Viriconium (70 page)

“I wonder if you know, Ardwick Crome, how I worry about his
bowels,
” she went on. “As his friend you must worry, too, for they are very lazy, and he will not encourage them if we do not!”

It was, she said, a family failing.

She offered Crome chamomile tea, which he refused, and then got him to run an errand for her to a fashionable chemist’s in Mynned. After that he could do nothing but go home and wait.

Kristodulos Fleece—half dead with opium and syphilis, and notoriously self-critical—had left behind him when he vacated the north-light studio a small picture. Traditionally it remained there. Succeeding occupants had taken heart from its technical brio and uncustomary good humour (although Audsley King was reputed to have turned it to the wall during her brief period in Montrouge because she detected in it some unforgivable sentimentality or other) and no dealer in the Quarter would buy it for fear of bad luck. Crome now removed it to the corner above the cheap tin washstand so that he could see it from his bed.

Oil on canvas, about a foot square, it depicted in some detail a scene the artist had called “Children beloved of the gods have the power to weep roses.” The children, mainly girls, were seen dancing under an elder tree, the leafless branches of which had been decorated with strips of rag. Behind them stretched away rough common land, with clumps of gorse and a few bare, graceful birch saplings, to where the upper windows and thatch of a low cottage could be made out. The lighthearted vigour of the dancers, who were winding themselves round the tallest girl in a spiral like a clock spring, was contrasted with the stillness of the late-winter afternoon, its sharp clear airs and horizontal light. Crome had often watched this dance as a boy, though he had never been allowed to take part in it. He remembered the tranquil shadows on the grass, the chant, the rose and green colours of the sky. As soon as the dancers had wound the spiral tight, they would begin to tread on one another’s toes, laughing and shrieking— or, changing to a different tune, jump up and down beneath the tree while one of them shouted, “A bundle of rags!”

It was perhaps as sentimental a picture as Audsley King had claimed. But Crome, who saw a lamb in every corner, had never seen one there; and when she came as she had promised, the woman with the insect’s head found him gazing so quietly up at it from the trapezium of moonlight falling across his bed that he looked like the effigy on a tomb. She stood in the doorway, perhaps thinking he had died and escaped her.

“I can’t undo myself,” he said.

The mask glittered faintly. Did he hear her breathing beneath it? Before he could make up his mind there was a scuffling on the stairs behind her and she turned to say something he couldn’t quite catch—though it might have been: “Don’t come in yourself.”

“These straps are so old,” he explained. “My father—”

“All right, give it to me, then,” she said impatiently to whoever was outside. “Now go away.” And she shut the door. Footsteps went down the stairs; it was so quiet in Montrouge that you could hear them clearly going away down flight after flight, scraping in the dust on a landing, catching in the cracked linoleum. The street door opened and closed. She waited, leaning against the door, until they had gone off down the empty pavements towards Mynned and the Ghibbeline Passage, then said, “I had better untie you.” But instead she walked over to the end of Crome’s bed, and sitting on it with her back to him stared thoughtfully at the picture of the elder-tree dance.

“You were clever to find this,” she told him. She stood up again, and, peering at it, ignored him when he said,

“It was in the other room when I came.”

“I suppose someone helped you,” she said. “Well, it won’t matter.” Suddenly she demanded, “Do you like it here among the rats? Why must you live here?”

He was puzzled.

“I don’t know.”

A shout went up in the distance, long and whispering like a deeply drawn breath. Roman candles sailed up into the night one after the other, exploding in the east below the zenith so that the collapsing pantile roofs of Montrouge stood out sharp and black. Light poured in, ran off the back of the chair and along the belly of the enamel jug, and, discovering a book or a box here, a broken pencil there, threw them into merciless relief. Yellow or gold, ruby, greenish-white: with each new pulse the angles of the room grew more equivocal.

“Oh, it is the stadium!” cried the woman with the insect’s head. “They have begun early tonight!”

She laughed and clapped her hands. Crome stared at her.

