Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘We were doing Theseus,’ he hisses. ‘The finger-waggling was the Minotaur, and you were meant to be abandoning Ariadne, not marrying Andromeda. The last bit was your return to Athens in the black-sailed ship….’

  ‘… which the aging Ægeus takes as a sign that I am dead.’ Lemprière’s late confusions are being cleared up.

  ‘… and so commits suicide, yes. Luckily your quoit-throwing bore some resemblance to Theseus waving from his ship, thus deepening the dramatic irony et cetera. In short my friend, they fell for it so keep it under your hat. Oh, and John.’ Lemprière turns back. ‘We’ve won. Well done.’ He smiles and hands his companion-in-arms a bottle. The Pug and Warburton-Burleigh are somewhat peevish but the Pork Club is unanimous, the laurels are theirs. Septimus pulls a cork for himself, mgnk, mgnk, mgnk, in tandem, the liquor most reminds Lemprière of cup ‘R’, with perhaps a dash of ‘J’, mgnk, mgnk, it slips down like syrup.

  At this point, the Crone forces her way into the circle that has formed about the victors. Lemprière focusses unsteadily on her. The bottle in his hand is half-empty and it is dawning on him that drinking it might have been a mistake.

  ‘The prize! The prize!’ cackles the Crone.

  ‘Oink!’ confirms the Pork Club.

  ‘The prize?’ slurs Lemprière.

  ‘The prize,’ endorses Septimus.

  ‘Who’s first at the trough, my little piglets?’ shrieks the Crone at the two of them. The Pork Club mumbles to itself. Septimus resolves the issue.

  ‘John shall go first,’ he announces. ‘In recognition of his inspired amateurism.’

  ‘For his sea-legs,’ shouts someone, for Lemprière is swaying now in time with the walls, which are swaying too.

  ‘Don’t knock his legs,’ bawls the Crone. ‘He’s going to need them!’ Several horribly exaggerated winks and obscene arm movements blow the innuendo’s scant cover.

  ‘Not sure if I’m quite ready, just now. Feeling a mite, you know,’ murmurs Lemprière.

  ‘You’ll be absolutely titanic, John!’ bellows Septimus. ‘Onward Theseus!’

  ‘Are you well, John?’ asks the earl.

  It is a measure of Lemprière’s deterioration that he is convinced by Septimus’s exhortation. Yes, titanic.

  ‘Absholutely. Never better,’ he answers and lurches towards the staircase on the far side of the room. By the time he reaches it, the staircase is lurching towards him. They dance a quadrille of Shandean slowness (the staircase taking three parts) and when it is over he is at the top.

  ‘Bon soir, sweet prince,’ calls Septimus to the inadvertent hero, who attempts a mock-curtsey in return. The din from the mob below sounds like an orchestra tuning up and the light is coming in waves, more and more intense. He isn’t feeling very well at all. A squawking bassoon hovers about waiting to become audible and the air is filled with tiny soap-bubbles that pop at the rate of millions per second, a fizzing mass-suicide that bleaches the air white as the sky when the cloud-cover is perfectly even and it hurts to look at any part of it. He is feeling distinctly odd.

  Downstairs, his victory is being celebrated with toasts. Someone has insinuated a peacock feather down Lydia’s cleavage and she is shrieking with laughter. Even the Pug has found a playmate and holds her above his head while she drops small morsels of pork into his opening and closing mouth, leavening the diet with splashes of Negus when his chewing-rate slows and fellating the bottle betweentimes. A general urge to form close and affectionate links with someone, anyone, is diffusing itself through the Pork Club; not quite lust, but not quite brother and sister stuff either. The mood of arousal percolates through everything, even the furniture has a new flirtatiousness about it and, upstairs, Lemprière catches on to it, confirming the gist of his speculations as to just what his prize is.

