Tomorrow

by Damian Dibben

  ‘My younger brother, always helping me. However cruel I am, he forgives. However conceited. Remember the times I visited you at court and would not allow you to say you were my kin, too vain to be connected with an employee?’

  ‘In the past, yes. But I see you are changed.’

  ‘Let me die.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m a coward.’

  ‘You are not. What is it you did in Antwerp? The black stone. Look.’ He pulls up Vilder’s shirt to show the scar. ‘You cut yourself open. For me. That took nerve. You nursed me too, did you not? You said you nursed me.’

  ‘One single good act in all my life.’

  ‘No, no, you realized you were wrong and made amends.’

  ‘And two days ago, when you arrived, I was too spineless to face you. One single good act in my life. That is the sum of me.’

  ‘No, no, I’ll not hear of it.’

  Vilder takes my master up by his collar. ‘Tomorrow waited for you. He sat on cathedral steps and waited. A hundred and twenty-seven years. He has courage. I cannot even contain the notion of what he did in my scared little mind. Or what you endured. You are both legend. I am a coward.’

  ‘No, no, surely you see—your realizing that is in itself laudable. It takes courage. I’ve done wrongs too. I have blame in this.’

  ‘Let me die, Valentyne.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let me die. It shames me to live.’

  I’d only seen my master livid once before, in Whitehall more than two hundred years ago when they argued then. ‘No! I forbid it!’ He picks up the phials and leaves the room.

  21

  VALENTYNE AND VILDER

  Opalheim, Westphalia, summer 1818

  The most surprising thing about Vilder’s decline is how sociable and warm he remains throughout it, how dignified in his downfall. It took only a few days for Valentyne to realize he would not win the battle with his brother, that Vilder’s course was set and my master could not stop it any more than he could a boulder that had dislodged from its furrow and started its descent down a mountainside.

  As summer comes, Vilder’s condition worsens. His hands and feet swell, whilst the fat evaporates from the rest of him. His skin darkens, particularly around the eyes and he can’t stop scratching himself. As his body deteriorates, his mind ever more reinvigorates. He becomes fascinated by everything. He explores the mansion with an archaeologist’s zeal, as if it were new to him, opening up more and more forgotten rooms, uncovering disregarded artwork and scribbling intricate diagrams: ‘To help you with the restorers—after I have left.’ He spends nights in the library, too busy to sleep, poring over books like a wide-eyed youth, hungry for any and all knowledge, forever shaking his head in amazement at the things he discovers—or remembers—repeating passages to himself out loud, drawing his hands over ancient maps and astronomy charts. He even finds time to set off on excursions into the hills or the forest, sometimes camping overnight and returning full of stories and pocketfuls of fossils. He raids through the wardrobes, dressing up in his old clothes, a pageant of yesteryear, of epochs before even I was born. I note, as I always did, the flair he has for dressing, a poise that is entirely unaffected and that enriches whatever room he inhabits. He plays practical jokes on his brother, or on De la Mare, appearing like a ghost at the top of a stairway, as a medieval knight, or an Italian count. There is such a quantity of noise and he is so endearing that I forget we’re living in the time of his decay.

  In the middle of the night he totters into our bedroom in his nightshirt. ‘Valentyne, are you here?’

  ‘What is it?’ says my master, sitting up.

  ‘I need to talk to you. On an important matter.’

  ‘Can it wait until morning?’

  ‘No, no, it is urgent. Let me climb into bed and speak with you.’ Before my master can stop him, Vilder gets under the covers and shakes himself warm, giggling. ‘The chauffage will not come a moment too soon. I’ve always been a coward for the cold. Remember how we used to make a camp when we were boys? What a miser Father was even with fires.’

  There is a spell of silence, before my master says, ‘What is the important matter?’

  ‘In fact, there are two matters to discuss. Firstly, when I leave, you will burn me, understand? You’ll not agree on that point, I know. All humans differ on it, but do it. As the Romans did. Free my soul to the wind, so it may take its chances elsewhere. In another body it may fare better.’ He leans up and looks around. ‘Where is Tomorrow?’

  ‘Ssh. He’s sleeping in the corner there.’