“Clowns will be capering in the great light!” she said.

Quickly she undid his straps.

“Look!”

Propped up against the whitewashed wall by the door she had left a long brown paper parcel hastily tied with string. Fat or grease had escaped from it, and it looked as if it might contain a fish. While she fetched it for him, Crome sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, rubbing his face. She carried it hieratically, across her outstretched arms, her image advancing and receding in the intermittent light.

“I want you to see clearly what we are going to lend you.”

When the fireworks had stopped at last, an ancient white ceramic sheath came out of the paper. It was about two feet long, and it had been in the ground for a long time, yellowing to the colour of ivory and collecting a craquelure of fine lines like an old sink. Chemicals seeping through the soils of the Great Waste had left here and there on it faint blue stains. The weapon it contained had a matching hilt—although by now it was a much darker colour from years of handling—and from the juncture of the two had leaked some greenish, jelly-like substance which the woman with the insect’s head was careful not to touch. She knelt on the bare floorboards at Crome’s feet, her back and shoulders curved round the weapon, and slowly pulled hilt and sheath apart.

At once a smell filled the room, thick and stale like wet ashes in a dustbin. Pallid oval motes of light, some the size of a birch leaf, others hardly visible, drifted up towards the ceiling. They congregated in corners and did not disperse, while the weapon, buzzing torpidly, drew a dull violet line after it in the gloom as the woman with the insect’s head moved it slowly to and fro in front of her. She seemed to be fascinated by it. Like all those things it had been dug up out of some pit. It had come to the city through the Analeptic Kings, how long ago no one knew. Crome pulled his legs up onto the bed out of its way.

“I don’t want that,” he said.

“Take it!”

“No.”

“You don’t understand. She is trying to change the name of the city!”

“I don’t want it. I don’t care.”

“Take it. Touch it. It’s yours now.”

“No!”

“Very well,” she said quietly. “But don’t imagine the painting will help you again.” She threw it on the bed near him. “Look at it,” she said. She laughed disgustedly. “ ‘Children beloved of the gods’!” she said. “Is that why he waited for them outside the washhouses twice a week?”

The dance was much as it had been, but now with the fading light the dancers had removed themselves to the garden of the cottage, where they seemed frozen and awkward, as if they could only imitate the gaiety they had previously felt. They were dancing in the shadow of the
bredogue,
which someone had thrust out of an open window beneath the earth-coloured eaves. In Soubridge, and in the midlands generally, they make this pitiful thing—with its bottle-glass eyes and crepe-paper harness—out of the stripped and varnished skull of a horse, put up on a pole covered with an ordinary sheet. This one, though, had the skull of a well-grown lamb, which seemed to move as Crome looked.

“What have you done?” he whispered. “Where is the picture as it used to be?”

The lamb gaped its lower jaw slackly over the unsuspecting children to vomit on them its bad luck. Then, clothed with flesh again, it turned its white and pleading face on Crome, who groaned and threw the painting across the room and held out his hand.

“Give me the sword from under the ground, then,” he said.

When the hilt of it touched his hand he felt a faint sickly shock. The bones of his arm turned to jelly and the rank smell of ashpits enfolded him. It was the smell of a continent of wet cinders, buzzing with huge papery-winged flies under a poisonous brown sky; the smell of Cheminor, and Mammy Vooley, and the Aqualate Pond; it was the smell of the endless wastes which surround Uroconium and everything else that is left of the world. The woman with the insect’s head looked at him with satisfaction. A knock came at the door.

“Go away!” she shouted. “You will ruin everything!”

“I’m to see that he’s touched it,” said a muffled voice. “I’m to make sure of that before I go back.”

She shrugged impatiently and opened the door.

“Be quick then,” she said.

