SYLVIE'S RIDDLE

by WALL, ALAN

  She walked quickly back up the stairs, slammed the cellar door, walked into the kitchen, downed the glass of wine in one gulp and then poured herself another. She went over to the phone, picked it up and dialled a number. She didn't need to look it up. After a few rings, the voice came on, cultured, slow and warm. Henry.

  'The Riverside Gallery. How may I help you?'

  'It's me.'

  'So how is he?'

  'In fucking Llandudno, recovering his memories, almost certainly the wrong ones, I should think, knowing Owen. I'm mighty sick of most of mine at the moment, I can tell you. Particularly the ones containing the word Owen. Be more than happy to dump the lot.'

  'Want to come over?' She hesitated. 'Is it all right?'

  'I'll get rid of all the belly dancers and temple prostitutes, change the silk sheets and ... bingo.'

  'You're on.'

  'Take-away?'

  'As long as we can have it in the Picasso Room.'

  'Have to be pizza then. Pablo might rise from his Iberian grave if there were to be a smell of curry in there.'

  'Pizza is fine. Pink period for me. You can have the blue.

  Make mine vegetarian, remember. Don't want to be having bad dreams. Not with so many minotaurs about.'

  'What time?'

  'I'll have a shower, then set off. About an hour and a half.' She cleaned herself up, chose some nice clothes, black silk, white cotton. Old-fashioned erotica. Henry was very predictable in some ways, and at this moment she was grateful for the fact.

  She stripped slowly in front of the mirror. Item after item of clothing came off, and she tried to see herself as a man might see her. Until the delta itself was revealed and he had no choice now but to enter. The mirror was a man looking. Owen, for example.

  And was that how Alex Gregory had done it? No, her attraction was to be taken surely, not to offer herself at all.

  To be taken. Owen had seen that, and that was precisely how he had used her, in both Time's Widow and Deva. She'd had the clothes taken from her both times.

  Naked now, Sylvie stared at the mirror, which stared back.

  'I hate you, Owen Treadle. And the way you use people to turn them into images. I don't care how good the images are. That's not what human beings are for. It's not what that girl was for. You took the food right out of her mouth.'

  Why can't mirrors cry? They do, of course, but only do it if you go first.

  She walked back into the bedroom and looked at the photograph of herself and Owen on the dressing table. Nine inches higher than her own head, Owen's black throw of hair and dark eyes were the first thing to strike you. But Sylvie repayed her own close attention, that almost blonde hair combed back from a face of delicate features, green eyes, small sharp nose. Vivacious: that's how her features had been described more than once. The laughing girl, they'd called her; that was before her marriage. Tiny lines had started mapping the years at the edges of her eyes since that shot had been taken. Hardly surprising, really. And she was perhaps a few pounds heavier these days, but still very attractive. If she ever had any doubts about that, the next fellow down the line trying to get her into bed soon removed them. As she pulled her stockings on, she started smiling. Putting things on with such care so someone else can take them off with the same attention later. She found the symmetry pleasing. Sylvie Treadle was going to be entirely Sylvie Ashton tonight.

  A little over an hour after climbing into her car she arrived at the riverside road in Shrewsbury where Henry had his gallery.

  The Riverside Gallery had become Henry's when his third and most tranquil marriage had ended with his wife's death. Eleanor had been considerably older and not in the best of health from the start. Henry always spoke of her with warmth and affection, but Sylvie couldn't help wondering if he might have married the gallery as much as the woman. Anyway, it was now his to do with as he chose. A large white building with black wooden cladding, it was a curious warren of mis-shaped rooms, and low-hung rafters. Henry had divided it up into sections for the public, where he hung his saleable wares, and those parts where you needed special permission to enter, like the living quarters, the kitchen, the bedroom and, most of all, the Picasso Room. The pictures on the wall in there were very much not for sale. Sylvie parked her little car in the drive, looked at the river for a moment, the river that was the cause of so many of Henry's nightmares, and then pushed open the large door, ringing the bell as she walked through.

