Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘All aboard!’

  I Caesarea

  THE WINDS blew high over Jersey, clearing the sky for the stars to glimmer down on the island below. Its gentle beaches and high cliffs were barely distinguishable from the dark water. The moon had sunk from view hours before. Some nights it shone bright enough to read by, but not tonight. The oil lamp which stood on the desk at which he sat threw a soft, yellow light. A book lay open before him and he studied it intently, his face only inches from the characters. His head followed the movement of the lines, turning slightly from left to right and back, moving slowly down the page. Outside, the murmur of the waves just reached his ears as they washed in and slapped against the cliffs of Bouley Bay.

  After some time, the hunched figure brought his head up from his labours and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. His tall, angular body was cramped, legs twisted around the chair, elbows seeking a resting place amongst the clutter of papers on the desk. He shifted position awkwardly. When he brought his hands away from his eyes, the room had dissolved. The patch of dull red he was able to make out would be his bed and the lighter area beyond it the door. The floor he could feel with his feet and the window he identified by the slight gusts and breezes which blew coolly against his face. At this distance, yards rather than inches, the rest was lost to him in a flux of shadows; nothing but ‘air deprived of light’; he recalled the formula. Lucretius, matter of fact and unhelpful. As the objects about him drifted, disappeared and shaded into one another, John Lemprière felt the slight panic in his stomach to which he had become inured, an unwelcome sensation even now. He bent to the page, trying to focus his eyes once again.

  The blurrings of sight had begun when he was fourteen or thereabouts and grown more and more frequent as he had entered his late teens. The world came to seem as it did now. Objects fogged and merged with other objects. Outlines broke and seeped into their surroundings. His myopia dissolved the world in a mist of possibilities and its vague forms made a playground for his speculations. His youthful panic had later become acceptance and, later still, something akin to pleasure. Only the faintest vestige of unease remained and he allowed his speculations, his daydreams and his visions free rein. The island itself could not compete with the routs of demi-gods and heroes, the noisy unions of nymphs and animals, with which the young scholar populated the fields of his imagination. His head had only to leave the pages of Tully, Terence, Pindar or Propertius to see their most delicate or lurid descriptions made flesh in the wavering dusk outside his window. Galatea had made sport with Acis in that land of visions. And Polyphemus had made sport with them both. There the last Punic war had been fought and lost by the Poeni whose Carthage burnt for seventeen days before twenty miles of its walls crashed in to quell the flames. Scipio Africanus was nothing but a trickster, but got the consulship he craved. Delenda est Carthago. So it was. Achilles sulked and raged for Patroclus, Helen awaited the nightly pleasures of Paris’s company. What matter if she were only the most beautiful of mortal women? Paris tasted better than any golden apple. Deiphobus better than both. The ancient kings whose lives flickered between natural and supernatural worlds, the ordinary loves of shepherds touched for an instant by hands that transformed flesh to wood, hamadryads and nereids, what vision was it that saw in the simple flames of an Athenian hearth the gory torture of Prometheus, in the nightingale’s song the rape of Philomel, in every tree a face, every stream a voice? And behind them lay the ukases which commanded not with reason, but with the simple certainty that it was their place to do so; perhaps the gods too were victims of that savage simplicity, he wondered? Victims to that clarity with its steel logic, its sentence without redress. Princes and heroes, nymphs and satyrs stalked the antechambers of the young classicist’s mind, disporting and dismembering, playing and replaying the scenes he chased through the pages of the Ancients.

  ‘He tripped over a bucket. It was plain in view, Charles.’ His mother’s querulous voice brought his head up from the page of Thuycidides and the Greek characters swam as his ears caught snatches of the nightly dialogue.

  ‘What of it? Did he hurt?’

  ‘Must he snap a leg before you’ll see it, Charles? You’re as blind as the boy.’ They spoke in the hush reserved for worry or intimacy. Lemprière’s fingertips brushed the chalky surface of the page before him. Three feet from his face he could not read it, inches and the letters were hard-edged and distinct. His parents were not intimate.

  ‘He’ll be a fine scholar, perhaps the finest of his age. What need for him to step over buckets?’

  ‘It’s the reading’s ruined his eyes. Ruined him.’ This last hissed, answered by Charles Lemprière’s snort of disbelief.

  ‘He’s grown strange to us Charles, you know it.’

