Diversifications

by James Lovegrove

  Dufrénoy survived largely by virtue of the fact that he was inured to deprivation and suffering, indeed this had been a characteristic of his life almost since birth, and even in old age he was hardy and phlegmatic, a veteran of countless campaigns against vicissitude. Jerome had taken off to France with his family, neglecting to invite his father to join them in exile, but Dufrénoy did not hold this against him. All too clearly, all too painfully, he understood his son’s choice, and he respected it.

  There was no let-up during those years of Britain’s tribulation, until finally, like a ghost from forgotten times, the rain came. The sound of its pattering was so unfamiliar that for a while people did not comprehend what this noise portended, this gentle hissing from the sky, the soft wet plashing of droplet after droplet upon baked stone surfaces and dust-velveted roads. Nor did they truly fathom why the sunlight had faded. They had forgotten what clouds were. They thought this dimming of the day an unnaturally premature twilight. Some fancied that it was, at last, The End.

  It was certainly the end of the drought. Down came the rain, and thunder grumbled distantly in low/

  pp. 203-205

  /and I shall be a living poem,” said Dufrénoy to himself, “a testament to all that London is and has been.”

  Who is to say that his insanity was not, in truth, the clearest-eyed sanity conceivable? Certainly, as he clambered up the face of the billboard, Dufrénoy had never experienced such a sense of pure, exhilarating omniscience. The higher he rose, the more apparent the patterns of existence became to him. The city was lines, London a vast page upon which forty million individuals wrote their life-poems, in their hearts, inside their heads, almost without being conscious of it. Bombarded from all sides by noise and demands on their time and their pockets, by advertisements perpetually clamouring for their attention and the relentless pressure to spend and buy and possess, by the panoply of capitalism arrayed in all its chrome and gilt splendour, by messages of want that undermined their self-confidence and made them feel incomplete, still they resisted, fighting a rearguard action in the depths of their souls as they struggled to cling on to that last vital, intact part of themselves that the moneymen and the corrupt bureaucrats and the avaricious plutocrats so badly wished to reach and conquer. You would not know it unless you looked deep and hard into their eyes. Even in the dullest of gazes, the deadest of expressions, you might find it. The Great Heat had tempered people, tested their mettle and forced them to rediscover an inner flame which had almost, almost gone out. In Dufrénoy the flame had continued to burn more or less constantly, although it had many a time guttered and nearly failed, for example back at Père-Lachaise cemetery, beside de Musset’s tomb. But it flared nonetheless, unquenchably, and now he understood that he was not alone; and he was not a poet. He was poetry. Everyone was poetry.

  On he climbed, using the cigarette-smoking bas-relief figures on the billboard as his rockface, ascending by means of handholds and toeholds found in their pitted steel surfaces, the ridges of their fingers, the contours of their faces and hair, till at last he gained the summit and the whole of London seemed spread out at his feet, man’s fantastic creation, an epic of brick and metal and glass.

  He wanted to shout his ecstasy across the rooftops but he was out of breath and dizzy with vertigo. He hung on to the billboard’s top edge while the shadows of whirring airships passed over him and the wind whipped at his clothes. He could let go, he could fall, he could die, and perhaps he would, but not now, not yet, not till this moment of triumphal revelation had passed, and maybe it would not, maybe it would never pass, maybe it would last for ever.

  For London was different now, new life crackled in its electric nervous system, new blood pulsed along its roadway arteries. One could tell. One could smell it. The citizens who had deserted the city were back in their droves, and more besides, foreigners who had ridden in with the returning wave, scenting a wiped-clean slate and fresh opportunities. Of the forty million and more who lived in the capital these days, a quarter at least were immigrants from other lands who brought with them their own mores and traditions. Now there were Turkish markets on the streets of Islington, Mongolian restaurants in the borough of Richmond, Latvian vendors hawking their wares on the paths of Hyde Park, Nigerians and Congolese playing music down at the Wapping docks and the Isle of Dogs, Polynesians setting up cafés on every bridge from Tower Bridge to Teddington, Argentines touting their services as rugby coaches to the children of the well-heeled, artists from Montmartre erecting their easels on the South Bank (coming to be known as the Rive Sud), and London was welcoming and subsuming them all, happy again to be a place where people wanted to be, glad to have a plenum of inhabitants once more.

  Possibly no one saw this—truly saw this—but Dufrénoy. He alone of all Londoners, a one-time immigrant himself but now more of a native than most, understood his home city’s renaissance. This New Jerusalem! And the old man atop the billboard need never write another line of verse again, because all around him/

  [There is no more. This last passage occupies the anteprepenultimate, prepenultimate and penultimate pages of the ruined manuscript. The final page is unreadably singed, with just a single word legible at the foot: “Fin”. It can only be speculated whether Dufrénoy throws himself from the billboard after all or else remains there in perpetual suspense at the novel’s close. The reader of the fragment may choose Dufrénoy’s fate according to his/her own inclination.