  This is not to say he is aroused. At the moment he is standing up, which is enough to be getting on with for, ventrally speaking, things could be better. A rather sub-standard vintage is slugging it out with the kümmel, the brandy and cider have hit it off but all are ignoring the yellow-root which sits in painful concentration somewhere near his abdomen. The rum he knocked back only lately is still making its way down, but its arrival is as imminent as it is unwelcome. Nevertheless, as he makes slow progress towards the far door (wasn’t it nearer than that a minute ago?) there is no question but that this is the way. There are aspects of this disorientation, grim though it feels, that he likes, chief among them being the fact that it did not originate with him. He isn’t thinking about the Crone’s metamorphosis now. He is not thinking about the story he just acted, its accidental parallels…. The inadvertent hero, would Septimus have known, anticipated the connection? Surely not. Too devious, professor. Not yet. Not thinking about (another step) that, just another step he takes determined not to think. Door shouldn’t bend that way, the knob, use it as a support, like that yes, look to the future and onward Perseus. Theseus, whoever. Eyes up. Not that. Eyes up. No, he refuses, staggering, swaying, sliding, staggering, definitely no to that as the door opens to spill him inside.

  Downstairs, Jemimah is explaining that she didn’t mean to do it. No she didn’t, so sorry, ouch! as the Crone cracks a spatula on her robust bonce, and again for good luck, good lord anyone’d think it was all on purpose. How was she to know the girl would sell such an ill-tempered bird as this one that’d fetch the mistress such a clip with its wing (tee hee)? Jemmy’s got the goose firm under her arm now, nice and tight, mitt round its beak, peering round the door here as the earl explains to Lydia why it would result in serious injury to one or both of them, dislocation of the hips at the very least, patiently, what a good, kind man he is. And so sober. Marry me, thinks Jemmy. Make me Earless of Braith! Someone is making a bottle-noise, ding, ding, over there and the floor will take some sweeping later. Goosey won’t settle. A wash too, by the greasy look of it. Jemimah takes a firmer grip on the bird, ding, that is struggling artfully to get loose.

  Ding. Very faint in Lemprière’s ears upstairs. Perhaps a silver fountain is dripping music into a silver pool where fabulous white birds are bathing and drinking? No. Heavy-looking dogs with sad faces mooch up and plash about in the water, stirring the mud, is that it? No again. It is a bedroom. Black, red, white. A fire burns, carpets cover the floor. They break Lemprière’s fall. A room with a bed in it. It has that frisson; of being placed here for a purpose. Horizontals and perpendiculars. The carpet is a very dark red. The bed is made of black, wrought iron. Posts at each corner rise straight up. They are made of the same black iron. There are no pillows. Lemprière lurches upright. The stillness of this room and its sense of waiting for him, prepared for him (by whom?) add another tension to the cross-hatching of drunkenness and evasion which are still his main thoughts. The set-up is doing its best to throw him. He resists. The room may be wavering and swaying, urging somnolence. Lemprière grasps the post nearest him and looks down. Yes, he thinks as his eyes focus on the prize laid out before him. It had to be this.

  The girl is fastened, spread-eagled and face down, to the black iron of the posts. She is naked, of course, only the red ribbon binding a central tress of her hair has been permitted. A sheet of raw, white silk has been thrown over her. Although this conceals the precise extent of her nakedness, it’s understood nevertheless. There are details which have escaped the cover’s touch. Her ankles and wrists are visible, strapped to the bed’s ironwork with leather bracelets. The bracelets are set with turquoise.

  Lemprière knows these ankles. He has seen them before. Bright waterdrops flashing off them and the streak of red, the red colour the water…. Leaning over the foot of the bed, his legs good as useless here, holding on and it cannot be this, not this, everything very slow and deliberate, concentrate now. Pulling back the sheet, one hand still holding him up but only just, uncovering first the shock of her black hair with its scarlet ribbon, jet on her milky back, arched slightly, it cannot be, he has to know, swimming in a lake of milk, muscled and shimmery, the smooth
buttocks, cleft and expectant, the sinews in her legs rippling the surface of her skin as her body shifts in the cooler air, how many hours has she lain like this, awaiting the attentions of her violator? The white of her flesh is dazzling, a liquid white flowing out and around him, everything blurring in it as he hangs there, losing his grip.

  ‘Juliette?’ His voice sounds weakly. But he knows the scene is incomplete. Your father! He stumbles forward, falls, and is still.

  Downstairs meanwhile, and not too surprising given the proximity of Christmas, the goose has got wind of its fate and escaped. Or, half-escaped. When it comes to long-haul continent-spanning (with inexplicable pin-point navigation to boot) there is a wide consensus that the goose is your bird. But, it is further acknowledged that certain manoeuvres are not strongpoints of the goose and chief amongst these is cornering. This goose is flying about downstairs, cheered on by the Pork Club, wearing a kind of dazed expression which is not too surprising given that it’s trying to fly straight through the walls. It’s a miracle it’s still air-borne, clunk, staggering about three or four feet above everyone’s heads.