  ‘He’s simply fond of his studies, the balance will come in time. I was the same, I remember it well.’

  ‘Oh yes, the Lemprières have ever been the same, that much I know. Nothing changes, does it Charles?’ Her voice was bitter.

  Lemprière caught only muffled words after that, his mother’s soft sobbing. The debate was a familiar one to him. He stayed awake waiting for it, enjoying his central role. He felt intimate with his parents as they unknowingly told him all they felt regarding him. Normally his mother seemed to understand little of what he said, while his father held himself in reserve, harbouring feelings his son could only guess at within a stern outward aspect. This, however, was to be the last of these particular discussions for the next morning it transpired that a resolution had been reached. John Lemprière was to have eye-glasses.

  So it was that a week later two figures could be seen making the four mile trek across the island from Rozel to Saint Helier. Taller, and walking half a pace ahead of his son, Charles Lemprière picked his way through the ruts of the road with a practised ease. An occasional glance at the sky reassured him that though they would be spattered with mud to the knee, they would at least reach their destination dry. His son stumbled frequently and each time he did so Charles would forbear to look back but would stiffen and wince inaudibly to himself. His wife was right of course, but blindness, of the eye or mind, had its benefits. It was possible to see too much. The path was passing through a wood. He ducked an overhanging branch and lifted it for his son. The pair walked on. Passing Five Oaks, they gained the brow of the slope and Charles saw St Helier laid out ahead, beyond it Elizabeth Castle improbably afloat in the harbour. It was only five years since Rullecourt and seven hundred men had got the governor out of bed to sign away the island. And, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he had signed. Elizabeth Castle stood firm then. Poor Moses Corbet, running through the marketplace with musket balls peppering his hat. There were more Martellos than cottages now.

  His son heard Saint Helier long before he saw it. The town clamoured at him, open arms brushed at his jacket and the din of human voices as they transacted, bickered or greeted each other, enfolded him in an anonymous, urban welcome. He caught his father’s arm and was hurried through the crush as its sounds crested and broke over his head. Charles Lemprière, son in tow, carved a passage through the business, gossip and grind of Jersey. The market crowd thinned as they took a sidestreet past The Peirson and walked through streets which seemed unnaturally silent after the hubbub of the marketplace. Another turn and they arrived, breathing heavily, at the workshop of Ichnabod Bonamy, glassmaker and lensgrinder. Charles was reaching for the bell when a voice boomed from within.

  ‘Come in Lemprière!’

  They entered and found themselves face to face with Ichnabod holding a coal shovel in one hand and a large, stuffed owl in the other.

  ‘Welcome, welcome you both. Are you well Charles? The boy I know of already, he of the stiff eyes, hmm? Forgive the owl.’ He put down the shovel. ‘I’ve been dusting.’ He pointed to the walls. There, perched, poised or nailed, were fixed rows upon rows of stuffed owls of varying widths and heights, beaks hooked downwards, eyes (of glass) fixed straight ahead in attitudes of mute disdain at
the indignity of their position. It was rapidly becoming clear to Charles that many of them were not completely cured.

  ‘I have errands to run Mister Bonamy. Will two hours suffice?’

  ‘Splendid, splendid,’ rejoined the other as he polished an eyeball here, wiped a talon there.

  ‘Two hours then, John.’ But his son did not reply as Charles Lemprière hurried to the door in anticipation of the fresher air beyond it. The lensgrinder turned to his subject.

  ‘A legacy from the former occupant,’ explained Ichnabod to the young man.

  John Lemprière was not listening. The glint of owlish eyes impinged dully upon him. Hundreds of them, paired and focused on his dim attempt to return their gaze, his mind adrift. Was this Cecrops’ Hall writ small? They would call softly to each other forming the delicate skein of wisdom’s ligaments as the light faded in the room. The gaping wound, the birth. Ichnabod, a name without precedent … sprang fully armed.

  ‘In here, John Lemprière!’

  He walked slowly past the long counter to the small door at the back of the shop from which the voice had issued and entered. The room was square, its walls formed of the granite which in the shop proper had been concealed behind wooden panelling. The ceiling was disproportionately high and contained a skylight which threw a beam of light down onto a large mahogany chair. At the far end of the room was a large stove, a workbench and several cupboards through which Ichnabod was now searching. The stove burned hotly.

