Under the Poppy (46 page)

The building lies quiet around him, like a beast that has swallowed up the night. Lucy’s light still burning, silently sewing, but no newspapers tonight, no need to wait up, no one is coming. Istvan has gone.

He has not drunk so much for many years, so very much with so very little effect: bottles of whiskey lined up like soldiers, whiskey like water, but still too shallow to drown…. Like a lad indeed, that tabletop assault on the General, like a child thumbing his nose, just as he used to, making voices pop from rubbish bins to taunt the night-watchmen—but to what end? Why attack the man, when he has himself retreated? To speed his own exit? and make return impossible? If so, then well done, Master God-Gives, Marcel, Hanzel, Dusan, whatever the fuck his name might be now.

Rupert sets aside the half-drunk bottle, kicks down the rumpled coverlet. An epiphany, yes, a showing-forth of the truth: and the truth is, there is no use to lie here alone, in this dank midnight, waning moonlight cold on the windows of this colder room, no use to be here in this place at all. Lucy does not need him, she has the building’s deed, and that Pimm fellow to stand beside her. Istvan—Istvan does not need him. Istvan does not want him, else why would he flee this way, not a word said, no goodbye, no chance to argue…. Arguing, yes, the night before the ball, recall the look on his face:
You may be content here, in this—domestic bliss, but I am not.
“No you are not, messire,” aloud to the room as empty as these thoughts, hateful thoughts he cannot master, Istvan his own master, yes, and that is the most hateful thing of all: to love so well someone who does only as he pleases, and in the end pleases no one but himself.

Benjamin tried to stop him, and was battered for his pains; Lucy watched him go like dumbshow—
He only said he must be off,
that sounds like him—but “Why not at least tell me?” again aloud, a mutter so dreary that it rings half-mad; well then, he is mad, so. As mad as this room all scattered and stuffed with his things, he took so little in the end, not even his puppets, Jesu, everything abandoned this time, except Feste, apparently. And the knife on the night table, oh, what a touch, messire, what a theatrical clue! as Rupert weights it in his hand, drops it on his desk, remembering that other desk, that other secret drawer like his locked and secret heart. Well. This is one dance he will not do again, no. “Not even for you,” as he pulls on his boots, splashes his face, takes a long sour piss and then departs, pocketing his own knife as he goes.

It is amazing, how the skill comes back to one, the way of moving without a ripple through a crowd, through streets he would once have known as fully as an alley cat, though in this city he does not: no habitué of the gaiety district, paradise of dicers and
voudou
girls and kangaroo boxers—he stops a moment to watch that, “The Aboriginal Giant” in chicken feathers and ivory bones versus some tubby brawler in a loincloth that barely covers his shriveled jewels—and purveyors of vices both sanctioned and not. There are a dozen grog-shops a dozen steps apart: he steps into one, a four-table den called the Crocodile’s Smile. The taste of whiskey has begun to sicken him, so perhaps he ought to try a different flavor, may be the stuff that Benjamin offered, the jade fairy or whatever he named it, that milky-green absinthe—

—which tastes even worse, like licorice and pond water: amazing that anyone would drink it, visions or not. The bosomy girl who serves him gives him a wink that he stares into a frown, then into the silence of retreat; he has spoken to no one since Lucy, this morning, urging him diffidently to have a bite of meat, to drink some tea. He tried, to please her, but found there was no pleasure in him, no words in him either, nothing left to do but walk the streets like the prowler he once was. But already it palls, this world grown small and overlarge all together, like a telescoping trick, some bit of stage business and he, stupid, blind, bewildered actor, kept out of the joke, or made its dupe—

—on this street called Dollhouse Row, how did he end up here? with the whores posing and preening behind their plate-glass windows, like chocolates in the case at the chocolatier’s: a resourceful way to present them, the tricks can just walk by and point with a finger, or a cane. Like this fine specimen here, yellow cane and long floppy coat, a sapphire stickpin as big as a pigeon’s egg, joshing with a friend as they all but block the way, but “You!” pettish and overloud, as Rupert tries to dodge; perhaps the man is drunk, perhaps a fool, anyone who walks the streets wearing such a jewel must be a fool. Rupert ignores him, makes to pass again but “Are you deaf, too, sirrah?” raising his cane to bar the way. “You’ve stepped on my coattails, so you must be blind—”

“I never touched you,” Rupert says; he smiles. He cannot help it, he smiles, he waits for what he knows is coming, and so it does: the man offers an insult, raises a hand—

