Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘Trousers?’

  ‘Shirt, pardon me, though you wouldn’t have known it for one. Stay clear of the knave, that’s my prescription.’

  ‘Right you are,’ said Lemprière, still laughing.

  ‘Ah, John,’ Septimus clapped him on the back. ‘I’ve been out of sorts. Forgive me.’ He moved towards the door which Lemprière held open. ‘I know I came here for a reason,’ said Septimus as he left, ‘but damn me if I haven’t forgotten what it is.’

  Lemprière saluted and watched him take the stairs two at a time. He closed the door. Then he stopped laughing. How long would it take? Two, three minutes.

  Lemprière took the coat from the chair, turned it inside out and rolled it in a tight bundle. Then he climbed to the next floor and knocked softly on the door. He heard a chair scrape and footsteps move quickly across the floor.

  ‘About time….’ as the door opened. ‘I’ve waited…. Oh.’ The tailor looked up and saw that it was Lemprière. His expression switched from annoyance to surprise, then back to annoyance. ‘I told you before,’ he said quickly, ‘trousers only. Now if you don’t mind….’ And he made as if to close the door.

  ‘Trousers,’ said Lemprière, holding up the bundle and placing his foot against the door.

  ‘Too busy!’ the tailor shouted.

  ‘Trousers!’ Lemprière brandished his coat. Then he leaned against the door and nudged. The tailor fell back and Lemprière walked into the room.

  ‘Where are your children?’ he asked innocently. ‘And your wife?’ The tailor was silent. ‘The work you are so busy with? Needles? Thread?’ But the tailor only stood in sullen silence.

  Lemprière looked about the room. A narrow bed, desk, chair, books stacked against the far wall. It was identical to his own.

  ‘Who were you expecting?’ he asked, though he had known the answer as soon as the tailor had mistaken him for his overdue visitor. He was the same height, his clothes similarly dark. ‘What are you doing?’

  The answer lay on the desk. The last entries of his dictionary were stacked next to an identical pile. A neat and exact copy. Lemprière stared at them in silence.

  ‘You have copied my dictionary,’ he said. The “tailor” nodded. ‘All of it?’ The nod was given again. Lemprière thought for a moment. ‘The signatures,’ he said. ‘How did you….’

  ‘Left ‘em out. Dates too. Don’t know why they were there in the first place.’

  ‘Copyright, Mister Copyist,’ Lemprière replied sharply.

  ‘Makes no odds, no difference at all,’ the copyist said. Lemprière digested this information, then changed tack.

  ‘Pays well does he, Mister Praeceps?’ The purpose of Septimus’ visit to the house was now abundantly clear, even if it had not been so to Septimus himself.

  ‘Well enough. Look here Mister Lemprière.’ The man’s tone was earnest. ‘It’s not so strange to make a copy. For safe-keeping, I mean. Cadell’s place isn’t fire-proof….’

  ‘Without my knowledge? In secret? Behind my back?’ The thought that as he had written his dictionary, a clerk stationed directly above him was tracing every line of his pen, duplicating every word that he wrote, angered him in a way he could not readily explain. The action seemed somehow to mock him. Lemprière gathered up both piles from the desk.

  ‘I don’t know why he wanted them.’ The copyist tried to placate him, but Lemprière pushed past the man clutching the last of his dictionary. He slammed the door and stamped down the stairs, baffled and angry and curious all at once. But then he forgot the papers and his rolled-up coat, his bafflement ceased and his anger evaporated. His curiosity was a memory of curiosity, postponed and half-forgotten already for Juliette was standing alone at his door.

  She wore a dress of cream linen. He recognised it as the one she had worn when she first descended from the coach outside the church in the parish of Saint Martin’s. Then, she had appeared as a fabulous, quite untouchable creature. An apparition. She turned to him as he approached. The hills and parched grasslands of Jersey seemed very far away, that summer a different age. She was quite beautiful. That had not changed.

  ‘You came,’ he said.

  She sat on the bed. He watched her from the chair. At first he had been tongue-tied. The events which had befallen him were dammed up inside him. If he extracted just one, the whole torrent would descend and drown them both. She reminded him of the afternoon in the library and they both laughed quickly, then stopped as the memory became a prelude. She had heard of his work, his dictionary. He realised that he still clutched its last sheets in his hand and released them, along with his coat.

