‘Pie and porter,’ Septimus shouted across to the woman who was stirring a fire more listless than herself. Everything; and now Septimus would be humouring him, the madman who saw demons leap out of books. And Juliette! What had he said of her? That would be the indignity he could not bear, he knew the idea was ridiculous, his awkwardness. Lemprière watched Septimus for some clue as to what he knew but none was forthcoming. Septimus was preoccupied with his new surroundings and Lemprière followed his eye as it wandered over the eatery.
It was a single room, a low-ceilinged, ill-lit den with unswept floors and filthy tables; a pervasive smell of cabbage and onions hung about it, leavened by the stink of stale beer and the jakes out back. Septimus slapped his knees as he sat down, still looking about as though he were a spectator at the Lord Mayor’s ball.
‘Quite itself!’ he said enthusiastically and Lemprière silently agreed. He still felt nauseous, and Septimus had grown no more quiet. The eating-house was empty but for themselves and two gentlemen who sat silently at a table on the far side of the room. The two did not speak, even to each other, and Lemprière wondered if they were together, or just happened to occupy the same table, for it was nearest the fire. He sat down.
‘Breakfast?’ Septimus demanded of him, but Lemprière shook his head. It was out of the question. Septimus’ pie arrived presently, a bilious, irregular object which squirted brown juice when faced with the knife. Lemprière looked away as Septimus guzzled happily, then propped his head in his hands. The table loomed into view.
One of the gentlemen on the far side of the room called morosely for another drink. He had a faint Scots accent. Lemprière gazed down at the table-top and tried to decide what colour it was. Brown was his first impression, then he thought brownish-green, tinged maybe with dark red and mottled in orangey-ultramarine, with a rich mauve understain and the whole thing tinged with a yellow that, somehow, verged on black. That seemed to sum it up. Really, he conceded, it was no colour at all, or one somewhere between all these in which, on closer inspection, Lemprière now picked out a mass of scratches, signatures and score-marks, sundry acts of vandalism and self-expression, bad jokes, abuse and obscure warnings. ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ was still visible in one corner, along with slogans from more obscure campaigns, the Yellow Tallow Riots of 1777 and the Great Comb Protest. The centre of the table-top was thick with obscenities. People’s names, the names of their lovers, or ex-lovers, hearts with arrows or circles with chains, all these had their place. The latest addition was the beginning of a word ‘BOSW’, scrawled lightly over more than half the table.
Casting his eye over all these, Lemprière speculated on their authors, the men, and women, who had idled away the hours here, alone or in company, one hand round a pint-pot, the other scratching and scraping away at the table’s surface to leave the marks he saw now. Malcontents certainly, and agitators too. But also dreamers and projecters, enthusiasts and virtuosi, all united here on the scored surface. What did they want?
As Lemprière traced these ragged inscriptions, he began to notice an outline made up haphazardly from the various scratches and signatures. It seemed to run close to the edge of the table, though veering away from the corners, a rough circle in fact, which he now began to follow with his finger, an irregular line full of indentures, outcrops and deviant tangents, until he suddenly came up against the edge of Septimus’ plate.
‘Pie,’ Septimus chomped vigorously, and made as if to offer Lemprière some. He had nearly finished.
‘See Ernst and Elly,’ confided Septimus, ‘zoom’. He swallowed. ‘Soon, I meant.’
Lemprière nodded. His palm was flat on the table. He could feel the ridges and grooves; voices from the wood like hamadryads. Septimus cleared his plate and sipped from the tankard before him. The woman came over and took his plate. She glanced down at Lemprière whose hand remained flat on the table’s surface.
‘Don’t you mark the surface,’ she warned him sternly. Septimus finally drained his tankard and they both rose. They had walked over to the woman and Septimus was patting his pockets before he remembered his purse, Lemprière’s in fact, from the previous night, which he had left at the table. Lemprière retrieved it and returned with an odd expression on his face. The woman was impatient, tapping her foot.
‘I found it in my boot,’ Septimus was explaining. ‘You spat it there. Look, your winnings. The bet, you remember?’ And, taking it, he showed Lemprière his increased wealth, to prove the point.