  The Crone doesn’t see it in quite these terms. She is lobbing up bolsters, trying to create a barrage of the things that will bring the goose down. So far, it’s not working, but on the walls there are certain nails on which once hung some rather nasty watercolours in the manner of John Opie, the Cornish wonder, executed by a one-time regular, now dead. The goose has yet to encounter these nails (another miracle) but a couple of the bolsters already have and goose down is showering down like snow on the Pork Club. With all the bacon and pork grease yet to be abluted, most of them are pretty adhesive and so now there are a lot of feathered people leaping up and down, imitating the goose which is none too pleased at the attention. (Plus, it’s putting two and two together as to the origin of this weird, white stuff.)

  Amidst all this, only Septimus hears the crash which comes from upstairs. Perhaps he felt it was inevitable. Racing up and bursting in, he comes upon Lemprière collapsed on the floor. Slapping him elicits nothing coherent, only a hawking sound from the back of his throat. Septimus picks him up without effort and as he turns to leave Walter Warburton-Burleigh slides in the door.

  ‘Thought you might need assistance,’ he grins. ‘She been touched?’

  ‘Clearly not,’ says Septimus shortly as he bundles up Lemprière and quits the room, edging past two women in blue who are peering into the room with proprietorial interest. Lemprière is being carried, the backs of his knees slung over Septimus’s shoulders, his arms trailing almost to the floor. The older of the two women stops Septimus.

  ‘Your winnings,’ she says.

  ‘His.’ Septimus indicates the upside-down body. The woman tries to put the bulging purse in Lemprière’s hands, but it is no good. He will not hold it. Eventually she stuffs it in his mouth. Warburton-Burleigh meanwhile, has extracted his own purse and is laying a cold line of coins down the girl’s warm back, one for each vertebra. She jerks a little.

  ‘Keep still, Rosalie,’ he murmurs silkily. ‘The first is always worst.’

  Lemprière comes to, descending the staircase, muhbubh, gagged with his winnings. He is floating upwards, towards the people whose feet are glued to the ceiling. Below, a crystal tree tinkles its leaves and a large, white bird circles it clumsily. His head is light, so light it draws his body up to within inches of the ceiling. Everyone is upside down, poor devils.

  The Pork Club have not lost interest in the goose. They have decided to serenade it and divide for this purpose into chorus and verse. Ranged about here like opposing teams of so many standing patterers, it has been pointed out that the gooses’s flight is (very) roughly circular and someone has trotted out the old music of the spheres theory. There is a feeling that with the right song the goose will descend. It is a weak argument, but the will is there and they have decided after an informal show of hands to sing what amounts to the Pork Club anthem. It is called ‘The Inheritance Song’ and goes like this.

  Who stalks the courts of t’poorer sorts

  Who’s known as The Open Purse?

  Who hands out alms to punks and charms

  The widows ‘hind the hearse?

  (descant)

  Your father! Your father!

  Your rampant, fleshly sire.

  Your father! Your father!

  The spendthrift of the shire.

  When the heir is left of all bereft

  Save bastards, bills and slatt-erns,

  He gambles, drinks and marries a minx

  D’you recognise the patt-ern?

  (descant)

  Your father! Your father! &c.

  Lemprière spits the purse into Septimus’s boot.

  ‘Get me out Septimus. For God’s sake …’ trying to inject the urgency he feels into his voice, not even sure if it is audible. Your father! Your father! Septimus has heard, or just knows. They lurch towards the door, which the earl holds open for them. Septimus and he exchange a few words after which the earl kneels in front of Lemprière.

  ‘Sir?’ The earl taps Lemprière on the shoulder. ‘Mister Lemprière?’

  ‘Grnnh?’

  ‘Mister Lemprière!’ The earl’s face looks very strange upside-down.

  ‘The agreement of which we spoke earlier….’ The earl’s voice, indeed his whole person, has changed. There is no trace of a slur as he speaks and his eyes are focussed. The earl seems suddenly all business as he outlines the gist of their earlier discussion, pointing across the room to where it took place, when and how, before launching into an involved story quite beyond Lemprière’s present level of understanding. Why is he doing this?