  Physically, Henry was everything that Owen wasn't. Did that apply mentally too? She wasn't sure about that. Where Owen was tall and thin, Henry was short and, not fat exactly, but loose about the waist. He had the unbuttoned look of a Regency Lord. And Henry's hair had greyed all round its untrimmed edges. He was drinking red wine, as usual. After kissing her smilingly (why did Owen always seem to frown when he kissed?) he offered her a glass, which she took.

  'The river is behaving itself. '

  'For the moment. I still think we'll probably get a chance to test the new defences before long. Shall we go and sit in the Picasso Room then?'

  'If I'm still allowed. '

  'You're always allowed, you know that.'

  'It's a privilege.'

  'It certainly is.'

  *

  It had begun when Henry had first moved in to the gallery with Eleanor She had already managed to buy three of the etchings from the Vollard Suite, two of them featuring the minotaur that so obsessed Picasso throughout his life. And the same images soon started to obsess Henry too. When his wife had finally died, and the resources of the gallery had become his in their entirety, he had pursued these images with some determination. Picasso etchings were not as expensive as much of his other work. Henry now had all fifteen of the Vollard Suite prints which featured the minotaur, and they filled the walls of the Picasso Room. Minotaurs and the women they consumed, or were in their turn consumed by.

  'How do you know they're authentic, out of interest?'

  'Well, the first look tells me usually. But if I need to check there's the watermark. Some say Vollard; some Picasso, unless it's one of the fifty copies on Montval paper watermarked Papeterie Montgolfier a Montval. They're all distinctive. Then there's the sizes, of course: either I33/8 of an inch by 175/16or 151/8 by 1911/16.'

  'You're showing off, Henry.'

  'I know. But they haven't tended to sell at huge prices over the years, so it would be unlikely for someone to go to all the trouble of an elaborate forgery for something they wouldn't be making all that much money out of. It's all rudimentary Sherlock Holmes stuff. But the ones in this room are authentic, you can take my word for that.'

  It was in fact these images that had introduced Henry to Sylvie in the first place. Owen had made a film with John called Inside the Cave. It was characteristically clever and wide-ranging. Images from the caves at Lascaux and Chauvet were interspersed with related images from much later in history, and the most related image of all was Picasso's minotaur, a votive offering to that labyrinth of confusion which constitutes a man's life, mind and body. At least that's what she thought the film meant. Owen and Johnny’s films never exactly spelt themselves out, and Owen would never discuss them much. Anyway, it had been the kind of subject that intrigued her, given her own studies of the image and its afterlife. She had been around during the shoot at the Riverside and so had inevitably met the proprietor; one Henry Allardyce; she had even asked if she might come to his gallery some time after the filming had ended, to study these images from the Vollard Suite when they had a little more stillness about them. She had explained her work; even hinted, not too subtly, that it was from her work that the idea for the film had come, which was almost certainly true. A tiny acknowledgment at the bottom of the film credits hinted at this, though it had never seemed to her to be a sufficient admission of the debt. And she had arrived here one late afternoon with her notebook and pen, while Owen was off with Johnny filming somewhere in Romania. Henry had sat looking at her with an expression of undisguised longing,
which she needed at the time, and it had all begun that night.

  If you had come in through the main gallery, this is what you would have seen. A lovely little Peter Lanyon, still probably underpriced; a sort of semi-abstract portrait in oils of a coastline, the boats rendered flat and diagrammatic and yet the whole somehow dynamic and surging. A Nolan Rimbaud; African desert miscegenated with the Australian outback, and a man who was half-animal, half-poet. Some curious early works of David Jones which another dealer had had to unload in a hurry. Early charcoals by Gaudier-Brzeska of a dancer. A Craigie Aitchison crucifixion, with a sunset as geometrized as a pyramid behind it. Christ's arms bore brightly coloured birds which appeared to be singing to him. Never had death by ritual torture looked so enchanting. All sorts of modem half-abstract sculptures. A maze of Ayrton's, which you could look down on like Daedalus. But something happened along the corridor separating this gallery from the Picasso Room. Sylvie sensed the shift each time she came. A corridor leading to a cave.

