Ashlyme pursued his life dully, unsure what he might have begun by bringing the dwarf and the fortune-teller together. One night he dreamed he was standing in a gallery which overlooked the ground floor of a large building. The whole of this floor, he recorded, was given over to piles of secondhandclothes, among which wandered hundreds of elderly women with powdered cheeks and wet angry eyes. They turned the clothes over busily: they looked like beetles in their black coats. Then the Barley brothers had come in, accompanied by the Grand Cairo, who immediately began giving away coloured balloons. There weren’t enough to go round. The women fought over them in the aisles, running over one another furiously, red in the face. I woke up sweating: it was just like being in Hell.
The popularity of his portraits persisted, but he found his clients distracted and hard to pose. For the moment, he wrote, they are a little subdued. It will pass. They find themselves chafed by their isolation. They say it is like living on an island, and I suppose they are right.
Something new, in the shape of Paulinus Rack and his difficulties, soon came to take their mind off their predicament. I have heard, Ashlyme noted, not without satisfaction, that he has made unwise property investmentsin the Low City. If Die Traumunden Knaben is not a success, he will crash, and his patrons will disown him. Yet they constantly interfere with the production, demanding that it be made “more acceptable.” They must have sets designed by Audsley King, but they do not want the ones that have already been submitted. These are, it appears, “too gloomy”; they are “drab”; they are at one and the same time “too suggestive” and “too blatant.” Rack is driven to dining alone at the Charcuterie Vivien (where he does not speak to me). Meanwhile, somebody has suggested we have a play about the Barley brothers.
He viewed this with some distaste.
These great fools occupy our minds enough as it is. Nightly they are staggeringalong the Mynned gutters, gaping at the stars through the branches of the trees. Must we have them paraded in front of us at the Prospekt Theatre, as well, their pockets full of clinking bottles, followed onto the stage by half a dozen barking Dandy Dinmont dogs they have bought from some trader in Line Mass who claims to have trained them on Stockholm Tar and live cats?
And later he added:
The Grand Cairo seems to fear them more than ever. “Their ears are everywhere!” he claims, and has sent out orders to increase the vigilance of his own spies. He visits my studio in the early hours and sits down cross-legged in the only good chair, as full of his own importance as ever and heavy with secrets he cannot wait to divulge-the plague zone has shifted again, fifteen people will be arrested at Alves tomorrow for trying to smuggle relatives out, and so forth. But his conspiracies are not going well. He is bilious, quarrelsome, insecure. If he hears a door slam in the distance he gives a guilty start, then tries to pass it off by laughing sarcastically or flying into a rage. He drinks black-currant gin without stopping; and as this stuff inflames his imagination his conversationturns less on how he will outwit his masters, and more and more on escape from the city.
“Tell me, Ashlyme,” he sighs. “Will any of us ever get out of this trap we have made for ourselves?” He never mentions the Fat Mam.
As the dwarf’s anxieties multiplied, he abandoned his visits to Mynned. But he would not have Ashlyme at the tower in Montrouge. Instead he arranged furtive meetings in Shrogg’s Dene, Cheminor, and the Haunted Gate, all the most squalid regions of the Low City, often to no more purpose than half an hour’s walk in the rain along some old fortification overgrown with willow herb, during which he would pick up and cast aside dozens of bits of leather, rusty saucepans, and other decaying domestic implements. One evening on his return from such an outing, Ashlyme found himself on Clavescin Crescent, a street whose name was not familiar to him.
He had come from a depopulated suburb a mile north of Cheminor, where muddy cinder paths lined with poplar trees wound among the empty lazar houses and crematoria. He had hoped to be at the foot of the Gabelline Stairs before darkness caught him: but it was already late, and a heavy blue twilight had set in, confusing him as to distances. He recognised the three-storey terraced houses, with their peeling fronts and cracked casement windows, as belonging to the Artists’ Quarter. Which part of it he wasn’t entirely sure, although he hoped he might be close to the familiar warren of streets behind Monstrance Avenue and the Plaza of Unrealised Time.
Little arched alleyways led off the crescent at intervals. He was hurrying past the mouth of one of them when he heard a low cry-not quite of pain, but not quite of anguish either.