  ‘… between the investors. 1600 was to be the De Veres’ annus mirabilis, the first voyage was set to yield vast returns. We borrowed…. The stake was beyond everyone; but the returns, the returns would be so huge … De Veres have always been traders, always an eye for the saleable cargo. When the venture failed, Thomas, the fourth earl, had nothing. The family might have been ruined but for your ancestor. François Lemprière was our saviour, the stock worth nothing you understand. Of course, he sold. And when the Company prospered again the De Veres grew rich on their share. Your ancestor must have reaped ten times that. Thousands upon thousands! Of course, when the agreement was broken, our fortunes declined once more. But we never knew why. The siege, or treachery of some sort. It’s all in the past…. But the agreement was valid in perpetuity, forever, I presume you know that. In theory, it would just go on and on….

  Ancestors, agreements; clearly, the earl is talking about something that should concern Lemprière. But what?

  ‘… who knows where that share is now? The Lemprières’ and De Veres’.… It would be millions, piling up over the centuries, almost unimaginable,’ continues the earl to Lemprière’s queazy indifference. His eyes begin to glaze over behind his spectacles.

  ‘Millions!’ shouts the earl in Lemprière’s face. This is provocation.

  ‘Pizz off,’ says Lemprière, trying the phrase for the first time. The earl’s face wavers a little but remains in position a few inches from his own. Then the vague remembrance of a similar scene drifts back to him. Agreements, ancestors, earls of Braith. But that was hours, years ago, some time at any rate, who would remember all that? It was all too late and in the past and it didn’t matter, no, not now. Your father!

  ‘Your ancestor!’ yells the earl. But Lemprière will not grasp the point of all this. The earl is a very noisy fellow, he thinks. Drunk perhaps. Lemprière considers vomiting on his boots. The earl is shouting something again, but it’s all too late, too noisy, too drunk and please go away now, just go far away….

  The earl will not go away. He is demanding a reply. Lemprière gathers all the resources at his disposal.

  ‘Ask Sebdimus,’ he manages at length. The earl turns away for a moment.

  ‘Addled,’ he comments to Septimus, then turns back.

  ‘Another time, Mister Lemprière!’ bellows
the earl. ‘Farewell!’

  ‘Pizz off!’ Lemprière tries again. This time it seems more successful for the face disappears. The earl’s voice is audible in the near vicinity, then that of Septimus, garbled together with the background burble and the horrible singing. Above him (or below) something large, white and presumably winged collided clunk! with the wall. The goose was still flying.

  ‘Goodbye goose,’ mumbled Lemprière as Septimus hoisted him up and kicked open the door.

  Fatherkiller, hissed the goose. They left for the night outside.

  The clouds had broken. Freezing rain fell into the black streets, beating down in rods on the roofs and gables. It fell in sheets on the slates and tiles, bursting the gutters and washing down the walls to the street. It danced on the flags of the pavements and ran into the ditches and drains. Rain scoured the cobbles, dissolving the muck, scum and scurf, sending it down the street in a thick wave of slurry. It sluiced through the rookeries, irrigated the great thoroughfares, baptising the courts, rising as it ate into piles of horse dung, picked up fish heads and old meat wrappers and rats drowned in the open sewers, driving them along in a rich, liquid mulch. Tomorrow, it would stink. But now, the rain brought its violence down to purge the city, drilling into the stonework of breached walls and the stumps of columns, each raindrop exploding in white as it conceded the dissolving city its forms. The details of the buildings seemed to blur and the downpour replaced them with wretched waterfalls and fountains, broken pipes and seeping minarets; templates of appeasement to the preterite, just the weather again to the elect for the sky absolves nothing of course.

  Standing clear of these accretions, a dim recognition of the need below hardly disturbs the weather’s deep composure. Its cycle turns and the cities fall. Rain today, tomorrow none. For as long as these structures have offered their pathos or their grey arrogance it has been like this. Seven hills surrounded the paludium, remember? An interim empire, its centre already malarial, spreading the seizures and relapses whose masquerade of health will later conceal the drain of that need, its exile. Now the outlines of its form are discernible through the fabric, like the girl on the bed, its indistinctness part of the game as it reaches through, finger-tips light and icy, insinuating its return. Each cold raindrop a reminder of his debts, every freezing drop arcing out in silver cusps an appropriate manner in which to approach one’s god….