  ‘Remarkable how he waited. I think I know why you called him that. I think I know.’

  There is another pause before my master says, ‘And the second matter?’

  ‘I need you to make another promise. Will you?’

  ‘If you’ll go to sleep.’

  ‘I want you to find a lady, Valentyne.’

  My master had been half dozing, but at once his eyes open completely. ‘What?’

  ‘A lady. Find one.’

  ‘Why do you say that all of a sudden?’

  ‘Because I have thought about it continually. How despicable I was in Amsterdam, how rudely I spoke of the women you admired. Of Adriana, from Rome, you remember what I said? It was monstrous. It plagued me, you know, for decades? You were right to have loved her, to have loved them all. You saw a quality of magic that passed most people by.’ My master makes no reply, but I can see that his face is beset with emotion, though I cannot tell if it is worry or regret. ‘Aramis was generous, you know?’ Vilder continues, ‘Much more than you might believe. And gentle. He was the opposite of aloof. People did not realize. We laughed so, Valentyne. Laughter to tear you in two. He was kind. A gentleman warrior. A rare breed. My boy soldier. I wish you had known him more. Find a lady, Valentyne. It will thrill you so. Will you promise?’

  ‘You go to sleep now.’

  ‘I’ll take that answer as a yes.’

  ‘Sleep now. It is gone four.’ He pulls the coverlet back over his brother.

  ‘I think I guessed why you called him Tomorrow, but tell me.’

  ‘You sleep.’

  * * *

  By degrees Vilder’s skin patches with scabrous rounds of puce red. He has trouble breathing and is often seized with muscle cramps. In time he’s unable even to eat and must be spoon-fed by my master, ceremonies that lead to many disagreements, some of them bizarrely comic. And he’s forever hauling himself up, insisting he can manage without help, shuffling to a commode—which my master has stationed everywhere, just in case—only to stand there for ages, blushing with humiliation, unable to pass any urine at all.

  Despite his steady decline, he insists on keeping up a regimen of activities, inside and out, regardless of the physical pain of just putting one foot before the other. Being led around the estate he’ll stop suddenly, bend down and stare at plants, gently fingering their flowers and asking his brother a multitude of questions as if these ordinary shrubs were the most rare species on earth. Then, in the very moment of rapture, he might look up, his eye on some distant crease of land and he’ll suddenly remember—or so it seems to me—the unknown vale that awaits him. At once he’ll grow frightened and confused. At these moments my master might draw in a deep breath on the point of bringing up the forbidden subject again, of still possible salvation, only for his older brother to find his nerve once more. ‘Do not suggest it, Valentyne. For I shall not listen.’

  When a tempest comes barging across the plain, rattling every window and door in the palace, Vilder demands to view it from the best vantage point. Reluctantly, my master shoulders him on to the rooftop. I go behind, tail tucked between my legs, only half coming from the arched doorway at the top of the stairs, the gale flapping my ears back as Vilder throws out his arms to the thrashing rain, cheering at every whip-
snap of lightning.

  ‘I wish to end here,’ he announces one day, shaking his walking stick at the door to the banqueting hall. ‘With our world about me.’ When he smiles, I notice how thin he is, skin like thin vellum stuck to his skull. ‘Help me, will you, with pillows, that we may camp on the floor like the Moroccan desert.’

  Valentyne makes several trips around the house until he has brought a mountain of cushions and laid them out as a giant bed. One evening, he makes a fire, pours wine for them both and they sit in silence, Vilder propped up, flamelight illuminating little pockets of life within the paintings.

  ‘When was it? Which summer?’ Vilder says. ‘1457? Is that when we met at San Marco? I remember that morning with such—such clarity, the hope we had, the sense of the everlasting.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ My master smiles, remembering too.

  ‘The light in the city that morning, the mosaics of the basilica, such blazing gold. You were thirty then? I a little older, but we were young, weren’t we, Valentyne, in our hearts, like children? We’d arranged it before we each set off. You recall? Two years previously, before I sailed for Italy and you for Arabia on our quests. We’d arranged then to meet on 21 June in San Marco, in the Piazzetta, beneath the statue of the winged lion. By the sea. Ha, such planners we were, such adventurers back then. 21 June, the apogee of the year.’