  ‘Sit on the chair.’ He did so, shifting uneasily in the unfamiliar surroundings. Pallas’ antechamber to Hephaestus’ forge thought the sitter. What is he doing? The lensgrinder seemed to find whatever he searched for and advanced on his subject carrying a large tray.

  ‘Hold this.’ And Lemprière’s arms were effectively immobilised as he sat facing the stove and holding the tray of glass disks before him. ‘Now for the frames.’ He loomed towards his subject holding a large wooden contraption.

  Trapped in the chair, Lemprière felt flutters of panic in his stomach and his bladder tightened. He had a strong desire to throw the tray to the floor and fend off the apparatus which now seemed to have extended two large claws towards his face. Ichnabod fitted the bulky test-frames over his head and clicked the fastening shut.

  ‘My own invention,’ he explained proudly. The frames formed a kind of cube encasing the irregular sphere of Lemprière’s head. Singled out from the rest of his body, his skull felt acutely vulnerable in its wooden cage. He stared fixedly ahead suppressing a strong urge to get up and run, wooden cage and all, for the street outside. The lensgrinder took no heed of the young man’s anxiety. Focal length, dynamism, ease of accommodation: these were the subjects which concerned him as he dropped different lenses in front of the defective eyeballs.

  The lens: a talisman for Ichnabod who did not believe in such things. Had not Archimedes used one to fry the Roman force at Syracuse? And did not Ptolemy set one on the tower at Pharos wherein he saw the ships of his enemies, six hundred miles distant? The simple disk, its smooth surface tapering gently to the rim, unchanged in two millennia.

  It had taken him many years to master the basic processes of lens manufacture. But the processes themselves reached back through the centuries. Oh yes, Newton may be the man with his Opticks, but he could never apply his own rules. The simple glass ball, the careful cutting into disks with the emril-stone. A dunce might do that, but not the glueing-on of the handle (Colophonia gave the smoothest join), the heating to the prescribed temperature, the pouring onto the iron dish. And then began the long polishing. His upper arm ached at the memory. First with saldame, later with water of Depart and powder of Tripolis, the glass would begin to shed its coat of irregularities and the perfect lens within the brute hunk of glass would eventually emerge, its properties locked into its dimensions. He remembered the manufacture of each smooth disk as he dropped them into the slot before the boy’s eyes. Some nights he would press one between his palms, until its slick cold yielded to the heat of his hands and he exchanged it for another.

  For Lemprière, the world was not so much composed of lenses as ceaselessly dispersed by them. As fast as his eyes adjusted to the new world heralded by one pair, it was replaced by another trumpeting its claims, only to be banished in its turn. He would signal his approval or disapproval by saying ‘better’ or ‘worse’, as befitted each case. Ichnabod, after perhaps two dozen pairs had been tried, stopped. He looked down at the tray, mumbled and seemed to make some brief calculations.

  ‘John Lemprière,’ he announced in magisterial tones, ‘prepare to see.’

  Reaching down to the tray he picked up one of the few remaining pairs. Lemprière heard them click against each other and then against the frames. The stove glowed a malevolent red. The lenses dropped noisily down. His knuckles whitened around the tray.

  ‘Aagh! Get me out! Get me out!’ The tray crashed to the floor. The lenses grasped the room and hurled it at the speed of light into the captive’s face. He let loose a cry of fear. The lenses sucked his eye-balls through the frames, dashed them into the first elected object. The stove. He was in the flames. They were licking greedily at him. He wrestled with the wooden cage. The fire burned hot in his face, behind the flames two eyes caught his, an horrible, misshapen face, a twisted body, eyes black with ancient cruelties, the legs curling and unfurling at him, like serpents. I see you John Lemprière, hissed from each mouth. Erichthonius. Curling and unfurling, like snakes. Like flames. Just flames. Flames in a stove in a room. A room between Minerva’s shrine and Vulcan’s forge.

  ‘Welcome to the visible world, John Lemprière.’

  On the floor between them lay the scattered lenses. They punctuated the grey flagstones like precious stones, gazing up mutely at the two men. Lemprière shivered and blinked. The stove was but a stove, the room but a room. And Ichnabod … Ichnabod was a man with a limp, a genius for glass and too many owls. Lemprière could see.