  Londres au XXIème siècle is barely even a footnote in the Verne canon. There are Vernian scholars who reckon it is not actually the master’s work at all but rather his son’s, for in Verne’s declining years Michel assisted with the writing of the novels and may well have authored some of them wholly by himself. In the light of this, the section which details the father’s being a disappointment to the son can be seen, perhaps, as a riposte by Michel to Verne’s anguish over the waywardness and lack of achievement of Michel’s early years—Verne junior getting his own back in literary form.

  In which case, one might go so far as to venture that it was out of guilt that Michel set fire to the manuscript, if indeed he was the culprit—guilt brought on by the death of his father in 1905, not long after Londres…was completed. Could Michel have come to regret creating that closing image of an elderly writer who has all but abandoned his craft, hanging on to a vast billboard by his fingertips while a post-apocalyptic vision of a “New Jerusalem” feverishly fills his head?

  Were there more of Londres…in existence, one might be able to form a cogent opinion. As it is, an unmistakable whiff of mortality and remorse permeates the few crisp-edged clusters of pages we have. As with every burned work of art, it is as if the creator has been immolated along with the creation.

  This much, in the end, is all we can assume—that Michel Verne, grief-stricken, consigned the manuscript to the pyre and then had a last-minute change of heart and rescued what he could before the artefact was fully destroyed. He thereafter kept hold of the remnants as though they were relics of his own father.

  Even the loved ones whom we haven’t loved as much as we should, should be remembered as if we loved them completely.]

  AT ONE

  On edge. On a ledge. This is no dream.

  The wind whips at me, rips at me. It wants to tear my hands and feet from their holds. It wants to blow me clear off the chalk cliff to which I cling. It wants to scour the cliff of me, leave its face clean as bare bone.

  I grip hard and start to climb down. Hand by hand, foot by foot, inch by inch, I claw, clutch and clasp my way down. At the base of the cliff lies a beach. A beach of small round rocks, not fine sand. A strand such as those on the Kent coast where I live, but no beach that I know. It leads as far as the eye can see, a straight line both ways. And the sea, whose waves wash it in arcs that seethe, is no sea that I know or have seen, and the cliff that stands guard by the shore is too tall to be true, to be real.

  Down to this strange beach I climb. Down, since to climb up a
cliff so sheer and high, whose top is out of sight, would be to risk more. To get near to the ground is my best course, so that, should I fall, I will not be killed. And I know that falls kill. For that was my skill once.

  Soon I am close to the cliff’s base, but for the last few yards the wind blows with yet more force, as though it knows I am near the end of my climb. It gusts with the rage of a child who can’t have what he wants and rails and flails in his ire.

  But now at last I am out of harm’s way, safe with my feet on the beach, and the wind may shake me but its blows will not break me.

  How am I here? Why am I here?

  All that I know is that this is no dream.

  I turn and scan the sea, whose heave is all pearl and jade gleam. The sea spreads to the edge of the sky, and its bears on its back no boat. No sail cuts its skin. No ship slips by. With the cliff at my rear, all I can see is sea and sky. There is no sun, just a pale disc of light lost in cloud. Flat grey sky. Bare green sea.

  I turn and walk to the east. At least, I think it is to the east, though the sun is so high and shade so scant that I can’t tell for sure.

  Half a mile on, and I think I see a shape, far off. A dot that grows as I walk, till at last I can make out that it is a man. A stooped man in a black cloak and cowl who waits by a skiff made of wood, beached on the shore out of reach of the waves, its oars shipped.

  When I am close, I hail him and he turns.

  The smile in his cowl is all bone and as cold as the moon. You have come, he says. Here you are.

  Step in, he tells me, and points to his skiff. The boat’s boards look frail. There are gaps in its caulk.

  As if I have choice (though I sense I do not, for how else am I to leave this stark spot?) I wait for a while and gaze at the sea with the air of a man who knows wind, wave and tides, who knows how seas are and can tell at a glance how safe it is to set sail, how fair a trip will be. Then, with a nod, I let the cowled man know that I will go with him.

  At this the man grins, and his teeth seem too large for his mouth, and his mouth seems too small for his face, and his face seems too thin for his skull.

  With a grunt and a heave the man shoves his skiff off the beach. Waves lap the bows as he wades out up to his waist in the sea, then climbs on board and sits at the oars. With his back to me, he rows, and his wet cloak drips and sops, and the skiff sways and swoops on the lurch of the waves, and the blades of the oars churn the sea, and for all that the cowled man has said that the skiff will not sink, I pray that there will be no leak and that the hull will hold.

  For hours our small rough barque ploughs its keel through the sea’s green loam. For hours, or at least so it feels, though the sun does not move and the sky does not change, the light does not shade from noon to eve, and the world, it seems, does not spin. I watch the cowled man’s back, his thin arms which poke from the sleeves of his cloak, his thin strong hands as they ply the oars. He rows with long strokes and does not seem to tire. For hours we are at sea, the cliff and the beach long out of sight, and just sky and waves the scene we have to gaze on. Grey sky that does not change and green sea that has no end.