  ‘It is finished then?’ she said, and he nodded. They both sat very straight in their places.

  ‘You could go home….’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I could,’ he answered without really thinking. When he looked across at her he saw a kind of appeal in her expression. ‘Come with me, come back with me,’ he said quickly. He knew what he wanted now. ‘We could leave this….’

  ‘No!’ she broke in. ‘I cannot, I cannot tell you why; that is why I came. Go now John, simply go.’

  ‘Your father….’

  ‘What do you know?’ Suddenly all her composure left her. ‘Tell me!’ she implored him.

  Lemprière was startled. He began to tell what Walter had said, that she was held a virtual prisoner, what his own perceptions told him, her terror in the archive only the day before. But as he spoke of Viscount Casterleigh he saw her expression change from pleading to resignation. Her head dropped.

  ‘The Viscount is not my father,’ she said. ‘I am only his ward. Nothing more.’

  ‘Then leave, leave now,’ he urged her.

  ‘He knows who my father is,’ she replied. ‘He will tell me soon….’ Her voice was hopeless. ‘I must stay till then, I know he will tell me. In the end he must tell me….’ She talked on in this way but more and more to herself as though she had rehearsed it too many times. At length, she fell silent. Lemprière began again to argue that she should come with him back to Jersey. Juliette sat shaking her head.

  ‘I do not know how you are able even to look at me!’ she burst out. Lemprière stopped in mid-sentence. Slowly, his cheeks reddened.

  ‘I knew nothing of it until much later,’ she said. ‘Believe me, I beg you.’ He looked away, two images rising irresistibly before his mind’s eye: his father’s body, torn and bloody, rolling over in its death throes, and the body of the girl who sat before him now, naked as she was in the pool.

  ‘I thought,’ he began and cleared his throat. ‘I thought it was my fault, you see. It is why I wrote this.’ He indicated the last sheets of paper. ‘There were other things; at the De Veres’, at Coade’s….’ The memories silenced him for a moment. ‘But it was not my fault.’ He gathered himself.

  ‘No,’ said Juliette.

  ‘The dogs, they would have known you of course, and not my father. Perhaps if he had lain still as I did, then it would not have happened. Such things do happen, I understand that and I suppose we have to accept them….’ Now he was the one to address himself as he explained the accident to her. When he looked up again her expression had changed. Juliette’s face was aghast and amazed at the same time. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘I could not help but see you….’

  ‘I know you saw. It does not matter,’ she said quickly.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘John, nothing keeps you here. Go, please go.’ She rose and Lemprière rose too.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said.

  ‘I cannot. Do you not see how I am here? I must return.’

  ‘Then I will come.’

  ‘No,’ she said. But Lemprière’s mind was fixed. ‘No,’ she said again as Lemprière made to follow her. He opened his mouth to protest and she closed it with her own. She kissed him, then he felt her pull him forward. They sank together down onto the bed.

  ‘Damn you,’ she was pulling at his shirt. His hand was tangled in her
hair.

  ‘Damn us both,’ he gasped. Juliette put her hand over his mouth.

  ‘Yes,’ she said …

  The air in the room turned to heat and circled slowly over them both. Twice she whispered, ‘Do you sleep?’ Twice she heard him murmur in reply. She lay by his side, still half-dressed. The third time he was silent. She whispered, ‘Can you really not know?’ He shifted in his sleep. Juliette rose silently and stood at the foot of the bed, looking down at him. He slept with his knees pulled up to his chest. She bent to gather her clothes and he stirred. She froze, then went on with her task. She crept quietly from the room and dressed on the landing outside. His ignorance was a miracle. A gift to her. If he knew what had truly befallen his father, he would never give up. Yet he did not know and, as she crept downstairs, she thought of her own father, whoever he was. His usurper, the Viscount, would be waiting with his partners. It was her own ignorance which bound her to them. She looked down once again at the sleeping form. His, she thought, might still keep him away.

  The stair creaked as she descended and she stood still for a moment, listening in the dark. Then she went on, out of the door and into the street where their different kinds of unknowing parted company. At the very top of the staircase, a pair of eyes opened and a body cramped from the long wait stirred in the darkness.