This was such a strange sound to hear, even in the plague zone, that he stopped and peered into the alley. It was damp and unwelcoming, but it opened out after ten yards or so into a courtyard like a deep well, the sides of which were propped up by huge balks of timber. Night was already advanced there amid the builders’ rubble. At the foot of one bulging wall, under a heavily boarded window, bags of mortar stood in a line. Someone had fallen down among them. Ashlyme could see an indistinct figure supporting itself on its hands and knees. Unwilling to enter the alley, he called uncertainly, “Are you unwell?”
“Yes,” said a muffled voice. Then: “No.”
Ashlyme bit his lip. “Can you move this way?” he suggested.
Silence.
“I can only help you if you come out,” said Ashlyme.
A low chuckle came from behind one of the timber balks. Ashlyme said, “Is there someone else in there?” He strained his eyes to see into the courtyard. The man on the floor put his hands on his head and groaned suddenly. “Are you alone in there?” Ashlyme asked him.
The Barley brothers, who had spent all afternoon hunting rats in the overgrown gardens behind the crescent, were unable to keep quiet any longer.
“Nobody in here, yer honour,” said Matey in a sepulchral voice. They had never heard anything funnier. They stuffed their handkerchieves into their mouths and rolled about on the floor. They bolted from the shadows which had concealed them and, laughing helplessly, shouldered their way out of the alley. “What a frightful sight!” they shouted, and, “Give him some stick, vicar!” Their grinning faces bobbed over Ashlyme in the twilight like red balloons; they smelled strongly of ferrets and bottled beer. Hard-favoured little Dandy Dinmont dogs milled about between their hobnail-booted feet, yelping hysterically.
“I’m weeing myself,” said Gog. “I’m doing it!”
Ashlyme was incensed. “Leave us alone!” he cried. “Go back where you belong and stop all this!” But they only laughed louder and ran away down the crescent, belching and farting and tripping over their dogs.
When the echo of their footsteps had died away at last, Ashlyme went to have a look at the man in the courtyard. He was trembling feverishly. Every so often he let out a groan, then whispered something to himself which sounded like, “Where am I? Oh, where am I?” He had no obvious injuries. His clothes, though crumpled and covered with whitish dust, were of good quality; he still had on a wide-brimmed felt hat of a kind popular in the High City. But he would not say who he was or where he had come from; and when Ashlyme urged him, “If you could just get up-” he only whimpered and pushed himself further in among the bags of cement. Ashlyme knelt down and tried to lift him. He resisted feebly and his hat fell off. Ashlyme found himself gazing into the flabby features and horrified eyes of Paulinus Rack.
“What on earth are you doing here, Rack?” he said.
“I’m lost,” whispered the entrepreneur helplessly. “I’m lost.”
He clutched Ashlyme’s sleeve. “Beggars are all around us,” he said. “Do nothing to provoke them.” Suddenly he shivered and hissed: “Livio, all these roads are the same! Livio, they don’t lead anywhere! Livio, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” Breathing heavily, hanging on to Ashlyme’s shoulder for support, he pulled himself to his feet and stood there with his mouth hanging open, staring about in a frightened, sightless way.
At the Luitpold Cafe they were keeping t
he night at arm’s length in a stuporous silence.
Madame sat behind her zinc counter with its shallow glass dishes of gooseberries soaked in lemon genever, thirty years the speciality of the house. A few vague plumes of steam issued from the kitchen door behind her. When she wasn’t required to serve she folded her thin hands in her lap and stared at nothing, like an animal waiting at a gate. Insects smacked into the wavering, bluish lamps, blundered off round the room, and flew into the lamps again. A generation before, this place had been the very heart of the Artists’ Quarter, the centre of the world: now its walls had an indelible lacquer of dirt into which had been scratched the indecipherable signatures of arriviste and poseur; and in place of the fabulous poets and painters of long ago, only a few fakers and failed polemicists sat at the marble-topped tables, writing endless letters to influential men.
Quarantine was the only word they knew. They could taste it in their mouths. They contemplated it constantly, while the plague, like grey dust, rained down on their shoulders.