In came Ansel Verdigris, stinking of lemon genever and wearing an extraordinary yellow satin shirt which made his face look like a corpse’s. His coxcomb, freshly dyed that afternoon at some barber’s in the Tinmarket, stuck up from his scalp in exotic scarlet spikes and feathers. Ignoring Crome, and giving the woman with the insect’s head only the briefest of placatory nods, he made a great show of looking for the weapon. He sniffed the air. He picked up the discarded sheath and sniffed that. (He licked his finger and went to touch the stuff that had leaked from it, but at the last moment he changed his mind.) He stared up at the vagrant motes of light in the corners of the room, as if he could divine something from the way they wobbled and bobbed against the ceiling.

When he came to the bed he looked intently but with no sign of recognition into Crome’s face.

“Oh yes,” he said. “He’s touched it all right.”

He laughed. He tapped the side of his nose, and winked. Then he ran round and round the room crowing like a cock, his mouth gaping open and his tongue extended, until he fell over Kristodulos Fleece’s painting, which lay against the skirtingboard where Crome had flung it. “Oh, he’s touched it all right,” he said, leaning exhaustedly against the door frame. He held the picture away from him at arm’s length and looked at it with his head on one side. “Anyone could see that.” His expression became pensive. “Anyone.”

“The sword is in his hand,” said the woman with the insect’s head. “If you can tell us only what we see already, get out.”

“It isn’t you that wants to know,” Verdigris answered flatly, as if he was thinking of something else. He propped the painting up against his thigh and passed the fingers of both hands several times rapidly through his hair. All at once he went and stood in the middle of the room on one leg, from which position he grinned at her insolently and began to sing in a thin musical treble like a boy at a feast:

“I choose you one, I choose you all,
I pray I might go to the ball.”

“Get out!” she shouted.

“The ball is mine,” sang Verdigris,

“and none of yours,
Go to the woods and gather flowers.
Cats and kittens abide within
But we
court ladies
walk out and in!”

Some innuendo in the last line seemed to enrage her. She clenched her fists and brought them up to the sides of the mask, the feathery antennae of which quivered and trembled like a wasp’s.

“Sting me!” taunted Verdigris. “Go on!”

She shuddered.

He tucked the painting under his arm and prepared to leave.

“Wait!” begged Crome, who had watched them with growing puzzlement and horror. “Verdigris, you must know that it is me! Why aren’t you saying anything? What’s happening?”

Verdigris, already in the doorway, turned round and gazed at Crome for a moment with an expression almost benign, then, curling his upper lip, he mimicked contemptuously, “ ‘Verdigris, you’ve never
been
to Cheminor.
Neither
of us has.’ ” He spat on the floor and touched the phlegm he had produced with his toe, eyeing it with qualified disapproval. “Well, I have now, Crome. I have now.” Crome saw that under their film of triumph his eyes were full of fear; his footsteps echoed down into the street and off into the ringing spaces of Montrouge and the Old City.

“Give the weapon to me,” said the woman with the insect’s head. As she put it back in its sheath it gave out briefly the smells of rust, decaying horse hair, vegetable water. She seemed indecisive. “He won’t come back,” she said once. “I promise.” But Crome would not look away from the wall. She went here and there in the room, blowing dust off a pile of books and reading a line or two in one of them, opening the door into the north-light studio and closing it again immediately, tapping her fingers on the edge of the washstand. “I’m sorry about the painting,” she said. Crome could think of nothing to say to that. The floorboards creaked; the bed moved. When he opened his eyes she was lying next to him.

All the rest of the night her strange long body moved over him in the unsteady illumination from the skylight. The insect mask hung above him like a question, with its huge faceted eyes and its jaws of filigree steel plate. He heard her breath in it, distinctly, and once thought he saw through it parts of her real face, pale lips, a cheekbone, an ordinary human eye: but he would not speak to her. The outer passages of the observatory at Alves are full of an ancient grief. The light falls as if it has been strained through muslin. The air is cold and moves unpredictably. It is the grief of the old machines, which, unfulfilled, whisper suddenly to themselves and are silent again for a century. No one knows what to do with them. No one knows how to assuage them. A faint sour panic seems to cling to them: they laugh as you go past, or extend a curious yellow film of light like a wing.