Lempriere's Dictionary (25 page)

‘Come on, John. Let’s go to work.’ And with that, Septimus is up, flexing and swallowing, while Lemprière bumbles behind him.

‘You know what to do?’

He nods.

‘Every third cup.’

‘I know.’ Lemprière takes his place at cup ‘A’, Septimus by the beans, a look is exchanged. No ‘Good luck’s, this is business. They’re off.

Lemprière’s worries up to this point have been mostly along the lines of some unspecified failure and consequent public humiliation. He has thought about the difficulties of bean-catching in a vague sort of way, but the notion that he may not be able to physically swallow the potions in front of him has not occurred. Until now. the earlier swig should have forewarned him of this. The stench of arrack fills his nostrils as he raises the first cup to his lips, a few titters start up at his hesitation. He is certain that if he swallows this, if he allows this noxious poison down his throat, he will puke instantly. The titters are turning to insults now, oh no, it smells of death, only one thing for it…. He swallows, and by some intestinal miracle, he holds it down. The brandy burns but is less disgusting. The cider he might almost have drunk voluntarily, almost forgets to turn, just in time,
pfft … ding!
One out of one. Somewhat encouraged, he tries to remember to keep the rhythm, furmity,
pfft… ding!
, gin, hock and on he goes, glugging and turning, the other contestants are cheering him on, who’d have thought it, slurp, slurp? The drinking is definitely getting easier, first is worse, oh yes, julep, kümmel, lethe, turn and catch, porter, quassia, rum,
ding!
He catches a sight of the Pug from the corner of his eye and tries a hostile grin. Wassail runs down his chin, no matter, Xeres sack, turn and nine out of nine, yellow-root, force it down, one more. He pours the last down with a flourish, splashing it all the way back to his eager tonsils, zythum, pyramid juice.
Slurpp
.

Lemprière bangs the cup down on the table and turns to acknowledge the cheers of the Pork Club. The alcohol has brought tears to his eyes but he only needs his ears for this.

‘Good work,’ Septimus claps him on the back. Warburton-Burleigh and the Pug have (as expected) failed to persuade King Archon and the Crone of each other’s charms and are sneering across the crowd. Septimus and Lemprière limber up for the next round.

‘How are you feeling, John?’

‘Very well, nine out of nine, eh?’ True, he is feeling a little flushed and his stomach is shifting about in unfamiliar ways, but it is not exactly unpleasant, yet.

‘Take the next stage slowly, alright? You take the King, I’ll deal with the Crone. There’s nothing to it, John.’ This last as Lemprière’s anxieties begin to surface on his face. ‘Just describe her in the most favourable terms you can think of. If you get stuck, tell lies.’

‘Right.’ Lemprière is warmer than he was a few minutes before and loosens his collar as they take their positions, Septimus kneeling at the feet of the Crone, his partner by the King.

The Pug and Warburton-Burleigh are impatient to commence and the Pork Club agrees with them. At a signal from the Crone, all begin, Pug and Burleigh instantly into a pretty snappy sword fight while Septimus assails the Crone with gamomanic protestations of King Archon’s progenitive capabilities and all-round, nuptial dark-horse characteristics, ‘… appearances can be deceptive,’ he’s saying.

But Lemprière is stuck. He looks across at the Crone, then back to the King. Nothing complimentary springs to mind.

‘She’d probably feed you well,’ he begins lamely.

‘She feeds him anyway!’ shouts a freckled porker behind him. His tonguetiedness is attracting unfavourable attention and Septimus is shooting him glances. The Pug is imitating a boat now, while Warburton-Burleigh seems to be vaulting over it and slaying things in an unspecific but convincing manner. Lemprière decides to try lying.

‘Her eyes are … her eyes, she has wonderful eyes,’ he burst out. A few onlookers nodded to each other approvingly, this was certainly untrue.

‘Wonderful eyes, and a generous heart,’ he goes on. ‘A heart full of, of milk, the milk of human kindness!’

Warburton-Burleigh is in alligator death-throes now, writhing and thrashing, murmuring
habibi
in waltz-time pulses while the Pug mimes the genocide of the titans, not one but hundreds crashing to the floor, fingers the size of Chesil Spit.

