Viriconium (54 page)

In the salons we hear nothing but what clothes they wear, what wineshop
they frequent this week, how they have got pregnant some silly young brodeuse
from the Piazza of Inherited Tendencies. “Will the Barley brothers dine at
home tonight?” the women ask each other. “Or will they dine abroad?” They
will dine, as everyone knows, like pigs, in some pie shop behind the
Margarethestrasse and then fall down insensible in the gutters. “The Barley
brothers have invented
Egg Foo Yung!”

When he thought about the Grand Cairo, Ashlyme was filled with a kind of violent disgust which extended to himself. He dreamed about the woman with the gaping mouth and the bulging eyes as if he had been responsible for thrusting the knife into the back of her throat. Nothing like this event had ever happened in his life before; even awake, he could see it over and over again just by closing his eyes. He could also see the dwarf’s expression when he had said, “That’s that, then.” It was one of satisfaction, the ordinary satisfaction of an ordinary need, as if one had just finished breakfast. Ashlyme dreaded another meeting with him if only because the shadow of this expression would lie—as it had always done, but now visible—just under his skin, alongside his vanity or his belief that he understood the language of cats.

Nevertheless a meeting was unavoidable. Ashlyme stayed away from the tower at Montrouge, but one night after his meal at the Vivien he came back to find the front door of his house banging open in the wind and the dwarf waiting for him in the darkened studio.

The dwarf looked tired. He complained, as usual, that the Barley brothers were plotting his downfall. “I do not take them seriously yet—things have not gone that far—but soon I must.” He complained of boredom. To alleviate it, he said, he had spent all week with prostitutes in Line Mass. They had called him “my little chancellor” and “my pet cock,” but he had got no enjoyment out of it, only migraines and a dry cough. As he told Ashlyme this he was watching him carefully. He sat on a windowsill, kicking his legs. He picked up Ashlyme’s lay figure and twisted its limbs into uncomfortable, not-quite-human positions. He laughed. “Come on, Ashlyme, what’s the matter? How’s old Emmley Burwash? He always looked the feeble type to me!”

Ashlyme stared at him across the studio.

“Well, if you won’t talk, you won’t,” said the dwarf. “I can’t make you.” He poked about among Ashlyme’s things until a rough portrait of Audsley King caught his eye. “What’s happened here?”

Ashlyme often saved the money he would have spent on a new canvas by reusing an old one. In this case he had done the painting over a group portrait of the Baroness de B—— and her family which had never been collected from the studio. As the wet summer advanced and the new paint began to fade, the image of the Baroness was beginning to reemerge in the form of a very old woman holding a flower, slowly absorbing and distorting the figure of Audsley King. There was something deliberate and eerie about this act of replacement. It was as if the Baroness, prohibited by her own vanity from collecting the original picture, nevertheless intended to claim the canvas. Ashlyme had followed the process with a sort of fascinated horror.

“It is some failure of the pigments,” he said. “The weather. I don’t know. It wasn’t a very successful portrait anyway.” He cleared his throat; swallowed. “It sometimes happens.”

Now that he found himself able to speak, he could wait no longer.

“How did you escape the police?” he heard himself ask anxiously. “What did you tell them? I watched from the Rue Serpolet, but you did not come down again. What happened after I went?”

The dwarf, who had been waiting for this, winked cruelly.

“In the Rue Serpolet,” he said, in a parody of an official voice, “I surprised two men in the act of smuggling a poor woman out of the quarantine zone against her will. I attempted to arrest them, but they stunned me, stabbed another unfortunate woman in a particularly horrible manner, and made their escape. I cannot describe them. They were wearing the most grotesque disguises. They were obviously very experienced criminals. Oh, don’t look so wretched, man! Can’t you take a joke?”

Ashlyme bit his lip.

“Even so,” he said. “Are you sure they believed you?”

The dwarf stared at him impatiently.

“Why shouldn’t they? I am the Grand Cairo. Everything they have, they have from me.” He laughed. “Besides, I am now in charge of this very investigation.” He gave an insolent shrug, tapped the side of his nose. “I have sworn to catch the offenders. A horrible crime like this is a matter of honour to me, you might say.”