‘Winnings? Yes,’ Lemprière answered absently. But he did not suspect Septimus. When he had fetched the purse, he had looked again at the table-top and the outline he had unsuccessfully tried to trace. Then, he had not seen it, but now, after the removal of Septimus and his plate and mug, it was plain. It was not a circle, or rather, not a whole circle. It was broken at one point and the inner arc was fantastically irregular. Lemprière stared at it. He knew it, a malformed ‘C shape, but it eluded him, not quite tangible and the woman was waiting.
‘Thank you.’ She took the coins and the two of them turned to go. As Lemprière passed the man he had earlier observed a hand closed about his arm. Lemprière looked down at the man’s face which was staring straight ahead, just as before. Tears were running silently down the man’s cheeks. He was clearly drunk. Lemprière made as if to pull away, but at that moment the man turned his head and spoke in a voice thick with grief.
‘Sam’s dead!’ he cried.
‘Been dead for years,’ the woman retorted harshly and without looking up. Lemprière looked down at the distraught man.
‘I am terribly sorry,’ he told him with some feeling.
‘We used to sit over there.’ The man gestured to the table at which Lemprière had sat. ‘But I’ve not the heart now.’ He looked down once more and Lemprière felt the hand on his arm fall away. The woman motioned silently at him to go. The man had resumed his former position staring straight ahead in misery.
Gaining the street he found his companion waiting, wanting to know what had detained him. ‘Have you ever thought about being alone?’ he asked Septimus. ‘Never,’ Septimus replied and immediately set off at a furious pace leaving Lemprière to stumble along behind. The bells, for the moment, were silenced. Nausea had receded but his headache had increased.
‘Ernst and Elly are friends of mine….’ This was a phrase Lemprière was learning to distrust.
‘We are going there now?’
‘Now, yes. You did agree to this, in a way it was your idea.’ Lemprière’s idea. He had no recollection of it. Presumably he had agreed to it, when he had spoken to Septimus on the bridge, or perhaps before, or after, or not at all and it was some form of practical joke, or something worse. What had he told Septimus? Everything, everything.
‘You’ll like them, at any rate, they will like you. Ernst is quite brilliant, after a fashion….’
‘Yes, but what are they? Why are we going there?’ They were walking past a terrace of modest houses. Septimus suddenly came to an abrupt halt and knocked loudly on a bright red door. Then he turned to his questioner. ‘They are doctors of the mind, John. And we are here because you are not sane.’ Not sane, Lemprière’s face momentarily dissolved. Then the door was being thrown open and he recovered himself in time to see a bulbous, smiling man greet Septimus like a long-lost son.
Introductions were dispensed with and both of them ushered directly to the drawing-room, which doubled as a consulting room for Elmore Clementi and Ernst Kalkbrenner, men who, in their time, had been called heretics, sodomites, amateurs, quacks, seditionaries, and, most lately, friends of Septimus.
‘Victims of calumny,’ Septimus confided as they entered the room. ‘Good friends, damned good friends.’
The drawing-room was overwhelmingly red. Dark crimson bokhara rugs lay on the floor, red velvet curtains and oils on the walls in magenta and vermilion. The piano on the far side had been stained a dark rust-brown. Their usher stood expectantly as they came to terms with all this. A
pinkish striped clothcoat lined with scarlet silk, scalloped cuffs à la marinère and death’s head buttons, overlaid a double-breasted waistcoat of crimson velvet embroidered with orange fleur-de-lys, both being topped by a lace-trimmed cravat wound multiply about his neck. His face was powdered and rouged beneath a carefully coiffured ramillies plait whose tail swung freely as he bobbed from side to side, awaiting an introduction.
‘Septimus?’ he warbled after a few seconds had gone by. Septimus came to.
‘John, my learned friend, Elmore Clementi.’
‘Call me Elly.’ The creature offered his hand.
‘And I,’ came a voice from behind them, ‘am Ernst Kalkbrenner.’ A tall, thin figure dressed in grey appeared in the doorway. ‘Welcome again Mister Septimus.’ He offered his hand to Lemprière, who returned the handshake.
‘We seek your opinion,’ Septimus announced.
‘Splendid, splendid. Elly, tea I think?’ At this, Clementi threw up his hands in a fluster and disappeared. Septimus and Lemprière took places on the mauve divan in the centre of the room. Clementi soon returned with tea.
