Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  Something was wrong with the sky. All day the gun-metal cumulus had inched across, extending its monotone to all points of the compass. Somewhere far above the clouds’ fat undersides, an invisible sun had probed laboriously but without success. Now, with the onset of sunset, a drastic wound spilled freakish purples and yellows onto the congruent gash of the river.

  Lemprière watched from Westminster Bridge as garish light connected the river surface with the sky. The brazen patriarch behind him would have flared into gleaming life had the light burst its banks, had the statue been polished in the recent past and been cleared of pigeon droppings and other more wilful defacements. The Streets Will Cry For Farina was scrawled in slashes of green chalk on the pediment, the work of furtive sloganeers. Such sentiments were growing, gathering force in the city, catalysing its low mumbles and grumbles, its cussedness and craven protests, injecting more potent terms into the rituals of discontent. Their solutions may yet involve the breaking of carriage windows, daubing of churches, burning of opera houses, acts of unfocussed violence. Lemprière peered once, then again, before loping off nervously onto the bridge where the light was now the colour of cheap jewellery, thinking, they’ll think I did it, towards his rendezvous with Septimus who was late and would not show up. A woman selling apples followed him. Sky mostly grey at this point. River still purple.

  Over the bridge in search of Coade, prompted by Guardian’s mention of the statue material a week before at which Lemprière had remembered a previous conversation scattered through the hubbub at the De Veres’; talk of giant tortoises cast in Coade, something to do with an opera house, someone called Marmaduke. Coade Stone.

  ‘From the Coade Manufactory,’ Septimus had informed him, ‘in Lambeth.’

  That was two days ago. Between his return from the Crow’s Nest and Septimus’ arrival he had worked diligently at his dictionary, finally halting at “Iphigenia” whose heading stared up at him with eyes accusing as Iphigenia’s own, ranging through the later dreams of her father Agamemnon.

  ‘Immolate her,’ Calchas had told the Greek commanders at Aulis. Unhelpful winds had fetched them up high and dry on the Boeotian coast and, as the temporary camp grew rife with explanations, offences real and imaginary were floated as possible provocations for their ill fortune, while the soldiers cooled their heels on the beach and their commanders quarrelled over who was to blame. Perhaps Agamemnon was absent from the crucial meeting, when the debate reached its conclusion and the propitiatory victim was chosen. Perhaps he was hunting and perhaps this suggested the official line to the huddled commanders. Agamemnon had killed enough stags for one of them to be Diana’s favourite. Stags, Diana, the familiar counters are gathering, another round is starting up…. It was credible and, with Calchas’ sanction, with their own solidarity….

  Agamemnon took the decision on the chin, understood this particular need, sent for the girl. Word was sent to Clytemnestra, a nonsense about their daughter’s marrying Achilles. Iphigenia arrived to the sight of ominous preparations, hymenal fears replaced by mortal ones, pleading with the tear-stained eyes which would later have Agememnon tossing and turning at night under the Trojan walls. And yet, when Calchas’ knife was raised, swung down, seemed to slice through innocent flesh and innocent bone in a first gout of bright blood, just then, well.… A goat, yes, standing there on the altar bleating, blinking its yellow eyes in plain view of all. A substitution? Metamorphosis? The supplicants speculate. A divine intervention, most certainly, and in fact the story went on, though the Greeks did not know it, involving other, yet more farflung clansmen and an extraordinary resolution which time will bring bubbling to the surface.

  Lemprière saw Iphigenia torn up and reassembled by the phony crosscurrents of impending war, a pre-vision of wider and more gruesome conflict. He imagined Agamemnon as a failed paterfamilias, persuaded out of reluctance by the nervy cabal of his confederates, offering token resistance while his wife was hoodwinked into connivance. Ghettoed back in Mycenae with the slaves, the women and the ghosts of Argive kings, Electryon, Perseus, Acrisius all urging gullible acceptance, grandson, son and father to Danae, who was victim of a similar arrangement, Clytemnestra sent the girl on her way. How many daughters have been lost? How many recovered through coincidence, luck, fate or intervention from higher up? Lemprière imagined Iphigenia as a doll, a plaything for the furtive band of heroes to while away the long, windless days, pulled this way and that by their different whims until the sacrifice itself, when they stood there mocked by the absurd goat, so obviously the product of a wider logic, an idea quite beyond even the wiliest of them. And, as mentioned, the incident had its coda.