  She looked hard at the blinded minotaur led away by a girl with a face like a blazing candle. So many hairy men, their animality touched momentarily with sublimity by the beauty of the female shape they contemplate. All the dark mysteries of life, the endless death and birth which Picasso took as his subject matter. Man, he seems to say, is a minotaur, a courtier, a bullfighter, an artist. He studies the woman to understand the mystery of entering another human being, to fathom the unfathomable mystery of creation. He becomes Rembrandt, he becomes lngres, he becomes a bull hunted to death. But the woman doesn't have to become anything except what she is. That was what Picasso seemed to think. Sylvie would have begged to differ.

  There was a ring of the door-bell. The pizzas had arrived. They sat and munched.

  'This is the vegetarian one, is it?' Sylvie asked, suspicious. 'Don't think there's much of any substance in either of them, to be honest. They make them out of some sort of technicolour straw. Doubt any living creature has ever been near either yours or mine, apart from the bloke on the moped who just did the delivery, and I'm not entirely convinced about his credentials as a form of organic life either, if we're getting technical. Shouldn't worry about it if I were you. Have another glass of wine.'

  Take-away pizza and chianti in large crystal glasses. Sylvie chewed distractedly and looked at the image from the Vollard Suite she was sitting before. The minotaur was a tangle, knotted in the threads of his own baffling desire. And this tangle mingled with the other tangle that was the woman; the tangle of her hair, cranial and pubic, the tangle of her own insides, of her children yet to be born, their dark knotted lifelines. Sylvie chewed and looked.

  'Worked it all out yet?' he asked, without taking his eyes off another of the prints.

  'No.'

  This was the chapter 'Labyrinth' in Afterlife of the Image. This was what had originally brought her out here. She sometimes wondered if it might be what still did. And Henry occasionally wondered the same thing.

  'Lascaux. Chauvet.'

  'Altamira. '

  'Those figures, what are they called again?'

  'Therianthropes. '

  'Remind me.'

  'Part man, part animal.'

  'Like the minotaur.'

  'Like the minotaur. Also like shamans, who dress up with headgear representing an animal.'

  'And Goya.'

  'The Black Paintings. Locked up in his house, curtains drawn, painting directly on the walls. Creatures of preternatural power.'

  'Like Therianthropes.'

  'Maybe.'

  'The craving to make and see images in the dark.'

  'Picasso painted through the night.'

  'And then see them in some sort of ritual. Like going to the cinema and waiting for the lights to go down, is that what you're saying? Or watching Dylan up on stage: wasn't he another of your images?'

  'He was Hamlet dressed in black, telling all the merrymakers to stop making merry. And Lennon: don't forget Lennon. My paper on the iconography of the Beatles for the Institute got me into all this in the first place. Went down well in Liverpool.'

  'Why them?'

  'Because they really got started underground, in a place called The Cavern, wearing those animal skins we call leather jackets, and because when Brian Epstein was stopped dead on the pavement outside, it wasn't because the sound they were making was more sophisticated than the ones he'd heard before, but because it was more primitive. I suppose primitive here means finding and expressing a form. Primitive means escaping what Brancusi said realism had become by the beginning of the twentieth century: "a confusion of familiarities". It was what primitivism offered to artistic form that led Picasso to these shapes on your walls. '

  'But how can you ever tie all thus stuff together?'

  'I can't as yet. That's why the book stays unfinished. But I think you'll find, when it does get tied, that it will be through lenses and constellations.'

  'Which lenses did your man from the Upper Palaeolithic use then?' She put down her glass, and pointed both her index fingers, one to the left eye, one to the right.

  'And are we in the labyrinth here then?'

  'Certainly looks that way from the images on your walls, Henry.'

  'The Riverside Gallery. Home of the Shropshire minotaur.

  Featuring the famous Knossos take-away pizza. '

  'And there must have been the odd boatload of virgins brought here to sate your appetites, surely.'

  'I fear you exaggerate.'