  My master nods in remembrance, but lets his brother talk on. ‘I’d arrived some days earlier, from Florence, so elated I couldn’t eat or sleep. The wonders I’d seen in Florence—Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello—genius to electrify the brain, doors opened into other universes, real-size statues with souls, all that guileless medieval chicanery swept away. The power of art. And science too. Engineering phenomena. Santa Maria del Fiore—I thought of you when I saw that dome the first time in Florence.

  ‘When you arrived, on time—you were always on time, Valentyne, before even time was invented—midday beneath the winged lion of Piazzetta San Marco, the place we’d arranged. The twenty-first day of June 1457. You’d come from Tabriz and were aflame as much as I. The wisdom of the Arabs, the miracles of mathematics. An hour we stood talking over each other, hugging, sharing stories, the sun dazzling on the water, on the cathedral windows, on the orchid pink of the doge’s palace.

  ‘It was your first time in Venice. Unbelievable that you were a novice. You were awestruck by the light, the glass, the colour—cinnabar, malachite, lazuli—the music, silk, spice. You were astonished by San Marco. The greatest rectangle in all civilization, you said. All the world is here. There were tears in your eyes. Greeks and Turks and Arabs and Germans side by side. Here, you said, a man may be true to himself. You were right, Valentyne. It mattered not where you came from, where you stood in society, your creed, your religion, none of it. Recall the world we’d grown up in? The cold grey north. Catechism, flagellation, austerity, strictness. Life after waves of the Black Death. Remember the bleak decades we’d lived through before our travels? Our father falling first. One of the richest men in the world, who’d always had his way, who’d dominated everyone, who must have thought he’d be eternal—powerless against the plague. Then our mother taken within a year of him. Remember, my brother? How she locked herself in to her bedroom to keep us safe? Perhaps you were too young to understand. How it snowed on the day of her internment? How alone we were afterwards? In our palace. Our inheritance. The appalling quietness of it. Noiseless snowfall against the windows of the long drawing room. Emptiness. Just each other and an empty city of a house.

  ‘But on that morning in Venice all was forgotten. The world was ours. We were unchained from our past, weren’t we, Valentyne? We went to the workshop together, to meet my new friends Gentile and Giovanni, the brothers Bellini, who’d find such fame. You laughed in shock when you laid eyes on their paintings! They have imagined the unimaginable. You had to touch Saint Paul to believe his robes were not real: the quality of shot silk. Do you remember all this, my brother?

  ‘We went with them on their boat to Murano, to the glass factory of their friend, where charcoal-faced sorcerers alchemized soda ash into clear crystal. Recall how they made a phial for you and you asked for a special inscription, and you sketched it for them, the family crest. I was surprised. Usually it was I who took pride in our heritage.

  ‘It was the night we returned from Murano that we sneaked on to the roof of the doge’s palace and you told me of the stones you’d brought back from Tabriz, the plain dust that might contain, locked within the innermost realms of its atoms, a power to halt time. Recall how I joked at first, asked if it might give me thick hair like yours? You told me it was called jyhr. It was hot that night on the doge’s roof; the sky hummed with starlight. It was then, intoxicated by Venice, by beauty and mystery, by the hope that burnt through us, it was then, Valentyne, that we conceived our plan for immortality.’ Vilder clenches my master’s hand. ‘My brother, I am sorry. So sorry that I blamed you for taking me down the road on which we travelled.’

  ‘But I did take you,’ says Valentyne. ‘It was my fault. It was I who brought the stones.’

  ‘No! Absolutely not. Of course I blamed you when it suited me, because I was not the person you were, because I liked to blame and cause trouble and be a coward always. But it was I, brother. That night—good grief, it is three hundred and fifty years ago that night on the roof. I was so charged, so confident in the world, so torchlit. I had such insatiable need for betterment. I could not countenance an earth in which I didn’t exist. If beauty was to be produced—and, gracious, the beauty that followed in the century ahead went beyond all imaginings—no, if beauty was to be produced, I wanted to be part of it. I am the older of us and I am to blame for taking us down that road, Valentyne, the road on which you must travel now alone, and I am sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Valentyne casts his palm around all the pictures in the room. ‘For this? For this abundance? For these sights we’ve seen? These marvels. These giants we’ve met? These inventors and builders and lovers and trailblazers. Us three. In all history, only we have had this fortune.’