—and before the man understands what has happened, is on his back in the gutter, blood leaking from both ears, cane broken across his ribs which are broken, too, several on each side; his friend has run off shouting for a constable, none of whom are in evidence just then. All the whores are studiously fanning themselves, or turned carefully sidewise to the windows, none of them will say she saw a thing—except perhaps the pudgy one, pink cheeks and lush blond curls, who blows Rupert a kiss in passing. To her he gives the slightest nod, and she breaks into a smile, one tooth missing, and throws him a quick thumbs-up—

—as he turns without noting—perhaps the man was right, and he
is
blind—into another café, or cabaret, the Gilded Something-or-other, and orders a brandy; the taste is a memory, it wounds him; he drinks another. Now the glimmering lights above, the candle at hand seem to have merged, become one dizzy glow; he is drunk, finally, thank Christ. What fun it was, beating that fellow. Perhaps he ought to do it again, perhaps to this man buzzing at his shoulder, murmuring at his ear like a bluebottle fly—

“
Maître
?” and turning his head, he sees that it is Benjamin, puckered brow and “
Maître
,” again and sweetly, hand on his arm, “let’s be away. Come, it’s very late—And you have blood on your jacket, are you harmed?” as Rupert looks into his eyes, what strange eyes this young man has, he opens his mouth to tell him so but realizes they are walking, he and Benjamin, that strong young arm about his shoulder, they are walking together into the darkness, they are climbing together into a cab—

—where that shorn head rests upon his shoulder, confiding hand against his own; is he never to do as Istvan has done so often, Istvan who has gone, now, how far? And for how long, forever? He need not pursue, only take what is before him, here, now, Benjamin asking softly, “Are you very cold? You’re trembling.”

“No,” says Rupert. His voice sounds strangely to himself. Silence; the cab’s enclosure; Benjamin’s warmth in the cold, all the warmth in the cold, and his mouth—offered; accepted; as simply as that—tastes of summer wine, lips parting like a bud in sudden bloom. His body taut and fevered with wonder, his murmur—“
Maître, Maître
”—and it is a matter of moments really, endless moments, Rupert’s breathing harsh against that unmarked skin as “Did I hurt you?” into the darkness, only the darkness until Benjamin’s little laugh, breathless, “Oh no, never,
Maître,
” head back against his shoulder, the smell of his skin like all the promise in the world.

The first things Rupert sees are flowers, white blooms mounded in white china cups. Gray-striped silk curtains bunched sideways, carelessly, out of the way, books piled like bricks, black drawings tacked up like scrawls on the wall, a window pale with morning light. The next thing he sees is Benjamin in shirtsleeves, scratching in his journal-book, meeting his gaze with a smile so luminous that he must smile, drowsy, in return—

—until he fully notes where he is, how he lies, remembers the night just past; and closes his eyes again, ah Jesu—as Benjamin now stands shyly over him, a cup of tea in hand: “I don’t believe that you take honey—?”

No, better that he put some poison in it; but one cannot say so to that look, that smile, and none of this is Benjamin’s fault in any way.
He
is the one who should not be here, in this opulent room, silken sheets and flowers, his clothing flung to a corner though “I’ve left your jacket for the laundress,” says Benjamin, “it was rather stiff with blood.…Whatever were you up to, last night?”

“Last night,” Rupert says, and stops. He takes the tea. Benjamin watches him swallow, head down, this apparition, this god in his bed; it is beyond believing, it is all he has dreamed of and more, so much more. To find his master so, at the Golden Calf of all places, and then to take him home…. He never slept a wink, up past dawn in a torment of happiness, feverishly writing it all into his journal as Rupert lay in exhausted sleep beside him, Rupert who now meets his eyes: “Last night,” again, as Benjamin feels inside his shirt the key dangling on its chain, symbol of all he would do to keep Rupert safe, nothing in the world he would not do so “
Maître
,” says Benjamin, “you need say nothing, you need do nothing. If you stood up, now, this moment, and walked out that door, if you walked away forever, I would keep the memory of you forever, I would never trouble you again.” His hand has found Rupert’s, holds it tight. “But if you let me, I will love you.”

“Benjamin—” slowly, wearily, past the waking pain, the mutinous desire, the terrible hope in those eyes, this boy no more a boy who seems somehow so terribly to need him—

“If you let me—”

—as beyond that stillness the house fills with its daily bustle, the servants up and down the stairs, curious to note Otilie perched yawning on a stool, stitching wristbands, just outside the young master’s bedroom door; set there sentinel just past dawn by a most serious Madame—
No one is to knock there, no one must disturb
—as she returned to her own rooms, to add a postscript to a longish letter, seal and send it swiftly on its way.