‘There’s a little camomile in it,’ he confided to Lemprière. ‘It will help clear out the system. Awful stuff, drink….’ Lemprière was secretly impressed by this diagnosis. He sat sipping tea, which did indeed make him feel a little more robust than before. The red was becoming more bearable. Ernst Kalkbrenner had taken up position by the piano while his patient occupied the velvet armchair opposite. He turned to the pair on the divan.
‘It would be best if you explained to me the exact nature of the problem,’ he began.
‘Ernst is a stickler for exactitude, an absolute stickler,’ said Elly.
‘Elly.’
‘Pardon me, please explain. If you like, it can be difficult, I know….’
Lemprière turned to his companion.
‘John was rather drunk,’ began Septimus.
And it was raining, thought Lemprière. They were on the bridge.
His legs had given up. He sat heavily, finally in the wet. He could hear his own voice breaking up in the downpour, the unstoppered heavens pouring down on them both. Two women in blue dresses were being drawn slowly out of sight, moving clumsily like ragdolls past the far end of the bridge. Septimus was saying, ‘Tell me everything,’ and his own voice was lurching forward to meet that question, stumbling and picking itself up and going on with the story, its characters dissolving like ink in the rain and the scoured fibres of the page emerging clean and snowy-white, pristine and candid, perfectly blank. He could not remember. ‘Go on,’ said the voice at his side. The ink was dissolving in reverse, coming back as greys and dark blues, irregular patches merging and emerging out of the blank tablet, returning for a second scene, a simulacrum of the first except now the tangle of surds and glyphs was a tangle of arms and legs, motile cells and released agents running over the surface, fast and low over the ground suck the nightmare-scene was seeping back not as a tame tale in a book but a grey contagion, a seepage of black into his brain’s soft sponge suck the story he had read was unfolding in his father’s flesh, a famished parasite bursting out of its host, the expended body rolling over in the water and far away on the far side of the island the story settled back into innocuous paper and harmless print. The sound when the teeth had met in the calf. Suck.
‘Elly!’
‘Pardon me, I do beg your pardon.’ Clementi pulled the thumb out of his mouth and wiped the offending digit dry. Septimus had finished his recitation. Ernst Kalkbrenner pursed his lips in thought.
‘Reads things?’ Kalkbrenner cogitated aloud. ‘They happen? Can’t quite see it. How would a shop sign happen? Just as an instance, or a bill….’
‘Oh, they happen …’ Elly piped up, to be immediately quelled.
‘Not everything,’ Septimus said. ‘It’s happened twice for certain, perhaps twice more.’ Lemprière nodded. Septimus was at least direct; he could imagine taking all day telling it himself. ‘First there was a fourteenth-century….’
‘Fifteenth,’ Lemprière corrected him.
‘… a fifteenth-century Athenian king in a stove on Jersey; then a local deity, the Vertumnus, who stalks about the fields outside his parents’ house; then Diana, with her dogs, also on Jersey.’ Lemprière looked away. ‘Lastly, there is the transformation of a Covent Garden madame into Circe. This was last night.’
Lemprière cringed with embarrassment at this recitation. It sounded ridiculous even to himself. Kalkbrenner, however, was deep in thought, Clementi watching him with the air of one confidently expecting revelation. Septimus had already begun to fidget. At length the good doctor signalled his readiness to diagnose by beginning to pace up and down before the piano.
‘I believe,’ he announced, ‘that I have discerned a common thread running through these incidents.’ Clementi’s hands flew to his mouth; Ernst was about to deliver judgment. ‘Correct me if I am mistaken,’ he continued, in a tone which forbade such presumption, ‘but is there not at work here an antique element? A touch of the Ancients, no?’ Clementi beamed.
Lemprière wondered if this was meant to be a quip, perhaps to set him at his ease. Septimus was nodding without a trace of irony.
‘Very astute,’ he commented.
‘Of course, we might describe this unfortunate condition. We are able to do that….’
‘Describe it, Ernst!’ Clementi burst out.
‘… but it would be pointless. We must begin from first principles, compare and contrast; symptomatic classification is for the encyclopedists.’ Lemprière was beginning to lose the track of Kalkbrenner’s reasoning, a fact which brought with it a feeling of security.
‘The mind only exists by virtue of the qualities it shares with other minds, thus.’ He flipped open the lid of the piano and struck the keys.
‘Happy or sad?’
‘Sad,’ replied Lemprière promptly.
‘Just so, a universal response, but we shall not pursue that line quite yet….’
