A Void (20 page)

about to hit him, was frolicking around Othon's limp

body, laughing so loudly that Augustus, in a fury, judging his

son's antics unfitting in such a situation, curdy told him to go

away.

"Off with you! Scram!" was his cry, a cry so loud that Haig,

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who, until that instant, had found his papa an unfailingly kind

man, took off with a halting, blushing apology. An involuntary

convulsion shook his childish body, causing him not only to burst

into sobs but soil his pants.

So, whilst Haig ran off, trying to pluck up his spirits by sprinkling

grain into his carp's pond, a task that would always amus-

"Hang on a mo," Olga cuts Squaw off in mid-word. "I forgot

about Jonah. Poor thing, it's probably starving."

"Shhh! Shhh!" cry Amaury and Savorgnan. "First, Squaw has

to finish this gripping, fascinating story!"

"Thank you," says Squaw.

So, as I was saying (says Squaw), whilst Haig was nourishing

his carp, I took Othon into an adjoining drawing room, laid him

out on a sofa and got him to swallow a tonic. Augustus and I

took off his raglan and (oh, abomination of abominations!) had

a vision causing us both to panic, causing our blood to run cold,

our hair to stand up in tufts, our skin to go all pimply - a vision

of Othon Lippmann bathing in his own blood. It was as if a

monstrous hawk had flown again and again down on to his torso,

flaying him, ripping off his skin, poking into his lungs, drawing

out his innards, digging into his thorax with its anvil blows.

What I saw in his body was a tiny zoo of vomit-making animals

- gadfly, blowfly, wasp, worm, cockroach, moth - buzzing, hum-

ming, squirming, as gluttonous as carrion crows, on a bloody,

slimy, gassy, putrid magma that stank a yard away!

"Ugh!" says Olga.

"Yuk!" says Amaury.

You said it (says Squaw). In an agony lasting all of six days

Othon would slip into a profound coma, surfacing from it on

occasion only to shout insults at us, accusing us, God only knows

why, of conspiring to kill him, calling damnation down upon us.

I did all I could for him and so did Augustus - hoping that his

dying days wouldn't incur too much fuss or strain. And Othon

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did finally pass away, hurling hair-raising oaths at us and, with

his last, rasping gasp, drawing from out of his lungs a cry so

horrifying I instantly had to throw up.

This was, at his burial, Augustus's orison:

"Othon Lippmann — you, my Guru — go straight to God's

kingdom, to that Holy City in which a Houri, a gift to you

from Allah in all His compassion, now awaits you. I was a daily

communicant in that faith that you brought us and taught us so

long ago. Today I am abjuring it, today, tomorrow and for

always. For, with your passing on, what can I do with your faith

but abolish it? And so, with touchwood, will you and I go forth

at midnight."

With that Parthian shot did his orison finish. It was, was it

not, a curious thing to say and, for my part, only his action that

night was to clarify it. Drawing his inspiration from Othon's

own apostolic Canon, amassing and binding up six thick faggots,

Augustus put a torch to his (which is to say, Othon's) body. It

burnt for a day and a half, producing a whitish ash that a whisding

north wind would sow all around us . . .

Nobody, not any of you, can know what anguish and affliction

struck us down at that point. Totally caught up in his sorrow,

his prostration, his apathy, mounting his Golgotha with a Cross

on his back, carrying, too, a giant, flapping albatross of guilt and

mortification, Augustus B. Clifford sank into a torpor.

It was frightful to watch him pacing up and down, all day and

all night, in suicidally low spirits - to watch this man who, as

you know, was a
bon vivant,
not to say a bit of a
gourmand.,
just nibbling at his food, just picking at his lunch. Notwithstanding

that I would lovingly cook for him all my most subdy scrump-

tious culinary concoctions —
aloyau aux oignons confits, turbot au

court-bouillon
, a London broil,
boudin au raifort
, scampi - Augus-

tus got down, at most, an anchovy, a shaving of Cantal, a dash

of Izard, a drop of amontillado, half an apricot or a solitary

walnut — and that was on a good day.