  'Maybe at least an occasional evening of rumpy-pumpy with a local Shrewsbury slapper?' Henry put down his glass and looked grave.

  'There are no slappers in Shrewsbury, my dear. All the womenfolk about these parts are fragrant and cultured, little Mary Archers one and all, but without the vulgarity of the attendant husband.' By now Sylvie had finished all she could eat of the pizza, and was concentrating on her wine. It was very nice; no one could fault Henry's taste in wine. But what about his taste in women?

  'Don't mind me asking, Henry, but you did say you'd been married three times.'

  'I had three very successful marriages, yes.'

  'What's that like? I mean, I've only ever done it once, and I find myself getting curious as to what the experience might be like on the occasion of a repeat performance. Does it get any easier?'

  Henry had now finished his pizza, and re-filled his glass from the bottle. He held the bottle up beckoningly, but Sylvie shook her head. Never could keep up with Henry's intake.

  'I wouldn't say easier, no. It's probably a bit like parachute-jumping: you grow more aware of the perils each time you do it, but that doesn't necessarily stop you. I'm not sure I'd trust memory here, if I were you. I certainly don't. But let's be chronological. My first wife and I were completely unsuited. But neither of us were to know that at the time, were we? She worked in one of those high-rise offices, where money sub-divides itself into fresh-faced zeros; it was a sort of high-tech perch, and she was a raptor surveying the bright new world below. They called it London in those days. She was so efficient that by the end I felt I couldn't even sleep in her presence without provoking her to fury. She would explain to me in the morning how untidily I slept, how raggedly I dreamed, what a noisy somnambulist I'd become, grunting and groaning and casting all the sheets around.'

  'Like a minotaur.'

  'Like a minotaur, staying over in the guest room of a convent.

  They're famously light sleepers, particularly when there are virgins around.

  'By the end even her cooking seemed to reproach me. She'd serve up these perfect little lasagnes, with a sprig of the neatest herb you've ever seen. Fennel, I seem to recall, straight out of the culinary clinic. Swiss greenery. The cleanest of all possible greens. I felt the meals should be eating me rather than the other way round. Lovemaking was similarly tidy, strictly time-tabled. Try not to make too much noise, Henry. This is a terraced house, after all. Can't you stay in one place for more than ten seconds, for heaven's sake?'

  'So you
got divorced.'

  'Yes, that was very neat too, if recollection serves.'

  'What happened next?'

  'What happened next was Laura. Ah Laura. Mad as a bloody hatter.' He took a deep drink of his wine for solace, and smiled briefly at the absurdity of life. His own and, if she was reading him aright, everyone else's too.

  'So what attracted you then?'

  'Erotomania, that's what. There were two Lauras; one in bed, one out. The one on the mattress could make you forget the other one for hours at a time, even days. Years of training as a trumpet-player meant that she had developed a particular gift for embouchement ... But forgive me, I didn't mean to become indelicate ... '

  Play your cards right and you might have a trip down memory lane later, Sylvie thought. She felt, to borrow a phrase, that she owed him one.

  'So was that the marriage that ended badly?'

  'No, I seem to recall it ended rather well. It was the beginning and the middle bits that were awful. Eighteen months of non-communication, punctuated by bouts of uncontrolled Dionysian frenzy on our lavender silk sheets. Still, it could have been worse. She might still be here.'

  Instead of me, Sylvie thought. 'And the last one?'

  'The last one was Eleanor, God bless her. A lovely woman, who gave me all this. All this and more.' Henry faltered. For the first time, she sensed some real pain beneath the seeming insouciance.

  'Not tempted by misogamy then, Henry?'

  'Might be, if I knew what it was.'

  'Detestation of the honourable estate of matrimony. '

  'No, not at all. Not sure how soon I'll be doing it again myself, you know, but I wouldn't want to put anyone else off. One of life's intriguing journeys. Might you be planning another little trip, by any chance?'

  The journey down into the delta, she heard herself saying silently, without really thinking it. Owen's terminology, that. Go away, Owen. Two things never failed Owen, however often his memory did: his words and his prick.