Paulinus Rack had recovered his wits, although his eyes were still watery and apprehensive. It was not clear what had happened to him. He contradicted himself at every turn. First he claimed that he had entered the Low City on his own, then that he had been with Livio Fognet and some unnamed friend of theirs, “who cleared off as soon as he saw our plan.” He said that they had come in that morning at eleven o’clock, but maintained later that he remembered passing an entire night in the courtyard where Ashlyme had found him. He said that he had been opportuned by beggars, and had to hide from them, but boasted later that they had been members of the plague police in disguise, with a special warrant for his arrest.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the plague zone had frightened and disoriented him. “Trees, buildings, gutters, every street identical, Ashlyme!” he kept saying. “We soon lost all sense of direction.” And then, speaking of his ordeal of the courtyard, “You know, I could hear those two foul creatures inside the house for hours, killing things, laughing at me.” He shuddered. “The shouting and squealing! It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me!”
Ashlyme eyed him unforgivingly. “You were a fool to come in at all. What happened to Livio Fognet?”
Rack looked down at his fat hands and gave a little smile. “I know,” he sighed. “I know it was foolhardy, but that is my nature. How can I ever thank you?” He drank noisily from his glass of tea. “I feel much better now.” Of Fognet he would only say, “I stuck with him as long as possible, Ashlyme. But he kept taking his own pulse. He was certain he had caught some disease. Then we quarrelled over the direction of the High City. He hit me. He was blubbering at the end: blubbering.”
“You will always get lost in here,” said Ashlyme, who privately thought that Fognet might tell a different story. “But you must never panic. When I first started to come in I stuck to the Plaza of Unrealised Time. You get used to it in the end. Will Fognet find his own way back? Or ought I to look for him?”
Rack wiped his lips. “Isn’t that Gunter Verlac over there?” he said. He smiled insincerely across the room. “I must go and have a word with him.”
And Ashlyme could get no more from him.
At about eleven o’clock they rose to go, chilled by the emptiness and gloom. At the next table, B- de V- the poet was busy writing a letter. He raised his white, inoffensive, sheep-like head as they passed by. “We’ll never escape from here, any of us,” he said matter-of-factly, as if they had asked his opinion. Madame sat beside her counter and watched them leave, her hands in her lap, a cup of bluish chocolate cooling in front of her. Ashlyme saw Rack to the head of the Gabelline Stairs. He shook Ashlyme’s hand and trotted off eagerly towards Mynned. We shall never hear the last of it, Ashlyme wrote later, now that he has been in the plague zone. And: His only hope was to get Audsley King to redraw her designs for The Dreaming Boys. But I don’t believe she would have helped him, even if he had got as far as the Rue Serpolet.
Ashlyme’s own visits to Audsley King continued. One afternoon, at her insistence, he lit a bonfire in the small garden at the rear of the house and carried her out to watch it.
“How nice this is,” she said.
There was no wind. Within the tall brick walls-which, with their mats of bramble, bladder senna, and reddish ivy, dulled the sounds of construction coming from either side-the air was sharp and rapturous, the light a curiously bleached lemon colour. The smoke of Ashlyme’s blaze, of which he was deeply proud and which he fed energetically with dead elder branches and sprays of yellow senna, hung motionless over the house, its scent remaining sharp and autumnal even when it mixed with the smoke of the builders’ fires. Audsley King watched him affectionately, smiling a little at some recollection. But when he began to pull down living ivy she chided, “Be careful, Ashlyme, that those tangled stems do not fasten themselves round your dreams. They will have their revenge.” But it was plain that her own dreams concerned her more than his. “Let’s burn the furniture instead. I shan’t need it soon.”
He eyed her warily. He could not tell if she was teasing him. All day her mood had been changeable, demanding.
“Paint me!” she ordered suddenly. “I don’t know how you can bear to waste this light!”
It was a long, strange afternoon.
The too-large collar of Audsley King’s fur coat conspired with the bleached light to diminish and soften the mannishness of her features until she looked, as she stared into the fire, like a child staring out of a familiar window. Ashlyme, encouraged, worked steadily; she had never been so complaisant a model. Meanwhile Fat Mam Etteilla came and went, communicating a monolithic calm as she burned the household rubbish. Into the fire went old picture frames, Audsley King’s bloodied handkerchiefs, a chair with one leg missing, a cardboard box which when it burst slowly open revealed a compressed mass of papers tied with old ribbon. She watched them all reduce to ashes, her agreeable face reddened by the heat, patches of sweat appearing under her arms. She was like a great patient horse, gazing with drooping underlip across an empty field.