  The sky’s ragged mouth was closing, sucking violet light out of the river. Lambeth confronted Lemprière. An old woman was trying to sell him apples.

  ‘Lambeth,’ Septimus had said as he gathered up most of G, all of H and the greater part of I. ‘All signed?’

  Two days had passed in outward idleness while Lemprière imagined himself leaping onto the altar at Aulis, a grinning Plautine slave facing down the massed milites gloriosi in their ceremonial breastplates, snatching the girl and racing out to a waiting canoe. A stray arrow (stray arrow?) would catch her as he paddled against the weak coastal tide, there would be grief (convention demanded it) and revenge. He thought of Juliette, dreaming thoughts of a beautiful future which involved terrible mutual loss and long years of grieving on both their parts. To lose her was a kind of romance too. He could almost believe he had won her in the first place. But then there was the kiss, his first, bestowed lightly in the library. The actual press of her lips, her hands as she pulled him up outside the church, all these nudging his cloudy constructions until he rubbed his eyes, stretched and stamped about the room. Why could this not be enough? He awaited signs, fated meetings, an astral sanction. Septimus and Lydia, Warburton-Burleigh, even the Pug, they all had an air about them, an assurance. Everyone seemed to have it. Juliette had it. He did not.

  Healing themselves aloft, squeezing the bruised light to a crack, a livid line, clouds of a darker grey lowered their bulging undersides onto the city like sinking ships. Westminster Bridge threw its details into the twilight and Lemprière realised that Septimus was not going to turn up. It was well past six. Lemprière bought some apples, turned away and walked south over the river for Coade.

  ‘Funny stuff,’ Septimus had said. ‘And Eleanor’s no stranger than she should be. Took the place on twenty years ago, makes ornaments, statues. You see them in gardens, on buildings, all over the place.’

  ‘But I’ve never seen them anywhere,’ he had protested. ‘What is Coade Stone?’

  ‘That’s the cleverness. It looks exactly like stone, is hard as stone, but a fraction of the price. No-one’s exactly sure what it is, some sort of earthenware, almost porcelain. The exact formula’s a secret. They mould it, then fire it in huge kilns at the Manufactory. You know those Dolphin pedestals? Edmund has a pair. They’re from Coade’s.’

  Lemprière remembered watching from the Crow’s Nest, the crate breaking open on the quay.

  ‘So they’re loading a ship with it,’ Septimus had continued, taking a bottle from his pocket and looking about for a glass. ‘So what? What does it matter?’

  Lemprière had thought of a brash promise shouted after Theobald in Blue Anchor Lane that night, of George dead in a room with a scattering of cheap furniture. He thought of Guardian’s caution, Peppard’s warning, of his own luck running out. It would be easy for them, easy as George was. He had turned to Septimus.

  ‘I need your help,’ he had said.

  The river was behind him now, north through the haphazard streets of the New Road. A greenish tinge hung in the air as though Lambeth were sunk in water.

  Wine had slid down his glass in films of overlapping pink. Septimus had listened to the tale of disappearing ships, reappearing ships, whales, crates, statues, insurance and the harbour draught at La Rochelle. He had heard Lemprière’s suspicions about the ag
reement and been told that it was already worth one man’s life, perhaps another.

  ‘Peppard knew the ship was here, here in London, but not why. That is why I must go to the Manufactory,’ Lemprière had finished up.

  Must go? Irritated reflections on Septimus’ unreliability mingled with the motives for these late disclosures. Who else might he have told? Who else would listen? The Falmouth was berthed in London, renamed Vendragon; it was being loaded with statues. François had made an agreement with Thomas de Vere, something had happened at La Rochelle, George was dead. These facts were his satellites. His father was dead. He thought again of the pool, the dogs, the great grey clouds and the girl picking her feet out of the water. The elements gathered around him. His father rolling over, one arm held up to ward off dangers that had already passed and in his mind the same scene was unwinding like fine silver wire. The woman with her distorted face twisting away from the glistening downpour, the hiss of metal, the smell of it. These matters cohered in him. Buried legends cracked through the generations’ interment, flooded back at his unknowing behest. Was it himself holding all these things together? Peppard had not died for any ship, but a piece of paper signed a century and a half before. Less: an opinion on that paper, requested by himself. Guilty.

