Soon Mammy Vooley was pushed into view at the top of the steps, in a chair with four iron wheels. Her head lolled against its curved back. Attendants surrounded her immediately, young men and women in stiff embroidered robes who after a perfunctory bow set about ordering her wisp of hair or arranging her feet on a padded stool. They held a huge book up in front of her single milky eye and then placed in her lap the crown or wreath of woven yew twigs which she would later throw to the dancing boys. Throughout the dance she stared uninterestedly up into the sky, but as soon as it was finished and they had helped her to sit up she proclaimed in a distant yet eager voice:
“Even these were humbled.”
She made them open the book in front of her again, at a different page. She had brought it with her from the North.
“Even these kings were made to bend the knee,” she read.
The crowd cheered.
She was unable after all to throw the wreath, although her hands picked disconnectedly at it for some seconds. In the end it was enough for her to let it slip out of her lap and fall among the boys, who scrambled with solemn faces down the observatory steps after it while her attendants showered them with crystallised geranium petals and other coloured sweets, and in the crowd their parents urged them, “Quick now!”
The rain came on in earnest, putting out some of the candles; the wreath rolled about on the bottom step like a coin set spinning on a table in the Luitpold Cafe, then toppled over and was still. The quickest boy had claimed it, Mammy Vooley’s head had fallen to one side again, and they were preparing to close the great doors behind her, when shouting and commotion broke out in the observatory itself and a preposterous figure in a yellow satin shirt burst onto the steps near her chair. It was Ansel Verdigris. He had spewed black-currant gin down his chest, and his coxcomb, now dishevelled and lax, was plastered across his sweating forehead like a smear of blood. He still clutched under one arm the painting he had taken from Crome’s room: this he began to wave about in the air above his head with both hands, so strenuously that the frame broke and the canvas flapped loose from it.
“Wait!” he shouted.
The woman with the insect’s head gave a great sideways jump of surprise, like a horse. She stared at Verdigris for a second as if she didn’t know what to do, then pushed Crome in the back with the flat of her hand.
“Now!” she hissed urgently. “Go and kill her now or it will be too late!”
“What?” said Crome.
As he fumbled at the hilt of the weapon, poison seemed to flow up his arm and into his neck. Whitish motes leaked out of the front of his coat and, stinking of the ashpit, wobbled heavily past his face up into the damp air. The people nearest him moved away sharply, their expressions puzzled and nervous.
“Plotters are abroad,” Ansel Verdigris was shouting, “in this very crowd!”
He looked for some confirmation from the inert figure of Mammy Vooley, but she ignored him and only gazed exhaustedly into space while the rain turned the bread crumbs in her lap to paste. He squealed with terror and threw the painting on the floor.
“People stared at this picture,” he said. He kicked it. “They knelt in front of it. They have dug up an old weapon and wait now to kill the Mammy!”
He sobbed. He caught sight of Crome.
“Him!” he shouted. “There! There!”
“What has he done?” whispered Crome.
He dragged the sword out from under his coat and threw away its sheath. The crowd fell back immediately, some of them gasping and retching at its smell. Crome ran up the steps holding it out awkwardly in front of him, and hit Ansel Verdigris on the head with it. Buzzing dully, it cut down through the front of Verdigris’s skull, then, deflected by the bridge of his nose, skidded off the bony orbit of the eye and hacked into his shoulder. His knees buckled and his arm on that side fell off. He went to pick it up and then changed his mind, glaring angrily at Crome instead and working the glistening white bones of his jaw. “Bugger,” he said. “Ur.” He marched unsteadily about at the top of the steps, laughing and pointing at his own head.
“I wanted this,” he said thickly to the crowd. “It’s just what I wanted!” Eventually he stumbled over the painting, fell down the steps with his remaining arm swinging out loosely, and was still.
