lease on the shop.
Pitiful.
Anthony now vaguely wished that he’d tried harder to sell the peachy Italian console table to the man with the pink tie, who, in the end, had bought nothing and had been seen making straight for David Linley’s shop on the opposite side of the road. He knew that not only the price of the table, but also his unconcealed disdain for this person, had driven him away, as it drove many customers away. But that couldn’t be helped. The fact was that Anthony enjoyed being disdainful. Disdain – born out of specialist knowledge, or what he thought of as secret knowledge – was a habit perfected over forty years, and was now one of the few pleasures left to him.
Anthony put his head in his hands. He clung to tufts of his hair. At least he still had that: he had hair. He might be sixty-four but his hair was fantastic. And of course what he liked most about it was the envy it provoked among his male friends – the few that he had – with all that pink head-shame they had to endure day in, day out. And he found himself admitting, as he could have admitted long ago, that the envy of others – the blessed invidia to which mankind is so ruinously prone – had really and honestly been the thing that had kept him alive. This was an outrageous realisation, but a true one. Lovers of both sexes and even one brief wife, Caroline, had come and gone, but the admiration and envy of others had stayed with him, moved with him through his work and his rest, fed and nourished him, allowing him to feel that his life had meaning and purpose. And now that, too, was gone.
Pity had replaced it. Everybody knew he was struggling, that he might even go under. They certainly discussed it round their dinner tables: ‘Nobody wants brown furniture any more. Interiors look completely different now. Anthony Verey must be in grave trouble . . .’ And of course there were many who wanted him to fail. Hundreds. If the shop were to close, how triumphant certain people would be . . .
Bitter thoughts. Anthony knew that, somehow, he had to resist, had to labour on. But who or what would help him? Where could meaning any longer be found? It seemed to him that outside the confines of his shop, where the beloveds clustered round him, keeping him safe, now lay a heartless wasteland.
His telephone rang.
‘Anthony,’ said a brusque but kindly and familiar voice, ‘it’s V.’
An immediate feeling of relief and gratitude rushed like an adrenalin shot into Anthony’s blood. His sister, Veronica, was the only person alive for whom Anthony Verey felt anything like true affection.
In that same cool springtime, Audrun Lunel, a woman who had never moved from her village of La Callune in the Cévennes in sixty-four years, walked alone through a forest of oaks and chestnuts.
This forest, a sighing and beautiful thing, belonged to her absolutely by the instruction of her dead father’s will (‘To my daughter, LUNEL Audrun Bernadette, I bequeath in its entirety that parcel of forested land designated Salvis 547 . . .’) and Audrun often came here alone, to feel under her rubber boots the contours of the earth with its carpeting of leaves, acorns and chestnut husks, to touch the trees, to look up at the sky through their branches, to remind herself that this place was hers ‘in its entirety’. She had memories of this wood which seemed to go back beyond time, or to be above time, or above what people called ‘time’ with its straightness, its years in a line, its necessities. These memories, in Audrun’s consciousness, always had been.
She knew she was often confused. People told her this. Friends, doctors, even the priest, they all said it: ‘You are sometimes confused, Audrun.’ And they were right. There were moments when consciousness or existence or whatever it was that you had to call being alive, there were moments when it . . . faltered. Sometimes, she fell down – like her mother, Bernadette used to do, fall in a faint when the wind blew from the north. At other times, she went on seeing and hearing the things that were there, but it was as if they were seen and heard through glass, at some oddly terrifying remove, and then, a moment later, she wouldn’t know what it was, exactly, that she’d just seen or heard. There would be the feeling of an absence.
Episodes, the doctor called them. Short episodes of the brain. And the doctor – or doctors, for it wasn’t always the same one – gave her pills and she took them. She lay in her bed, swallowing pills. She put them on her tongue, like a Communion wafer. She tried to imagine herself transfigured by them. She lay in the Cévenol night, listening to the scoop-owl, to the breathing of the land, trying to envisage the chemical river in her blood. She saw this river as a marbled swirl of purple, crimson and white; the colours drifted in skeins, expanded into almost-recognisable shapes, like clouds. Sometimes, she wondered whether these envisagings were inappropriate. She’d also been told that her mind was liable to fabricate ‘inappropriate ideas’. It could imagine terrible things. It could imagine torture, for instance. It could discover, inside the old abandoned wells of La Callune, the bodies of her enemies hanging upside down, their ankles tied with wire. This wire bit into their flesh. Blood seeped from their eyes. The water in the wells kept rising . . .
‘Enemies, Audrun? You haven’t got any enemies,’ said the people of La Callune.
But she had. Her closest friend, Marianne Viala, knew who they were. The fact that one of these enemies was dead and buried in the churchyard didn’t remove from his hated form the mantle of enemy. It often seemed to Audrun Lunel that the dead, becoming formless, also became agile and could seep not only into your dreams, but into the very air you were breathing. You could taste and smell them. Sometimes you could feel their disgusting heat.
Audrun walked on. Her eyes were keen and never dimmed, except when an episode was nearing and objects and faces appeared to stretch and shift. Today, she could capture the signs of spring, clear and sharp and filled with light: pale leaves on the chestnuts, dog’s-tooth violets at their feet, catkins on a hazel bush. Her hearing, too, was exact. She could recognise the song of the willow-warbler, be troubled by the squeak of her rubber boots. And now, at the centre of the wood, she stopped and looked down at the earth.
About
the earth she knew she was not wrong. About the earth of her beloved Cévennes she never conjured inappropriate thoughts. There was a pattern to how things became and she – Audrun Lunel, child of the village of La Callune – understood it perfectly. Fire or flood could come (and often did come) to sweep everything away. But still the rain fell and the wind blew. On the bare mother-rock, tiny particles of matter accrued in cracks and declivities: filaments of dead leaves, wisps of charred broom. And in the air, almost invisible, were specks of dust, grains of sand, and these settled in amongst the detritus, making a bed for the spores of lichen and moss.
In one season, the burned or washed limestone could be green again. Then in the autumn gales, in the drenching rains falling under Mont Aigoual, berries and seeds fell onto the lichen and took root. Box and bracken began to grow there, and in time wild pear, hawthorn, pine and beech. And so it went on: from naked stone to forest, in a single generation. On and on.
Except there could be trespass.
‘People can come and steal from you, Audrun,’ whispered her mother, Bernadette, long ago. ‘Strangers can come. And others who may not be strangers. Anything that has existence can be stolen or destroyed. So you must be vigilant.’
She’d tried never to cease this vigil. Since the age of fifteen, when Bernadette had died, Audrun Lunel had followed her mother’s instruction. Even in sleep, she’d felt the long weariness of the watcher. But it hadn’t been enough to save her.
The sun was warm. This was like a spring day from childhood, when she’d sat on the steps that led to the heavy front door, waiting for the arrival of the bread van.
Hunger.
She could recall its power over her will. She was four or five years old. She took the two loaves from the van into the kitchen, which was cool and silent. But she couldn’t walk away from the bread. She tried to, but she couldn’t. She broke one of the loaves and began stuffing the crusty white bread into her mouth.