‘She loves you, at least that’s true,’ Lemprière lies and now, as he looks over at the Crone for fresh, well, any inspiration, there is a flicker of her features that might say,
Yes, it’s true; he doesn’t deceive
. This cannot be right but.… He continues with a conceit on the curve of her cheek, something about the sway of long violin notes as they ripple the air (a little florid? ponders the Pork Club) and looks over again. No, this cannot be right. Right before his eyes there is, faint but unmistakable, a definite modification of the Crone going on. To be exact, there is a change in the shape of her cheek, no room for doubt. What is worse, or better, the shape has a visibly violin-ish quality about it. Certainly, the Pug and Warburton-Burleigh are doing a synchronised imitation of the Lisbon earthquake blindfold, but can this compete with a genuine, if slight, metamorphosis? Lemprière looks around for acclamation, amazement, a dash of dismayed
respect even. The Pork Club is busy making up its mind about the earthquake though, ‘is that the harbour draining?’, ‘the Alhambra, maybe’ and ‘What?’ are random samples of the reaction. Only Septimus looks across at him. Can they all be blind?

‘Observe her fulsome, red lips.’ He is fired to this. ‘The bloom of her dimples, the pools of her eyes.’ That should do it and, yes, it seems it does. All these things are actually beginning to happen. Not grotesquely, but as if the years were peeling off in layers and time was always meant to run this way, the other way was a mistake and things should get better, at least not so bad.

The Crone is passing presentable, indeed verging on the desirable and Lemprière is spurred to yet greater heights of eloquence. Taut rhetorical figures and fervid apostrophes reap immediate rewards. A thousand third-rate sonnet sequences are cleaning out their closets; Lemprière just has to blow the dust off and tidy up the orthography a little for the words to become tangible flesh on the person of the Crone, breasts like ripe fruit, a neck of white marble.

‘O lucky man!’ he hails King Archon and by Jove he means it; the Crone is ravishing now, her staff crackling and sparking with unattributable thoughts of lust. Any man worthy of the name would be mad to pass up the chance of getting his snout in her trough. He tries a few lines from Anacreon and her new-found beauty takes on a boyish tinge, quite pleasing but best not to take it any further. Now, when he turns around, Lemprière notices that the Pork Club is becoming less articulate than before. A larger proportion of the background buzz is taking the form of grunting and snuffling. A few are down on their hands and knees rooting around in the empty bottles, uneaten gristle-gobbets and busted glasses that litter the floor. The Pug and Warburton-Burleigh are reaching the climax of their act, the latter on the former’s shoulders contorting his fingers in animal-shapes, a rabbit, a vole, a large snake, an alligator (again, just what is the iconography here?) which throw huge, successive silhouettes on the wall behind while the Pug approximates jig-steps, tap, tap.

Lemprière adds a couple of dimples and looks around again. A transformation is taking place behind him. Most, if not all, of the spectating revellers are showing signs of piggish metamorphosis, noses thickening and flattening, bellies extending taut, rounded contours. Oinking and snuffles are general and not a few seem to be eating the table-cloths. This is not what he means at all, he hasn’t mentioned pigs, could it be coincidence? It’s definitely hotter now and someone has set the unlit chandelier above his head in wheeling motion. On top of this, the Crone is reverting to type, blurring and wrinkling, his stomach feels a little volatile
and unwelcome memories, other transformations, other places, he has held them off all evening and it’s only a game, isn’t it?

Certainly is. The Pug rips King Archon’s head off and feeds it to the grunting herd behind while Warburton-Burleigh pulls off his wig to release seven snow-white doves which beat upwards through the pork-fumed smoky air, dissolving through the ceiling in quest of innocence on the floor above. Somewhere, a goose cries. Septimus smiles over at him, thumbs up. The round is at an end.

The earl taps Lemprière on the shoulder.

‘Well done. Do you need a hand?’ Lemprière lurches up. The earl doesn’t look porcine at all, a little hazy maybe, but the haziness belonging to a quite different order than before. His knees ache. Comments reach his ears about the Pug’s and Warburton-Burleigh’s performance: consensus is boiling down to ingenious, well-executed but just a little obscure and tricksy. The papier-maché Archon-head is acknowledged as a
coup de théâtre
, albeit smacking of professionalism. A few congratulations are being passed his way, none by pigs, and the Crone is as scraggy as before. Lemprière stands dumbfounded, did he dream it all?
No, you did not…
.

‘No, you did not….’ Septimus, is explaining to him that the Crone and King Archon have decided, after all, not to tie the knot although his suasive verses have created a favourable impression on all who heard them. King Archon is as impassive as before, but not to be discouraged, this is the norm. Everything is as it should be.

Lemprière hangs onto this, and Septimus. Involuntary genuflections are afflicting him and the room is growing less distinct. Louder too, dimmer. Perhaps this is because of the smoke which striates and layers the air in lazy drifts, confusing the issue.

‘Pull yourself together, John. Come on, man,’ Septimus breaks in on these unwelcome thoughts.