(Ashlyme studied her covertly. Had she seen the Grand Cairo since that curious meeting in Montrouge? He was not sure. Her thoughts were invisible.)
Later, old women came to sit out on their balconies, looking up at the sky like animals about to be drowned. Fat Mam Etteilla fetched down her cards, laid them out on an old baize-covered table, and predicted, “A good marriage, a bad end.” The workmen next door brought down a wall, more by accident than design, and the old women, chuckling appreciatively, watched the dust belly up into the air. The light shifted secretively a degree at a time, until it had left Ashlyme’s work behind. Audsley King, anyway, had evaded him again: the heat of the fire had relaxed her narrow, angular face and softened the lines about her mouth. He was reluctant to ask her to change her pose, for the comfortable crackling of the fire had induced in him a hypnotic sense of time suspended, time retrieved: so he began a new charcoal study instead. After he had been scratching away at this for a few minutes, Audsley King said, “Before I came to the city I cut off my hair. It was the first of many fatally symbolic gestures.”
She contemplated this statement as if trying to judge its completeness, while Ashlyme, intrigued, looked at her sidelong and carefully said nothing.
“It was the autumn before I married,” she went on. “The servants brought out all the rubbish which had accumulated in the house during the past year and burned it in the garden, just as we are doing here. Our parents looked on, while the children ran about cheering, or stared gravely into the red heart of the flames. We loved those autumn fires!”
She shook her head.
“How can I explain myself? I cut off my hair and threw it on the fire. Was it despair or intoxication? I was going to the city to begin a new life. I was going to be married. From now on I would paint what I saw, see everything I wished to see. Viriconium! How much it meant to me then!”
She laughed. She shrugged.
“I
know what you are going to say. And yet…
“We were all going to be famous then-Ignace Retz the wood-block illustrator, elbowing his way down the Rue Montdampierre in his shabby black coat at lunchtime, Osgerby Practal, with nothing then to his name but his sudden drugged stupors and his craving for ‘all human experience’; even Paulinus Rack. Oh, you may laugh, Ashlyme, but we took Paulinus Rack quite seriously then, going about his business in a donkey cart, with that sulphurous yellow cockatoo perched on his shoulder! He was thinner. He hadn’t yet turned a whole generation of painters into tepid water-colourists and doomed consumptive aesthetes on behalf of the High City art collectors.”
She made a sad defensive gesture.
“Once when I was ill he brought me a black kitten.” She smiled. “Once,” she said, “he tried to kill himself on the banks of the Pleasure Canal. He pressed a scarf soaked in aether to his face until his legs gave way, but was pulled out of the water before he could drown. We all rather admired him for that.
“Later I understood the pointlessness of this dream, and of the people who pursued it through the smoke in the Bistro Californium, the Antwerp Estaminet. Oh, we were all going to be famous then-Kristodulos, Astrid Gerstl, ‘La Divinette.’ ” But my husband contracted a howling syphilis and hanged himself one stifling afternoon in the back parlour of a herbalist’s shop. He was twenty-three years old and had saved no money.
“I was too proud to go back to my mother. I was too determined. Your hair was not your own to cut, she had written to me. It was mine. I had cared for it since you were born. What right had you to betray such a trust? We spoke again only once before she died.”
Finally she said:
“I regret none of this. Do you understand?” and was silent again. She closed her eyes. “Will somebody build up the fire? I am cold.”
For a long time nothing happened in the garden. Afternoon crept toward evening; the fire burned down; the fortune-teller somnolently addressed her cards. Ashlyme sketched the strange long hands of Audsley King. (Later he was to use them as the basis of the equivocal sequence “Studies of some of my friends,” fifty small oils on wood which bemuse us by their repetition of a single image differentiated only by minute changes in the background light.) Occasionally he glanced at her face. Her eyes were half closed, mimicking the exhausted trance of the invalid, while from beneath the grey papery lids she judged his reaction to her little biographical fable. He had decided to hold his tongue. He would take the story away with him and hope its meaning eventually became clear.
Viriconium Page 41