  Icy waters surged silently eastward beneath the waves, shooting their jets forward, blunting and falling back to be gathered by the tidal force behind. Waters charged with a blind purpose streamed from the unlit, stony basins of the ocean-floor, stabbing through the placid sea ahead, feeling vague, coastal constrictions to either side before slamming against the stubborn peninsula at Cherbourg, scudding against its coast and slipping away into the channel.

  Down from the slate-grey North Sea, channelled through the Dover Straits, raced the rival westward tides. They gathered force, swerved and fought their way through the eastward waters, gouging whorls in the sea’s surface. Sucking currents were shot sideways from the force of the conflict. The mass of two seas met to slice one through the other and in the midst of their battleground, registering the force of each blow and counterblow against its cliffs, stood a rock of granite. Twelve miles long and six miles wide, it surveyed the sub-surface drama of current and cross-current, tidal ebb and flow, and seemed to stand firm against the treacherous waters. The waters might climb forty feet, the tides hauling up the coast, or rage against the cliffs to the north but the red granite was old and hard. It broke through the turf in outcrops all over the island like scars from some elemental battle.

  Hedgerows parcelled out the land amiably, scarcely disturbing the green vista which now and then would shade into drifts of purple heather or the darker green gloss of the ferns. On the southern hillsides the grass was beginning to brown in patches under the late summer sun. Innumerable tracks and lanes criss-crossed the verdure like cracks in a fine glaze. Where roads met, a few cottages might cluster about the crossroads, sometimes a church, a new villa, or one of the older seigneurial manors. The twelve parishes of the island, from St Brelade’s to St Ouen’s, St Clement’s to his own St Martin’s, traced their invisible boundaries on the island’s face, and these were subdivided further into vingtaines. More ostentatious evidence of the old desire to mark the earth littered the island. The druids had left their menhirs and poquelayes, the Romans their houghes, althou
gh raised fortifications seemed superfluous on the inland sites where they were to be found. Around the coast, Martello towers, observation platforms, castles and forts bespoke more recent fears of invasion from France whose coast, not fifteen miles distant, was just beginning to appear as the sun burnt the morning sea-mist out of the air.

  To Charles’s right was Rozel windmill where, in a few weeks, apples from the new orchards would be brought for pressing. Below him, the hill fell away in côtils, each carefully cut shelf overgrown with couch grass. The slope had not been worked for six or seven seasons now. On the far side of the hilltop a flock of four-horned sheep started at some brief private terror and wheeled en masse before stopping just as suddenly. He turned back to the scene before him. The scent of cider apples was blown in and away by the southerly breeze, each seventh wave was just audible from the bays at Bouley, Rozel and Fliquet. The sound was carried and checked in the air, reaching him in sustained, sibilant whispers. Their dull repetition seemed to carry the ghost of a message that may once have been vital, but now spoke only of attrition and defeat.

  Do not take comfort in our sound. Do not believe you can discover the least purpose in our action, they seemed to say. When your rock is worn flat as the ocean bed, do not imagine it marks our triumph. It marks nothing but the beginning of the same action elsewhere. We go on, we continue, that is all. The sea rippled and chopped around the island, its surface crawled like the skin of an immense beast, flexing and readying its muscles for violence. It brooked no dissent against its ancient murmur: to be is justification enough. And the man on the hill struggled with that maxim. His grandfather clutching at his throat and crying out ‘Rochelle!’ before his tongue thickened and the poison turned it blue. His father who had left shore in an open boat and returned, face down, on the tide. Old anger, tempered hard with grief, had turned to revenge. And now it was alloyed with fear. The fight would continue a little while yet, just time enough to finish it. He would not see those he brought down, he did not even know their names, but the wheel only required a nudge now to bring them blinking into the light. The line of ancestral casualties arrayed itself at his back to urge him forward to the act. The long-kept secret had found them all. And will find me too, he thought. But not yet, not on this fine summer’s morning, not on this island where my life has been spent. He looked down at the stream which raced through the shallow dale. Silvery-black, they had dammed it as boys, but to what purpose he could not remember. There were no fish in it. Beyond it the copse of elms and oaks where, he smiled at the memory, Marianne had led him fearlessly, stripped and lain with him in the hard tufts of grass among the tree roots. To his left was the church where he had married her a fortnight later. And there, on the track between the two was the offspring of that union cutting an eccentric path towards the same church.