“But the testimony of the other women!”

“Unfortunately we had to arrest some of the women. They were confused, and had somehow got hold of the idea that I had injured one of their number.”

He gripped Ashlyme’s arm suddenly.

“For your own peace of mind,” he said, in a low, urgent voice, “I advise you to forget the whole dangerous business. I intend to, which is good luck for you. And another thing, Ashlyme—” He tightened his grip until tears were forced from Ashlyme’s eyes. “Never leave me in the lurch like that again, or you’ll be the next one to feel that little skewer of mine. Enemies are all around!” Ashlyme tried to pull his arm away. Contemptuously, the dwarf watched his struggles for a moment or two, then let him go. “Remember!” He was silent after that, staring at Ashlyme as if he couldn’t really see him. Then he said in quite a different tone,

“A curious thing happened to me on my way back from Line Mass this morning. I tell you, Ashlyme, it was one of those incidents that make you think! I was walking along the canal bank in a district full of warehouses. Pink-and-brown-brick walls. The smell of old water. Rusty pulleys swinging in the wind above your head. A very old man approached me and, as we drew level, stopped to look into my face. It was an eerie look he gave me. As I stared back at him the sun came out briefly from behind a cloud. An unbearable halo seemed to flare round the edges of his yellowed skull! For a second or two it was very beautiful, this incandescent light burning round the edges of his head, dissolving away the pink brick behind him so that the whole sky seemed to open up like the white page of a book—

“But then the wind came up again and the sun went back in, and I saw that his face was eaten away by some disease contracted in youth. His mouth was trembling. He looked sickly and preoccupied. A vague power emanated from him, like a wind pushing me away. Ashlyme, I think the plague will have us all in the end!”

The dwarf shuddered superstitiously and was silent again. This was a side of his character he had never displayed before. At first Ashlyme suspected he had made the story up, or at least embroidered it to make it more impressive; but when he passed his heavily ringed hands over his face and turned to stare gloomily out of the window, it was quite impossible not to believe that something had genuinely disturbed him in Line Mass. He declined Ashlyme’s offer of tea, with a gesture which hinted that he could not be jollied out of his mood. He was plagued, he admitted, with nervous depressions which came and went with the weather. Undoubtedly this new melancholy was of that sort. Abruptly he said, “As a matter of fact I have thought a great deal about a woman I saw when we were in the Rue Serpolet, a big woman who tells fortunes and is said to live with Audsley King. I daresay you know of a woman like that?”

Ashlyme nodded puzzledly.

The dwarf gave him a curious smile, weak-mouthed yet conspiratorial, and drew from inside his studded leather jacket an envelope with a red wax seal as big as a carbuncle. “Just so,” he said. “I want this delivered to her.” He thought for a moment. “Tell her that I am most interested in the cards. Assure her of my regard. Build me up in her eyes. This is a romantic matter, Ashlyme, and I trust you. Take the letter to the Rue Serpolet as soon as you can.”

Ashlyme was filled with panic.

“But what about Audsley King?” he appealed. “She may have recognised my voice in the mêlée on that wretched staircase! How can I face her again?”

The dwarf stared at him expressionlessly, holding out the letter. Ashlyme spent a sleepless night and visited the house in the Rue Serpolet the next day, a dozen lilies waxen and heavy in the crook of his arm.

“How are you?”

“As you see me.”

The room was cold. Audsley King lay on the sofa—thin, still, dazed-looking—wrapped in a fur coat with curiously huge sleeves. She spoke reluctantly of “thieves”; her eyes moved apprehensively every time a builder’s cart went past the house. Bowls of anemones stood on every flat surface, as if she had begun to mourn herself. The flowers were purple and wine red, the colours of her disease; their necks were bent compliantly. She discussed small things: her domestic arrangements (“I am here in the studio all day now”) and her meals. “I have a sudden dislike for fish!” He studied her closely, but she was not laughing at him. “Would you go to the window and look out? We have had thieves break in, and I am very nervous.”