Crome turned round and tried to hit Mammy Vooley with the weapon, but he found that it had gone out like a wet firework. Only the ceramic hilt was left-blackened, stinking of fish, giving out a few grey motes which moved around feebly and soon died. When he saw this he was so relieved that he sat down. An enormous tiredness seemed to have settled in the back of his neck. Realising that they were safe, Mammy Vooley’s attendants rushed out of the observatory and dragged him to his feet again. One of the first to reach him was the woman with the insect’s head.
“I suppose I’ll be sent to the arena now,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged.
“The thing seems to be stuck to my hand,” he told her. “Do you know anything about it? How to get it off?”
But it was his hand, he found, that was at fault. It had swollen into a thick clubbed mass the colour of overcooked mutton, in which the hilt of the weapon was now embedded. He could just see part of it protruding. If he shook his arm, waves of numbness came up it; it did no good anyway, he couldn’t let go.
“I hated my rooms,” he said. “But I wish I was back in them now.”
“I was betrayed, too, you know,” she said.
Later, while two women supported her head, Mammy Vooley peered into Crome’s face as if trying to remember where she had seen him before. She was trembling, he noticed, with fear or rage. Her eye was filmed and watery, and a smell of stale food came up out of her lap. He expected her to say something to him but she only looked, and after a short time signed to the women to push her away. “I forgive all my subjects,” she announced to the crowd. “Even this one.” As an afterthought she added, “Good news! Henceforth this city will be called Vira Co, ‘the City in the Waste.’ ” Then she had the choir brought forward. As he was led away Crome heard it strike up “Ou lou lou,” that ancient song:
Ou lou lou lou
Ou lou lou
Ou lou lou lou
Ou lou lou
Ou lou lou lou
Lou Lou lou lou
Ou lou lou lou
Lou
Lou
Lou
Soon the crowd was singing too.
STRANGE GREAT SINS
“This mite’s sins are nothing to some I’ve had to swallow,” boasted the sin-eater. He was a dark, energetic man of middle height and years, always nodding his head, rubbing his hands, or shifting his weight from one foot to the other, anxious to put the family at their ease. “They’ll taste of vanilla and honey compared to some.”
No one answered him, and he seemed to accept this readily enoughhe had, after all, been privy in his life to a great deal of grief. He looked out of the window. The tide was ebbing, and the air was full of fog which had blown in from the sea. All along Henrietta Street, out of courtesy to the bereaved family, the doors and windows were open, the mirrors covered and the fires extinguished. Frost and fog, and the smell of the distant shore: not much to occupy him. The sin-eater breathed into his cupped hands, coughed suddenly, yawned.
“I like a wind that blows off the land myself,” he said.
He went and looked down at the little girl. They had laid her out two hours ago, on a bed with a spotless blue and white cover, and placed on her narrow chest a dish of salt. Gently he tapped with an outstretched finger the rim of this dish, tilting his head to hear the clear small ringing noise which was produced.
“I’ve been in places where they make linen garlands,” he said, “and decorate them with white paper roses. Then they hang white gloves from them, one glove for each year of the kiddy’s age, and keep them in the church until they fall to pieces.” He nodded his head. “That’s how I think of children’s sins,” he sa
id. “White gloves hanging in a church.”
Imagining instead perhaps the narrow cemetery behind the dunes, entered through its curious gateway formed of two huge curved whalebones, imagining perhaps the sea holly, the gulls, and the blowing sand which covers everything, the girl’s mother began to cry. The rest of the family stared helplessly at her. There was another, idiot, daughter who banged her hands on the table and threw a knife into the empty grate. The father, an oldish man who delivered mackerel in a cart along the Fish Road to Eame, Child’s Ercall, and sometimes as far as Sour Bridge, said dully: “She were running about yesterday as happy as you please. She were always running, happy as you please.” He had repeated this every half hour or so since the sin-eater’s arrival, shaking his head as if in his simple pleasure at her happiness he had somehow missed a vital clue which would have enabled him to prevent her death (or at least comprehend it). His wife touched his sleeve, rubbing her eyes and trying to smile.