  The Coade Artificial Stone Manufactory stood in Narrow Wall by the Kings Arms Stairs. Two spacious yards guarded by high brick walls flanked, successively, a large triple-fronted house, four high narrow roofed sheds built one against the other, and a long windowless hanger which effectively doubled the size of the complex. The sheds faced sideways to the street, rising clear of the house by ten feet or more, their steep gabled roofs reaching back out of sight. Between these sky-lit sheds and the house, itself no mean structure, an alley ran, visible through the iron grille of a gate set into the brickwork. Two larger double gates enabled access to the yards thirty or forty paces down the road and over these the legend “Coade Stone Manufactory” was mounted on hoops of wrought iron. By day the scene bustled energetically with raw materials arriving at one yard and the finished product, crated for dispatch, leaving by the other. Workmen wheeled in clay and coke, stokers fed furnaces which turned out the grog - pre-fired pellets of clay - by which addition the remarkable shrinkage rate of barely one inch in twelve was achieved. China clay, sand and glass made up the formula upon which the Manufactory’s fortunes rested.

  Now, as Lemprière approached the smallest, most central of the three gates, which would open to admit him to the alley beyond, the complex was deserted. He clutched his apples as talismans in his one good pocket and entered. The alley led him to a pair of high coach doors which were opened to disclose the dim interior of the first shed.

  He went in, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dim light filtering down from a skylight high overhead. Large wooden hoppers stood against one wall together with a large number of hessian sacks bulging with coke. A number of oil lamps were ranged along a shelf to one side of the door.

  ‘Hello,’ said Lemprière. No-one answered. He picked up one of the oil lamps and began to walk the length of the shed in search of matches. The partition dividing it from the next shed ended a few yards short of the far wall. Lemprière realised that the entrances were staggered. He had to walk the length of each shed to find exits which were always at the far end from the entrance. He proceeded in a formal zigzag into the second shed, just as narrow, just as high as the first. He could smell wet clay. The floor plan of this part of the Manufactory was now clearer to him and he moved more confidently past a row of low vats with buckets hung on the wall behind them. He skipped over some sort of stirring device, tripped on another and fell heavily against the last vat, saving himself only by grasping the bucket on the wall behind which slowly pulled its hook out of the wall and emptied a stream of ground glass into the vat. The unlit lamp fell softly into the glass-covered clay as Lemprière himself teetered on the edge, this way, that way, finally falling back towards a large chimney breast. He rested against it for a second, then smelt burning. His hand! The bricks were scorching hot. The chimney formed one side of a huge kiln. He blew on his palm and felt cautiously in the vat for the lamp. Undamaged.

  Lemprière removed the hood and set about opening the heavy door to the kiln. A touch of the wick against still hot coals brought it flaring into life. He returned once more to the vat and tried in vain to scoop glass out of the clay. Eventually he replaced the bucket in defeat. The lamp threw huge shadows up the shed’s steep walls. On the side of the vat, the word “Stalkart” had been scrawled in green chalk, the letters “H.O.” beneath it. Lemprière went on, past the kiln, picking his way around flat-bed trolleys, coils of rope, shovels and a large water tank, into the fourth shed where the landscape suddenly changed.

  Faces stared out of the walls, limbs hung inertly from indented shoulders and hips, animals inverted themselves in snarling attitudes. Moulds, he realised. He hurried to pick a way through the narrow corridor between their stacked ranks. The fourth shed brought him out into a corner of the hanger he had seen from outside.

  A few of the moulds seemed to have spilled out into this wider space. They were large hemispherical affairs, irregular inverse domes about five feet across. Something was scrawled on each, green chalk again. “Stalkart” again, now “M. Stalkart”, and “H.O.” was “Hmkt. Op.”. He looked more closely. Inside-out tortoises, Lemprière realised, giant ones….