No, she said, she had done no new work. There, as he could see, was her easel, folded against the wall. She had drawn some cartoons, but she would not show them to him, of all people. They were not good enough. She had kept them for a day only, then torn them up. Why had he not been to see her? She would be glad to sit for him again, if that was what he wanted. Life seemed so quiet. She hadn’t to exert herself. It was not empty, but very quiet. “The fortune-teller is kind, but I miss the High City,” she said. Then again, she had so much to think about, there was barely time in the day!

He promised to call again soon. As he went out she was already staring uneasily into the corners of the room.

In the narrow hall with its broken linoleum and stacked canvases, Ashlyme found the Fat Mam bending over a bucket, her great bulk unhappy in a loose, flower-printed dress with little “muttonchop” sleeves. Washing the floor had made her breathe heavily through her open mouth, and there were broad patches of sweat beneath her arms. The hall was lighted only by a fanlight, which opened onto the communal stairs; in the brown gloom this produced she seemed monumental, immovable. But she stood up as he approached, wiping one powerful forearm across her cheek, and made way for him impassively. Steam came up from the bucket. Hardly knowing what to say, he handed her the dwarf’s envelope. She turned it over, examined the florid seal, weighed it a moment in her big rough hands as if she was not certain what to do with it.

“Would you like a glass of anisette?” she asked slowly.

“Thank you,” said Ashlyme, “but I’ll have to go.”

It was the first time they had spoken.

He watched her blunt fingers, so unaccustomed to the task, split and dampen the envelope. She saw him watching and turned away with a kind of instinctive modesty to read the single sheet of paper she had found. Her lips moved. Ashlyme, who would have given her greater privacy if he could, looked up at the wall. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a flush of bright red spread slowly up her thick neck and into her pallid cheeks with their downy hairs and faint film of perspiration. This monolithic woman, with her heavy shoulders, stuporous movements, and ox-like calm, was blushing! He tapped the side of his leg nervously and stared at the steaming bucket as hard as he could.

The sound of a builder’s cart came dully into the hall through the fanlight. He could smell food cooking down the passage in the kitchen. He had a sudden feeling of ordinariness and stability, then someone shouted in the street and it was gone. At last she folded the letter up and put it, with some effort, carefully back into its envelope. She dropped it down between her huge breasts and patted the place where it had settled.

“Your friend is a fine little man,” she said. “And very helpful.”

This was not what Ashlyme had expected. Suddenly he could see, superimposed on her face, the face of the woman the dwarf had murdered— head lolling back, mouth agape on that appalling thin knife. He felt he ought to warn her of this.

“You may find that the dwarf is subject to . . . enthusiasms,” he said, after some thought. “I mean that he may not be as dependable as you would like.”

He saw immediately that he had said both too much and too little. Perhaps the moment was past for him to say anything about the dwarf’s behaviour anyway: he had already condoned it by keeping quiet. The fortune-teller eyed him heavily. Then she smiled. For a second her eyes seemed to become a very pure and limpid blue. It was like a signal from the intelligence within, which had disengaged itself briefly to attend to him before returning to the eternal task of sifting sense from the random fall of some internal pack of cards. “I’m sure he is a man of great resource,” she said, “and a good man. Thank him for his invitation. But what he suggests is not yet possible.”

“I see,” said Ashlyme, who did not.

Rather than wait to see her eyes fade again, he gave her a vague nod and went out. When he looked back from the door she was down on her hands and knees by the bucket, scrubbing hard at something on the floor.

He reported this meeting to the dwarf in the tower at Montrouge.

“Good,” said the dwarf, rubbing his hands. “Excellent. Better than I expected. But we must press our advantage, eh? She must come here and see me as I am, a man who has organised his life on comfortable lines but who is willing to share it!”

He was in a high good humour. He blinked and winked with contemplative conceit and contentment. He ate a pear with relish, polished his spectacles vigorously. He had a bottle of bessen genever brought in and made Ashlyme toast what he called his “romantic success.” Once or twice his gaiety seemed a little tired: he ran his hands continually through his hair, and when he wasn’t speaking his eyes had an unfocused look. He got up without warning and threw the door open as if he hoped to catch someone listening outside. Once he said, “Half my men were themselves arrested yesterday morning, due to some administrative blunder up at Uriage and Montdore.” He gave a strained laugh. “Can you imagine that?” But generally he was pleased.