It was a long vigil, as they always are. Towards morning the sin-eater heard a sound of muffled revelry in the street outside: stifled laughter, the rattle of a tambourine quickly stilled, the scrape of clogs on the damp cobbles. When he looked out he could see several dim figures moving backwards and forwards in the sea fog. He blinked. He narrowed his eyes and cleaned the windowpane with the flat of his hand. Behind him he heard the child’s father get to his feet with a deep sigh. Turning back into the room he said, “They’ve brought the horse over from Shifnal, I think. Unless you’ve got one in the village.”
The old man stared at him, at first without seeming to understand, then with growing anger, while outside they began to sing:
Mari Lwyd
Horse of frost amp; fire
Horse which is not a horse
Look kindly on our celebration.
The pallid skull of the Mari could now be seen, bobbing up and down on its pole, clacking its lower jaw energetically as the wind opened the fog up into streaming ribbons and tatters, then closed it again, white and seamless like a sheet.
“Let us in and give us some beer,” called a muffled but derisive voice. The idiot daughter gave a smile of delight and stared round the room as if she had heard a cupboard or a table speak; she tilted her head and whispered. There was a clatter of hooves or clogs, or perhaps it was simply the clapping of hands. The Mari’s followers were dressed in rags. They danced in the fog and frost, their breath itself a fog. The masks they wore were meant to represent the long strange lugubrious head of the wasteland locust, that enormous insect which lives in the blowing sand and clinging mud of the Great Brown Desert.
“I’ll give you more than beer!” shouted the old man, his face congested with his powerful frustration and grief. “I’ll give you something you won’t like!” He pulled the sleeves of his shirt up above his elbows, and before his wife could stop him he had rushed out among the Mari-boys, kicking and punching. They evaded him with deft hops and skips, and ran away laughing into the mist; the idiot daughter murmured and bit her nails; the door banged emptily back and forth in the wind. The old man had to come back into the house, shamefaced and defeated.
“Leave them be,” said his wife. “They’re not worth it, that lot from up at Shifnal.”
Distantly the voices still sang,
Mari Lwyd
Falls between the day and the hour
Horse which is not a horse
Look kindly on our feast.
The sin-eater made himself comfortable by the window again. He scratched his head. Something in the foggy street had stirred his memory. “The horse which is not a horse,” he whispered dreamily.
He smiled.
“Oh, no,” he said to the old man and his wife, “your little girl’s sins will be like the coloured butterflies-compared to some I’ve tasted.” And then again: “The horse which is not a horse. I never hear those words without a shudder. Have you ever been to Viriconium? Packed your belongings aboard some barge at the ruined wharfs of the Yser Canal? Watched two clouds close a slot of blue in the winter sky, so that you felt as if something had been taken from you forever?”
Seeing that he had puzzled them, he laughed.
“I suppose not. Still… The horse which is not a horse…”
To recall the momentous events of your life (he went on) is to pull up nettles with the flowers. When I think of my uncle Prinsep I remember my mother first, and only then his watery blue eyes. When I think of him I can see the high brick walls of the lunatic asylum at Wergs, and hear the echoing shouts from the abandoned almshouses round the Aqualate Pond.
I was not born in this trade. When I was a boy we lived in the broad ploughlands around Sour Bridge. We were well enough off at my father’s death to have moved to the city, but my mother was content where she was. I suppose she relied on the society she knew, and on her brothers, who were numerous and for the most part lived close. I can see her now, giving tea to these red-faced yeomen in their gaiters and rusty coats who filled our drawing room like their own placid great farm horses, bringing with them whatever the season the whole feel of a November dawn-mist in the cut-and-laid hedges, rooks cawing from the tall elms, a huge sun rising behind the bare wet lace of hawthorn. She was a woman like a china ornament, always wary of their feet.
