Viriconium (57 page)

“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 Café they were keeping the 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.

“One July,” she said suddenly, “storms came up from Radiopolis nine days in succession, and always at the same time in the evening. We sat in the summer house, my sisters and I, watching the damp soak into the coloured wood which formed the dome of the roof.” She spoke quickly and fractiously, as if she had pulled this memory across like a screen to hide something else. “In drier weather we—”

She broke off distractedly.

“My life is like a letter torn up twenty years ago,” she said in a low, anguished voice. “I have thought about it so often that the original sense is lost.”

The unfinished portrait attracted her attention. She got unsteadily to her feet and stumbled through the edges of the fire, the hem of her coat scattering charcoal and ashes. She took the canvas off the easel and stared intently at it. “Who’s this?” she demanded. “What a travesty!” She laughed loudly and threw it in the fire. It lay there inertly in the middle of the flames, then, with a sudden dull whooshing sound, flared up white and orange. “Who is it, Ashlyme?” She whirled round and struck out at him; groaned with vertigo; fell against him, hot and fragile as a bird. He grasped her wrists. “None of it will work now,” she whispered. “How could you let me die here, Ashlyme?”