  Lemprière fell back panting, exhausted, emptied. He felt her body fit itself to his own. Her breathing slowed. He heard her voice whisper to him. She was warm even in the warmth of the room. A faint breeze entered through the windows and circled slowly over them both. She whispered again perhaps, but her voice was more distant this time. His own breath fell into rhythm with hers, rocking them gently towards and away from each other, towards sleep.

  The sound from the staircase would have to reach very deep to find him. When his eyes opened it would not be only at that sound. Her going would be felt as a disturbance along the axis of his body. An imbalance, a dream as his arm reached across for her. It would become true and his breath would stutter. His eyes would open and already he would know she had gone. Then he would rise and run to the window and catch a glimpse of her before she turned the corner. Then, when he awoke, she was gone.

  Lemprière was pulling on his coat and boots, half-running, half-falling down the stairs, half-dressed, half-awake, stumbling and running after her down Southampton Street, turning into the Strand and seeing her already a hundred yards away in the half-light of the full moon which bleached her dress from cream to bright white, a moving beacon which he ran for down the empty highway. She had fled once again. It must be the early hours. The moon was low in the eastern sky; the breeze a little stronger now. She turned, saw him and ran. At the top of the staircase, the figure rose slowly in the dark and rubbed aching limbs before moving down the stairs after them both.

  Lemprière ran past white stucco arches and bow-fronted windows, railings and brickwork pitted with shadows cast by the moonlight. He skipped low piles of rubbish and skirted larger mounds of market debris in his pursuit. She ran ahead of him and in every street he gained on her until she turned a corner and then, when he rounded it himself, she would be further away than ever as though the streets themselves were stretching every time he lost sight of her. She took narrow alleys and passages which zigzagged west across the city and he kept after her, closing and falling back, while the silent buildings rose up and around them. When he rounded the corner from Cockspur Street he thought he had lost her. He was in Haymarket and the citizens abroad at that hour were shuffling slowly. None of them were her. The broad steps of the Opera House passed to his right, then he heard a door swing shut behind him. He turned but saw nothing. He stopped and walked back a few paces. A narrow alley ran down the side of the theatre. It was pitch black. Lemprière let his hand guide him as he walked down the alley’s length. Suddenly the stones of the wall gave way, he pushed and a door swung open. He entered and found himself in a corridor which curved away to left and right. A faint light glowed from one direction. Lemprière closed the door behind him and moved towards it. He heard a low noise which became a dull roar as he drew nearer. The corridor led him in a long curve to a flight of stairs. The noise was much louder, a cacophony of shouting and screaming. He pulled aside a curtain and jerked his head back, shielding his eyes.

  The auditorium was a blaze of light. Oil lamps and candles were ranged all around the tiers and stage. He had entered from the side, between the pit and the first row of seats. The auditorium was a heaving mass of costumed humanity crammed with bodies that shouted and cursed one another as they surged forward and back, clambering over and between the seats, filling the stage and pit with hugely confused conflict. Swords and spears were being waved; the garbled din was deafening. Lemprière shrank against the wall as revellers careered towards and away from him clutching bottles, makeshift weapons and each other. He seemed to be ignored as he over-looked the reeling horde. Of Juliette, there was still no sign.

  He stayed back and saw that there was some order to the scene before him. His first thought was of a factional masquerade. It had started well enough perhaps, with polite conversation and genial unmaskings and all the paraphernalia of the bon ton, but something had gone wrong, convention succumbed to the bottle, acerbic wit descended to abuse, reasonable doubt to madness. Everyone wore dominoes - loose enveloping smocks of black or white linen - and crude wooden face masks with holes for the eyes and mouth. Inept fighting was breaking out in the pit between black smocks and white smocks, clumsy blows being struck by bottle-wielding warriors of both colours. Then, as he watched, a number of the black smocks turned tail and the white smocks pressed forward, clouting them with ineffectual swords (wood? he wondered) as they retreated to the back of the auditorium where, under the first of the rising tiers, a man in black stood with crossed arms. He was a giant.