‘Something of a last resort,’ Clementi added. ‘Alcmaeon might have pronounced you perfectly sane simply from that, but we have moved on from Crotona, isonomy will not suffice. Empedocles would have concluded that you were part-piano and Protagoras would agree, adding that the piano be part-Lemprière, of course. This brings us to Aristotle….’ Kalkbrenner moved on, through a fluid series of dismissals to the accompaniment of Clementi’s rapturous endorsements. Plotinus, Augustine and Aquinas were incidental travellers along the highway he had chosen, Descartes’ fixation with the pineal gland was risible and Linnaeus was a scribbler, an oneirodyniac who only dreamed he was awake…. Kalkbrenner had the measure of them all, his teutonic demolitions left nothing but the ruins of buildings built in outmoded styles. He admitted a partial admiration for Locke but excused himself on sentimental grounds. It was only when he began intoning the name of Etienne Bonnot, L’Abbé de Condillac that his tirade ended and panegyrics took their place. ‘Le Divin Abbé’ (for so he addressed him) had had a profound effect on the young Kalkbrenner. He had the apostate’s zeal and as a young man had been observed sucking the toes of a marble statue in Darmstadt, but the authorities (’Cartesians to a man, damn their hybristic sums’) had refused to understand.
‘How could they, their experience being conditioned by the very system I proved to them was false? “Sedition! Exile!” they cried, and thus began my years of wandering, alone but for dear Elly here, through the Low Countries and France; this was before the troubles began, thence to your own fair shores spreading the words of le Divin Abbé as I went. It has been a hard time, has it not Elly?’ Elly nodded sadly. ‘But we have borne our vicissitudes as true voyagers.’ He was reaching some sort of climax. ‘And, in our small way, we have helped the cause.’
‘The cause!’ Elly toasted his companion with a raised tea-cup.
‘Thank you, Elly.’ He paused in his story and allowed his fingers to dally once more on the piano. Two or three notes rose up. Kalkbrenner picked
out a well-thumbed book from the shelf behind the instrument.
‘This. The Traité des Sensations. Your story brings to mind its dedication.’ His eyes roved heavenwards as he held the talisman and recited. “We cannot recollect the ignorance in which we were born. It is a state which leaves no traces behind it. We remember our ignorance only when we remember what we have learned. We must already know something - before we can attend to what we are learning. We must have ideas before we can observe that we were once without them.” He sighed. ‘Sublime….’
His eyes closed at the ex nihilo grandeur of the lines. ‘Is that not the situation of every doctor? “We remember our ignorance only when we remember what we have learned….” Just so; my friends, take heart from these words for their message is universal. The statue becomes fully sensible, fully alive only through knowing its own former emptiness, through seeing the construction that came to be itself. This is what we must divine in you, sir,’ he said, looking at Lemprière. ‘We must take your story and trace its cogs and levers back to the original fault; we must make the screw adjustment, the crucial quarter-turn that sets you ticking properly….’
But despite this prolegomena, Doctor Kalkbrenner had not the slightest intention of hearing the story of Lemprière’s life. He continued to expatiate on the principles of the human mind, to sing the praises of ‘le divin Abbé de Condillac’ and now and again would touch on Lemprière’s case as if it were quite incidental to these favoured themes. Occasional questions were asked and answered by Lemprière whose nausea was returning, replacing his headache, brought on, he suspected, by the redness which surrounded him. After digressions on the case of the pregnant woman and the porpoise, a remarkably shrunken pineal gland he had come across in Aix-de-la-Chapelle and a ‘Monsieur Sienois’ whose obsessive urinary retention had only been cured by his neighbour setting fire to his house, the good doctor at length arrived at his diagnosis.
‘… and so it is clear from these examples that the condition you suffer from, a peculiarly rare one I might add, is none other than projective-objective palilexic echopraxia. Palilexia I first came across in Salzburg, a gentleman there had read a handbook on obstetrics, in reverse of course.’ He gestured with his hand as if the results of this were too terrible to speak of. ‘Echopraxia is more normally associated with mass hysterias. The tendency to mirror the bodily motions of those about one is commonplace in military environments. L’Abbé de Condillac does not treat of those matters directly you understand…. You seem to function as a conduit of some sorts; read, secrete, excrete would be the pattern….’ Kalkbrenner frowned.
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