The cardinal virtue of age is simplicity: the graceful whittling-down, the letting go. Mr. Arrowsmith sits considering that principle in the exclusive confines of the Emperors’ Club, where so many he has known throughout the years—ones he has served, or who have served him, ones with whom he has together pulled in harness—sit at various stages of their varied campaigns—for kings are not born, despite the common man’s romance; they are constructed, made by men like these men, men the common man never knows or sees—the shrewdest among them understanding that time is an arc, not an arena, and must be respected accordingly.

There by the dining table, for instance, is old Herr Konstantine, for whom Mr. Arrowsmith apprenticed long ago: pouring his tea into the frail china saucer, puffing to cool it like some careful grandmamma. Or M. Tillits, a great friend, once, of Jürgen Vidor’s, whose joy now in life is racing horses, he boasts a stable of twenty-two and plans to breed many more:
They are more biddable than men, and far more loyal. My pony, Sans-Souci, would come through gunfire at my whistle.
For gunfire, yes, one needs a valorous mount, but in these larger wars, fought on the tilted battlefields of the mind, wars of words as ordnance, betrayals and overturnings, the outcome for which one plots and struggles is not, in itself, an end: there is no end because life has no end. See this current strategy, to install in several places of power those deemed worthy by de Metz and his brethren in Paris, in Petersburg: have they not done the same many times before, in those cities and in others? How many of those men are still useful today? How many are still alive?

Jürgen Vidor himself was a proud guest of this assembly, though he never held a chair, and dined here on many occasions, between his visits to Le Lapin Vert or whatever hellfire club he rejoiced in at the time. A cloven man, yes, but useful, a tool unashamed of his office. And a corrective, too, to men like Hector; to Hector directly, once or twice; that time in London, say. Did Hector ever wonder, one wonders, whose hand lay on the haft?
It was a pity to have had to let him go.

He sighs, and shifts his leg. His cane lies aslant against the chair’s peacock-blue brocade, his own cup of tea sits cooling on the mahogany table beside. The windows give what light there is, which, on this gray February day, is little; Candlemas, Epiphany’s paler cousin, and what a night that was. It was all he could do to keep his distance, devotee of the theatre as he is, and though Isobel’s account was stirring, what a pleasure it would have been to be there: watching Hector’s discomfiture, and Isidore’s own surprise—how often does that happen?—but best of all Dusan’s flair and flourish, the man is a true artist, it is a rare joy to see such a one at play. And for such stakes, too. He has few regrets in life, but this is surely one of them, that the dice did not roll so he might have seen this command performance with his own eyes. Ah well, one day he shall have the full account from the horse’s mouth, sans souci.

Meanwhile its ripples are still being reckoned, between Chamsaur’s crushed matrimonial dreams and Isidore’s change of tack, Hector’s disappointment and, to Mr. Arrowsmith’s mind, rather childish and outsized rage:
To make me the butt of his foolish entertainment—I would have expected better of Hanzel. And to confuse an opportunity—a rare opportunity! with an order
—never noting that Dusan, of course, saw matters rather differently. Yet does Hector himself reckon where his pique originates? The scout on the path, the protégé, the heir: had he sons of his own, none of this might have happened. Or had he followed Mercury instead of Mars—fancy Hector upon that smaller stage, Dusan might have made a protégé of
him
. But as the path now lies—

Still opportunities are all around us, eh, Javier? And now that Hanzel’s—gentleman is in residence with Isobel, it makes matters much easier.

What matters? How can either of them matter, now? You’ve another courier, the work continues—

I never threaten what I will not perform,
though of course the performance is ultimately aimed at Isidore: the young man, Benjamin, the crank that turns that wheel, and if M. Bok turns Benjamin, and Dusan turns M. Bok, reaching for one, he will have all. If the wheel turns his way.

Meanwhile
I thought you were taking Benjamin into your service?
just to ask, just to see but
I’d not have him now,
which could mean anything, the statement’s opposite, it could even be true; with Hector, who knows? Mr. Arrowsmith sips his tea, he ponders the slant of the sun, he watches M. Tillits rise in greeting to a fat man in pale spats and his thin associate, men unfamiliar to Mr. Arrowsmith; it is a sign, surely. When new counters reach the board, others, older, must depart; yet another decision deplored with heat by Hector—

I told Isidore you had grown poetical.