‘Do you suppose he might have had too much to drink?’ asks the solicitous earl.

‘Come on, John. This is where we win the day, get up! Let’s go!’ Lemprière tries to ignore the leaden ichor creeping through his body.

‘Get ‘em!’ he blurts.

‘That’s the spirit. Just follow my lead.’

The Pork Club have ingested the previous performance and are readying themselves for the next. Their paramours have rejoined them after long abstinence and re-couplings are being negotiated in raised eye-brows, fan-fluttering, pert and winsome smiles. Collective anticipation is the palpable mood. Septimus is already giving them what they want, pacing up and down with occasional short runs at the spectators who spill back ‘Whooo!’, playing along with it. Lemprière is at a loss until Septimus begins
waggling his fingers over his ears, an unnatural addition, a monster of unknown pedigree is being implied here, which is enough for Lemprière. He goes into heroic mode (every monster implies a hero, or vice versa) dibbing with an imaginary javelin at Septimus, who is now waggling more urgently. At this point, it dawns on the dibber that Septimus’s fingers must be meant to represent snakes and that his flashing eyes are approximations of Medusa’s petrifying glance. The Pork Club is going with it, hooting him on between swigs. Lemprière hopes that Septimus-Gorgon is following the Ovid version; he certainly is, carefully using a non-existent shield as mirror, thrust and parry until he slays the beast, crash! and spectacular dying agonies from Septimus.

Matters start to get a little confused now with Septimus swooning and wringing his hands, mimicking a character that Perseus-Lemprière cannot identify. He decides to go on a Hero’s Journey to gather his thoughts, wandering about at random while trying to ignore the shouts of the Pork Club, ‘Left, left! No, go right! Go right!’ Andromeda! Of course! But he’s running out of time now, hurry up, slay the dragon in double-quick time and get the girl. The girl doesn’t want to be got though and more confusion arises; could Septimus-Andromeda be alluding to the celebrated (but lost) Iolus-fragment in which the Perseus story (it is rumoured) is almost exactly reversed? It seems unlikely, but the show must go on. Lemprière decides on a bold ellision, leaping over the business with Phineus (too complicated in any case) and not giving Atlas a second thought, he arrives at the Larissan Games. Septimus is undulating now, probably the Larissan crowd, thinks his partner. Picking up an invisible quoit, he winds up the dramatic tension, swinging his arm up high, then low ready to release it on its fated journey to the fragile skull of Acrisius. Applause breaks out amongst the Pork Club, scattered clapping at first, then louder, louder still and when it reaches its peak he releases the missile watching its path into the distance, its inevitable destination the head of Acrisius-Archon.

He holds the pose as tumult turns to congratulation.

‘Bravo, Theseus!’

‘Hurrah!’

‘Victory to the Athenian!’

Some of the Pork Club seem to be a little confused as to the exact content and characters of the performance, but now they are all about him, shaking his hand and slapping him on the back.

‘Wonderful, John!’ The earl separates himself from the mass. ‘Solves the essential problem of old Archon’s non-cooperation, brilliant conception, quite brilliant….’ A certain Lydia (she of the cream silk, red ringlets and fingers) offers him an apologetic kiss as he pushes towards Septimus. All is well and Septimus is all smiles.

‘Did I get the impression you were doing Perseus?’ he asks in a low tone as Lemprière approaches.

‘Yes, my quoit-throwing.’ He demonstrates (there are adjacent whoops at the reprise). ‘Not bad, eh? The quoit.’ He holds out an empty hand but Septimus interrupts.

‘We were doing Theseus,’ he hisses. ‘The finger-waggling was the Minotaur, and you were meant to be abandoning Ariadne, not marrying Andromeda. The last bit was your return to Athens in the black-sailed ship….’

‘… which the aging Ægeus takes as a sign that I am dead.’ Lemprière’s late confusions are being cleared up.

‘… and so commits suicide, yes. Luckily your quoit-throwing bore some resemblance to Theseus waving from his ship, thus deepening the dramatic irony et cetera. In short my friend, they fell for it so keep it under your hat. Oh, and John.’ Lemprière turns back. ‘We’ve won. Well done.’ He smiles and hands his companion-in-arms a bottle. The Pug and Warburton-Burleigh are somewhat peevish but the Pork Club is unanimous, the laurels are theirs. Septimus pulls a cork for himself, mgnk, mgnk, mgnk, in tandem, the liquor most reminds Lemprière of cup ‘R’, with perhaps a dash of ‘J’, mgnk, mgnk, it slips down like syrup.