  We stay in the banqueting room day and night, I on Vilder’s bed and Valentyne in a chair, his fingers always resting against his brother’s. Between unsettled bouts of sleep, Vilder grows restless, calling for books to be brought until there are piles of them around the bed. Vilder gropes them up in turn, avidly scanning passages, marvelling over illustrations with hallucinatory intensity, before nudging them aside and requesting others. As the days pass, tea-coloured urine seeps on to the blankets and Valentyne asks again and again if he might change them, but his brother won’t allow it. ‘No time, no time,’ he keeps panting, unfolding the pages of another tome, every minute, every new piece of information vital to him.

  Gradually he spends more and more time sleeping, his breathing shallows, his legs blotch purple, the warmth drains from his hands and feet, pooling its minute strength in the lukewarm shallow of his abdomen. His anaemic blood collects on his underside and his front turns as yellow and stiff as waxed paper.

  At dawn, he calls out suddenly, rousing my master from his armchair. ‘That one,’ he demands, shaking a clumped hand towards a tome he’s returned to again and again. ‘Show me.’ My master leans it on his brother’s lap and turns the pages slowly. It’s a picture book. On each leaf are hand-painted illustrations of faraway lands, realms beyond any I have travelled to, where the trees and palaces are strangely coloured and curiously shaped, realms that perhaps belong to another time altogether.

  ‘This place, w-where is it?’ Vilder stutters, voice hushed and reed-thin, wax-paper mouth twitching with a smile.

  ‘It is Japan. Mount Kita, in the south of the country.’

  ‘And this here?’

  ‘The Caspian Sea and the Caucacus.’

  ‘And this?’

  ‘The realm of Brazil. The Amazon.’ A deep breath. ‘You asked why I called him Tomorrow,’ my master says.
‘Tomorrow is hope, is it not? If he has that name, he will surely last. I meant him for you, you see. Originally. For you. But how could I part with him?’

  Vilder cups his hand beneath his brother’s jaw. ‘As I always thought. The day I left Amsterdam, with Aramis in a box, I guessed. But so much better you kept him for yourself: for what a poor guide I would have been. My younger brother, always helping me, always honouring me. My guardian.’ He reaches out his hand and folds his fingers round Valentyne’s. ‘Will you keep your promise?’

  ‘What promise?’

  ‘Dear Tomorrow, you must make him keep it.’

  ‘I will do it, as you ask,’ says my master, ‘on a pyre, in the Roman way.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but not just that. Make a family, Valentyne. Find a lady. Find a way to find a lady. An inamorata.’ My master blushes and shakes his head. ‘I do not jest. You are the greatest discoverer of remarkable people. With every one, you hit the mark. Do it again. Serve yourself for once. How I love you.’ He turns back to the illustration and carefully studies it: a verdant jungle valley of palms and firework-blooms that hang over an emerald river. ‘Brazil.’ His eyes wilt with regret. ‘I have not been.’ He follows the twists and turns of the waterway and, as it melts into the coral sky, his finger stops.

  Although Valentyne realizes Vilder has died, he does not move for a long time. He stares at the corpse, a red smack of irritation on his face, the expression that a moneylender might have as he obstinately waits for a debtor that will never come. At last he stands, shunting back the armchair, removes the book from Vilder’s chest, puts it to one side and exits the room. I pivot my ears to the hard clump, clump of his boot-steps along the corridor. For a moment I stare at Vilder’s blue-white hand hanging from the side of the cushions. I press my nose against it. There are already traces of rotting sweetness and I quicken with anger. He could be any dead thing. How unjust that Vilder, who lived for centuries, embattled and desperate, but a giant of a human nonetheless, courageous and marvellous even with his flaws, that he should smell the same as ordinary men, who allow themselves to be carried through their small lives unthinking.