  He looked again for Juliette but she was nowhere in the auditorium, nor in the orchestra pit, nor on the stage where the white smocks flocked (some of them seeming oblivious to the conflict below) and towards which he was now swept as the white smocks also retreated. An uneasy truce held all in check. The black smocks gathered in a chanting, shouting line in front of the foremost seats. The white smocks similarly, on the edge of the stage. They had their own giant, not as large as the black smocks’, who seemed to lead them and then Lemprière felt himself being manhandled by his neighbours up onto the stage and towards the giant who thrust a long wooden sword into his hands and clapped him on the back at which the white smocks cheered before taking him by the arms, struggling hopelessly as he was thrown from the stage into the pit, acutely conscious in his pink coat of being on display, his sponsors still cheering and looking up to see his challenger from the black smocks standing in front of him holding a sword just like his own, except that the challenging giant brought it down on a chair lying between them both which splintered as the steel blade hit six inches into the floor. Amongst all the props and shoddy machinery of this sham, the sword was real and his challenger, he saw now, wore horns and behind his mask his mouth opened to roar the cuckold’s challenge at him. ‘Paris!’

  Lemprière rose to his feet. For a moment he held his wooden sword up before him, then he thought, ‘I am insane to believe this.’ Menelaus advanced. Lemprière dropped his lolling weapon to scramble back onto the stage where the black-smocked giant berated him for a coward and a soft seducer but Lemprière ignored his taunts and pushed his way through the crush to the back of the stage where he began pulling the masks off his fellow Trojans. He found faces caked with rouge, smeared with paint and paste, pockmarked faces, toothless mouths and eyes rolling in their sockets from the drink. Even as he scraped the grease paint off the shoddy illusion, he thought of the sword shuddering in the wood of the floor and wondered, ‘Where was Aphrodite with her cloud of mist to carry me to safety?’ But the answer to that lay an hour past and a mile back on the narrow bed in his room where she had shown him once and for all that she was flesh and blood, and human as himself, unle
ss that too was all illusion. He shouted, ‘Juliette!’ But the clamour drowned him out and no-one turned to claim the name.

  Behind him, the white-smocked Trojans surged forward again and the black-smocked Greeks fell back behind barricades of seats, hurling empty bottles and wooden lances and bits of seating at their attackers. The Trojan leader, Lemprière’s scolder, Hector, crashes through and lays the Greeks to waste, throwing one against the wall, another over his shoulder, a third into his fellows. The black giant is unmoved, a brooding Achilles, as Hector finds himself surrounded then driven back to the foot of the stage. He seizes the brave leader of this counter-attack by the throat until he crumples and lies still. The black-smocked Achilles moves at last. Dashing aside white-smocked warriors with either hand, casually swatting off the Trojan missiles, he reaches Hector who races up and down in front of the stage. Olympian trapeze artists swing down from the gods, back and forth, whispering for him to stand and fight. The advice is taken - a mistake. Achilles catches him and brings him down with a single terrible blow. Auditorium left, two pantomime horses trot in drawing a chariot with one damaged wheel and gilt paint flaking off the cheap coachwork which disintegrates under Achilles’ bulk and he drags Hector around the auditorium himself. (Grief-stricken ululation from the Trojans and the exposure of Hecuba’s breast.) Achilles tires, stops and uncorks a bottle while, on the stage, Paris sees his Helen escaping through the screen to the rear of the stage and shouts ‘Juliette!’ over the din. Her head turns and she mouths ‘Go back!’ once more over her shoulder as he struggles to push the Trojan bodies aside.

  So the pursuit began again. Backstage, the props department was already hard at work on the shattered chariot. The pantomime horses had divided about the midriff and their occupants, red-faced and sweating, were refreshing themselves with cold flannels and beer. Costumes were strewn everywhere about the floor, bright chintzes and gauze, animal heads and unconvincing armour. He looked up and saw that the ceiling extended to the height of the building. Ropes and pulleys hung down, together with swaying ladders which reached up to flimsy platforms and catwalks a hundred feet or more above him. Odd bits of scenery hung suspended in mid-air: a triumphal arch, a mountain, several trees and a contraption of irregular tubes painted blue and white with handles to rotate them which was, he guessed, the sea.