  Then, at last, just as I have lost hope that we will reach our goal, I spy a dark skein that parts sky and sea, a line such as a bad child might sketch with a pen on a print in a book that he or she does not own. The line grows, till I can make out low hills, bare of trees, cracked and cragged and dark brown.

  One more hour and we are there. Our keel scrapes ground, and our skiff grinds to a halt. The cowled man draws in his oars and tells me that I must get out. I do as he says. The sea is warm on my feet and shins. Soaked to the knees, I wade out of the waves. I squelch on sand dark as ash, soft as mud, till I have gone past the range of the tide, and there, on dry land, I turn to thank the man who has brought me here. I find that he has swung his skiff and rowed a good way from the shore. His cowl hoods his face as he bends to the oars, so that all I can see is his smile. All bone and as cold as the moon.

  I watch him till he is a speck on the vast sea, a dot too small to have shape. Then, when he is lost from view, I turn once more and trudge up the dark beach to where the dark hills start.

  This is a place with no life. No birds fly here. No beasts prowl. No plants grow. No roads have been built. No paths have been forged by feet, paws or hooves. It is a land that has not been touched by God’s hand or man’s. The hills roll in waves, their slopes not too steep, not too sheer. Rocks split as I step on them, break to crumbs. The ground cracks to my tread. It’s hard to walk, and I trip and I fall, but forge on, in the hope that, if I keep this up, I will at last come to some place where men dwell; I will at last find some sign of life in this dry, drear, dead zone.

  My wish comes true in the end. When I have walked for miles, more miles than I can count, I come to a steel post stuck fast in the ground. Chained to the post is a blind man dressed in rags. His black hair snarls in the wind like a flock of rooks at war, and his black beard trails to his chest like a bib of burnt twigs. His rags might once have been a robe, such as that of a priest or a monk or a judge. They hang on his starved frame like weeds on a wall. His blank eyes are boiled eggs. They bulge from the cups of their lids.

  In his hand the blind man holds a glass globe, dulled and scuffed by use and time. He strokes it like a pet, till he hears me draw near, at which point he hides the globe in his lap, as if he fears I will steal it.

  Who’s there? he cries.

  A lost soul, I say.

  Aren’t we all, the blind man says, with rue. Do you have a gift for me?

  Not a thing. I came here with just the clothes I stand in.

  Yes. Of course. Each one I ask says the same. It slips my mind each time that there are no gifts for me, not now, not here. Each time my shame is fresh. And how did you come here?

  By boat.

  Yes, but how did you get to the boat?

  By the beach. On foot. I climbed down a cliff.

  And how did you come to be on that cliff?

  That, I tell him, I do not know. I woke up there, it would seem. Though, come to think of it, why I should wake up on the side of a cliff I’m not sure.

  Do you want to know why?

  Why not?

  Then I’ll show you. Look. See.

  With that, the blind man holds up the glass globe for me to look at. At first I can make out just the flaws in the glass, but the more I look, the more I see that the flaws form a shape.

  And then I can scry a scene.

  An old man lies in a bed in a room with a clock on the wall, the kind of clock with a weight that swings to and fro. The clock has stopped, its weight is still; the time it tells is one. One at night, I guess, since the old man is in bed. And a chart on the wall at the head of the bed shows a date. The year has a one and a nine and a six and an eight.

  And I think I must know the old man. His face strikes me as that of a friend I have not seen in a long while, or a film star whose name I can’t think of just now, or a boss I once worked for and liked. How still he looks in his bed. How calm, how like a small child, as he lies there. And how pale his skin is, how like wax it looks. And no rise and fall of his ribs stirs the sheets. And no breath creeps in or out of his mouth, the lips of which are tinged with blue.

  And all at once I know how I know this old man and why I did not place his face at first. For his face, when I used to see it, was flushed with hue. Life warmed its skin, kept its lines loose and put silk in its sags. This stiff, stilled face I see in the globe is not the face I used to see in a glass, in a pane, in a still pool.

  Yet it is my face all the same.

  My sense of shock is great, but in a way I am glad as well. At least it is clear now where I am. This place makes sense at last. I have passed through the veil, to the realm where the rules of life and time hold no sway.

  I died, at peace, in my bed.

  In my sleep.

  On my own.

  At one.

  And what now? I ask the blind man
. What next?

  Now you must learn why you are here, he tells me.

  I’m dead. That’s why I’m here.

  That, says the blind man, is how. But not why. To learn why is your task now.

  Why are you here? I ask, in the hope that what he tells me may give me some clue to my own place in this realm.

  Once, he says, I ruled a land. This was a long, long time back. I was a king, of sorts. But I was filled with greed. I raised tax and used it for no one else but me. I lied to those I ruled and told them that I had to have more, for their good. They gave up as much as they could, since they had faith in me, and I spent all I gained on fine food and wine and crowns and rings and toys and whores and gold and gems of jade and jet. I died rich and fat. My heart burst with the weight of all that I stole from the good folk who had put their trust in me. And that is why I must sit here chained to this steel post and tell the truth—and naught else but the truth—to all who come this way.