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Starting to grow disturbingly thin, occasionally withdrawing

to his donjon, locking its door, not surfacing from it for six

days, although, from within, without warning, and invariably at

midnight, giving out an alarming howl, Augustus would abruptly

turn up again, as if in a stupor, his brow moist and sticky, his

good looks haggard and drawn. In just 12 months his auburn

hair had lost all its colour, transforming him into a grizzly old

fogy.

Haig, a pallid, sickly, timorous boy, an unwitting victim of all

that gloom and doom, was psychologically unfit for this cold,

harsh world of ours, a world in which, if you want to function,

you simply cannot show any pity. Gradually coming to know his

son, snapping out of his nihilistic sloth at long last, disparaging

his past duplicity, his misconduct, his casual abandoning of his

offspring, Augustus finally got down to pray for moral stamina,

so that no guilt, no stigma, should attach to his son for a sin that

was his - which is to say, his own - and nobody's but his.

"I had what you might call an anti-Midas touch," is how

Augustus put it, milking his propitiation for all it was worth. "I

would spoil all that was truly important in my world, and what

I couldn't spoil, what I couldn't corrupt, I would simply forbid.

I know now that I'm going to rot, I'm going to go to pot, in

my insignificant vacuum, in my void - but I will insist that my

son, that fruit of my unruly loins, for whom I affirm, in front of

all that is holy, an undying passion from this day forth -1 insist,

I say, that my son's schooling will start right away, from today,

and it's I who will tutor him. In addition," Augustus finally said

with a sigh, "may I find in this daily obligation my own harsh

but vital salvation."

So Augustus took in hand his son's instruction - an arduous

task as his mind was almost a tabula rasa. It was soon obvious

that his tuition at Azincourt's local grammar school had had

practically no impact on him. Haig, who had an amazingly poor

vocabulary for a lad of 12, had no grasp of orthography at all;

135

was totally lacking in imagination; could do subtraction but not

addition, division but not multiplication; was blissfully ignorant

of Avogadro's Law or, should I say, mistook it for an axiom of

Arago that had nothing at all to do with it; and would gladly

inform you that Louis X was familiarly known at court as Hutin

but had no notion why. As for Latin, although a thick manual

was put at his disposal, it had childishly strict limits: "
Animula

vagula blanda", "Aquila non capit muscas'\ "Sic transit gloria

mundi"
or "O
firtunatos nimium sua si bona norint qgricolas".

Inculcating a satisfying command of basics in his son took a lot

out of Augustus, who, although working hard at it, at all hours,

did, as both tutor and adjudicator, inflict on his ignorant child

a form of schooling that was far too high in its standards,

incongruously abstract in its quality and mosdy much ado about

nothing. Poor Haig would swallow all this waffling, compliant,

smiling and without any sulky ill will; but it was also obvious,

within a month, that such tuition on its own could not, would

not, bring about automatic intuition. To Augustus's dismay, his

son was null in anything touching on maths, philosophy and

Latin, and had, at most, only a faint inkling of Italian and Spanish.

As for linguistics, Haig truly put in a lot of hard work, contriving

to grasp,
grosso modo,
a host of grammatical, syntactical and

phonic quirks, managing to distinguish - in, say, four words out

of six - a glottal from a labial, a noun from a pronoun, an ordinary

auxiliary from a modal auxiliary, a past from a conditional, a root

from a suffix, a comma from a colon, a surd from a sonant, a

chiasmus from an oxymoron, sarcasm from irony and, finally,

pathos from bathos (and both from Porthos and Athos).