Uncle Prinsep was her step-brother, a very silent man who came to us for long visits without ever speaking. Many years before, after a quarrel with his own mother, he had let the family down and gone to live in Viriconium. I can see now how much my mother must have disapproved of his dress and manner (he wore a pale blue velvet suit and yellow shoes, much out of date in the city, I suspect, but always a source of amazement to us); but despite this, and although she often pretended to despise the Prinsep clan as a whole, she was unfailingly kind to him. There he sat, at the tea table, a man with a weak mouth and large skull upholstered with fat, who gave the impression of being constantly in a dream. He was filled, his silence informed us, with a melancholy beyond communication, or even comprehension, which sometimes stood in the corner of his eye like a tear. You could hear him sighing on the stairs in the morning after his bath. He patted himself dry with a soft towel.
The other uncles disliked him; my sisters regarded him with contempt, claiming that when they were younger he had tried to put his hands up the back of their pinafores; but to me he was a continual delight, because he was so often used as an example of what I would become if I didn’t pay attention, and because he had once given me a book which began:
I was in Viriconium once. I was a much younger woman then. What a place that is for lovers! The Locust Winter carpets its streets with broken insects; at the corners they sweep them into strange-smelling drifts which glow for the space of a morning like heaps of gold before they fade away…
Imagine the glee with which I discovered that Uncle Prinsep had written this himself! I could not wait to fail my mother and go there.
One afternoon a little after the spring thaw, when I was eighteen or nineteen, he arrived unexpectedly and stood on the doorstep shaking his coat under a sky the colour of zinc. He seemed distracted, but at the tea table his tongue was loosened at last. He talked about his journey, the weather, his rooms in the city which he said were untenable through burst pipes and draughts: my mother couldn’t stop him talking. If there was a silence he would suddenly say, “I was in mourning for six people last May,” causing us to look at our plates in embarrassment; or, “Do you think that souls fly around and choose bodies to be born into?” My sisters covered their mouths and spluttered, but I was mortified.
He couldn’t hear enough, he said, about the family, and he interrogated my mother, who had by now begun to look down at her own plate in some confusion, mercilessly about each of the other uncles in turn. Did Dando Seferis still go fishing when he had the chance? How was-he snapped his fingers, he had forgotten her name- Pernel, his wife? How old would the daughter be this year? When he could pursue this no further he looked round and sighed happily. “What wonderful cake this is!�
� he exclaimed; and, on being informed that it was a quite ordinary kuchen: “I can’t think why I’ve never eaten it before. Did we always have it? How nice it is to be home!” He nudged me, to my horror, and said, “You don’t get cake like this in Viriconium, young man!”
Later he played the piano and sang.
He made my sisters dance with him, but only the old country dances. To see this great fat man, face shining with perspiration, shamble like a bear to the strains of “The Earl of Rone” or “The Hunting of the Jolly Wren” moved them to even greater contempt. He told us ghost stories before we went up to bed. He managed to corner me on the stairs after I had studiously avoided his gaze all evening, to give me a green country waistcoat with some money wrapped in tissue paper in one pocket; I sat in my room looking at it and wept with fury at his lack of understanding. After we were asleep he kept my mother up, talking about their father and his political ambitions, until the small hours.
We had him for two days, during which my mother watched him anxiously. Was he drunk? Was he ill? She could not decide. Whatever it was he went back to Viriconium on the morning of the third day, and died there a week later. In keeping with her evasive yet practical nature she told us nothing about the circumstances. “It happened in someone’s house,” she said with a movement of her shoulders which we recognised as both protective and censorious; and she would admit nothing more.
He was brought home to be buried. The funeral was as miserable as most winter occasions. Rain fell at intervals from a low, greyish-white sky, to bedraggle the artificial flowers on the cortege and the black plumes of the funeral horses. Some of the other uncles came and stood with their hats off by the grave, while rooks wheeled and cawed overhead in the rain as if they were part of the ceremony. The cemetery was frozen hard in places, already thawing in others; and the flat meadows beyond were under a single shining sheet of water, up out of which stuck a few black hedges and trees. My sisters wept because their dresses were soaked, and after all they had not meant to be horrible to anyone; my mother was quite white, and leaned heavily on my arm. I wore with defiance a pair of yellow shoes.
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