  The hanger was a warehouse. Its interior stretched away into a darkness well beyond the flickering apron of lamp-light. The far wall was invisible. It was filled with statues, pale, almost luminous effigies. Blind eyes stared at him as he held up the lamp. Hundreds of them, thousands, a petrified forest sewn from dragons’ teeth. Cupids and little cherubim, gods and goddesses arrayed in a vast, disorganised tableau. He could see Pomona, Father Time, Neptune ‘with an urn….’ and without, a trio of Graces, Samson, Hercules strangling vipers, Zeus with his thunderbolt, all in Coade stone, standing there like silent witnesses. And all of them seemed to be looking towards himself. Three women held out their arms, the first veiled head to toe, the second helmeted, the third rising out of a stony spume: Juno, Minerva and Venus awaiting the judgment of Paris. Lemprière placed an apple in each of their open hands and sniggered to himself. The goddesses looked on, unamused.

  A soft clanking reached his ears from somewhere above. He held the light up and saw chains, long looping chains hung with hooks every ten feet or so suspended from heavy rails, a lattice of them criss-crossing the whole warehouse. Some sort of lifting system. The statues were arranged too closely for….

  Bang! It was the door, the door to the first shed and Lemprière was a trespasser, a thief, a spy come for the formula. He froze, then moved towards the statues thinking to hide himself in their midst. Click, from somewhere in their ranks, then, click, click, click…. Something crashed to the floor in the second shed.

  … click, click, click, taut mental surfaces rose out of zero-states. Lemprière heard stone grind on stone, somewhere back there, in the dark they were moving. Footsteps? Footsteps! Coming closer, in the third shed now, and he could not bring himself to walk into the mass of statues, with their limbs twitching in the half-light, stone moving against stone. He looked around quickly, thought to douse the lamp and, even as he cast around for a hiding place, even in his panic as the steps grew louder, drew nearer, a cool clear voice in his head which was not his voice said, ‘it begins again, you know its outline, only your attendance is required now….’ Not his head. Where else?

  Lemprière pulled a tortoise mould away from the wall, heavier than he thought. He crawled under the bowl of its shell and lowered it like a trapdoor to cover him as the footsteps rounded the corner of the last shed. He stuffed his fingers in his mouth, not because he was frightened, though he was, but because as the lip of the shell had lowered he saw the three goddesses he had earlier sniggered at close their fingers on the apples and apple pulp ooze between their stone knuckles and drip to the floor. Dead. He was s
haking, trying not to breathe as the footsteps halted and the manoeuvres began.

  An air hole. Lemprière pressed his eye to it, cowering in the tortoise mould. He heard footsteps circle about him. He could see the blank faces of statues lit by yellow lamp light. Not his light. A shadow, close up to the air hole, another, someone had walked past, ankles, skirts, long black hair as she moved further away. Were those anklets, leather bands set with turquoise? Recognition dawned as she half-turned, he tried to rise, an inch and something slammed down on the mould, something covered the air hole.

  ‘Juliette!’ he shouted. She was walking into the midst of the statues.

  ‘Get away!’ He heard the grinding sound grow louder, penetrating the shell of the mould and then a soft exclamation, ‘Oh’, an unsurprised tone. The grinding grew louder and he strained his back to throw off the mould but it was held fast. He kicked and shouted again. Something cracked inside the mould, a shard of Coade Stone which his feet had broken off. He grasped it and hammered blindly but it was no good. He could feel the shard cutting his hand. Outside, there was a softer sound, a sucking sound, like a boot caught in mud as it comes free, suck…. The chains began to move and rattle dully.

  Click. The air hole was uncovered. The statues were unchanged, unmoved. He pushed again and found he was able to lift the weight of the mould. He rose and stood upright. A lamp was burning, placed on the floor some yards behind him.

  ‘Juliette?’ he called hesitantly, then again, louder. The chains swung softly, their links clicking against one another. He picked up the lamp and held it high, trying to peer through the ranks of statues. Somewhere, a tank was leaking. He moved a little closer, craning his head. A steady drip, somewhere in the sheds, behind him.