It was frustrating for Augustus (on whom it would quickly

dawn that his original plan to turn Haig into a brilliant physicist

was all in vain) that his own input vis-a-vis his son's vocation

was practically minimal. At which point, forgoing all such

ambitions, it struck him as a surprising but also charming fact

that it was for music that Haig — whom Augustus had caught

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on two occasions puffing into a tuba and producing from it a

sound that wasn't wholly discordant - had both a passion and a

gift. Haig had, too, a natural instinct for harmony, a distinct

vocal ability and could sing a song, any song, if it was sung to

him first.

So Augustus, whom Iturbi had taught in his youth, bought a

grand piano (it was a Graf with a slighdy nasal tonal quality but

miraculous pitch, built for Brahms, who would tap out on it, so

it was said, his Impromptu Opus 28) and had it put in a drawing

room in which also stood a billiard board (that billiard board on

which, as I told you, Augustus almost took a poniard to Douglas

as a baby).

Day by day,
do mi fab sob,
from morning till night,
sob fab mi

do
, Augustus would drill his son in that gracious art that is sing-

ing, both accompanying and inspiring him. Abandoning his

Latin, his Italian and Spanish, Haig thought only of his passion

for classical music, finding total satisfaction in Mozart, Bach,

Schumann and Hugo Wolf. In truth, not so much Apollo as

Marsyas, his susurration was too squally, his sonority too soft,

his modulation too shaky, his sharps flat, and his pitch simply

off. Augustus's son, in short, sang badly — but was to know,

notwithstanding, a joy in singing that no plummy vibrato could

diminish.

As you all know, at 18, and not without difficulty, Haig sat

his
bac\
and, making his mind up at last, taking an autonomous

stand as to his aspirations, stood up to Augustus, accosting him

in that forthright way of his:

"Now that I'm all grown-up, this is what I want to do - sing

at La Scala. It's my vocation!"

"It's a long way from Arras to Milan," said Augustus, smiling.

"Labor omnia vincit improbus
," said Haig, who was a stubborn

young man on occasion.

"That's what you think, you big bag of wind," said Augustus.

Haig, who had no gift for humour, got angry at this, stamping

his foot and crying:

1 3 7

"Oh, shut up!"

"Now now, my boy," said Augustus, trying to calm him. "I

was just admiring your obstinacy. First things first, though. You

know, don't you, that if you want to triumph against your rivals

you must put in a lot of hard, slogging work? What kind of

world would you call it if just anybody thought to turn up at La

Scala and ask for a major part in a production?"

"But my plan is to go forward and upward rung by rung."

"If that's so, work hard and I'll assist you as much as I can,"

said Augustus in conclusion.

So, from that day forward, his son did nothing but work at

his vocation - practising sol-fa from cockcrow to dusk.

Now, it was a warm, sunny April morning with spring on its

way. Haig, who was taking particular pains with an oratorio by

Haydn, sat down, flagging, worn out, on that billiard board -

or, should I say, on its rim — that sat stagnating not far from his

piano, stagnating, as I put it, for nobody now had any inclination

to play on it.

Idly, as if simply twiddling his thumbs, Augustus was improvis-

ing on a choral work by Anton Dvorak.

Chancing just at that instant, who knows why, to look at

Augustus's billiard board, Haig saw that part of its dust-cloth,

about a third all told, was going mouldy. All along its margin

was a rash of baffling points, whitish in colour and pica-high (as

in typography), abnormal and anamorphous grains, small, flaky

dots, almost circular and almost uniform. A handful had tiny

incrustations, additions or variations, but all had this quality in

common: a structural organisation that struck Haig as arising

organically out of a conscious plan, a goal that was as obvious

as it was blatant: not a random but a
signifying
sign (using that

word in its structuralist connotation), partially if not wholly akin

to a manuscript or possibly a quipos (a nodal ribbon, of Incan

origin, that functions as an aid to communication).

But that wasn't all. What was most disturbing was that, as

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Augustus was happily tinkling away at his Dvorak improvisation,

Haig saw this inscription - which had, by his count, 25 points

to start with - actually, fantastically, almost as if in a vision,