Viriconium (72 page)

It was a long vigil, as they always are. Towards morning the sin-eater heard a sound of muffled revelry in the street outside: stifled laughter, the rattle of a tambourine quickly stilled, the scrape of clogs on the damp cobbles. When he looked out he could see several dim figures moving backwards and forwards in the sea fog. He blinked. He narrowed his eyes and cleaned the windowpane with the flat of his hand. Behind him he heard the child’s father get to his feet with a deep sigh. Turning back into the room he said, “They’ve brought the horse over from Shifnal, I think. Unless you’ve got one in the village.”

The old man stared at him, at first without seeming to understand, then with growing anger, while outside they began to sing:

Mari Lwyd
Horse of frost & fire
Horse which is not a horse
Look kindly on our celebration.

The pallid skull of the Mari could now be seen, bobbing up and down on its pole, clacking its lower jaw energetically as the wind opened the fog up into streaming ribbons and tatters, then closed it again, white and seamless like a sheet.

“Let us in and give us some beer,” called a muffled but derisive voice. The idiot daughter gave a smile of delight and stared round the room as if she had heard a cupboard or a table speak; she tilted her head and whispered. There was a clatter of hooves or clogs, or perhaps it was simply the clapping of hands. The Mari’s followers were dressed in rags. They danced in the fog and frost, their breath itself a fog. The masks they wore were meant to represent the long strange lugubrious head of the wasteland locust, that enormous insect which lives in the blowing sand and clinging mud of the Great Brown Desert.

“I’ll give you more than beer!” shouted the old man, his face congested with his powerful frustration and grief. “I’ll give you something you won’t like!” He pulled the sleeves of his shirt up above his elbows, and before his wife could stop him he had rushed out among the Mari-boys, kicking and punching. They evaded him with deft hops and skips, and ran away laughing into the mist; the idiot daughter murmured and bit her nails; the door banged emptily back and forth in the wind. The old man had to come back into the house, shamefaced and defeated.

“Leave them be,” said his wife. “They’re not worth it, that lot from up at Shifnal.”

Distantly the voices still sang,

Mari Lwyd
Falls between the day and the hour
Horse which is not a horse
Look kindly on our feast.

The sin-eater made himself comfortable by the window again. He scratched his head. Something in the foggy street had stirred his memory. “The horse which is not a horse,” he whispered dreamily.

He smiled.

“Oh, no,” he said to the old man and his wife, “your little girl’s sins will be like the coloured butterflies—compared to some I’ve tasted.” And then again: “The horse which is not a horse. I never hear those words without a shudder. Have you ever been to Viriconium? Packed your belongings aboard some barge at the ruined wharfs of the Yser Canal? Watched two clouds close a slot of blue in the winter sky, so that you felt as if something had been taken from you forever?”

Seeing that he had puzzled them, he laughed.

“I suppose not. Still . . . The horse which is not a horse . . .”

To recall the momentous events of your life (he went on) is to pull up nettles with the flowers. When I think of my uncle Prinsep I remember my mother first, and only then his watery blue eyes. When I think of him I can see the high brick walls of the lunatic asylum at Wergs, and hear the echoing shouts from the abandoned almshouses round the Aqualate Pond.

I was not born in this trade. When I was a boy we lived in the broad ploughlands around Sour Bridge. We were well enough off at my father’s death to have moved to the city, but my mother was content where she was. I suppose she relied on the society she knew, and on her brothers, who were numerous and for the most part lived close. I can see her now, giving tea to these red-faced yeomen in their gaiters and rusty coats who filled our drawing room like their own placid great farm horses, bringing with them whatever the season the whole feel of a November dawn—mist in the cut-and-laid hedges, rooks cawing from the tall elms, a huge sun rising behind the bare wet lace of hawthorn. She was a woman like a china ornament, always wary of their feet.

Uncle Prinsep was her step-brother, a very silent man who came to us for long visits without ever speaking. Many years before, after a quarrel with his own mother, he had let the family down and gone to live in Viriconium. I can see now how much my mother must have disapproved of his dress and manner (he wore a pale blue velvet suit and yellow shoes, much out of date in the city, I suspect, but always a source of amazement to us); but despite this, and although she often pretended to despise the Prinsep clan as a whole, she was unfailingly kind to him. There he sat, at the tea table, a man with a weak mouth and large skull upholstered with fat, who gave the impression of being constantly in a dream. He was filled, his silence informed us, with a melancholy beyond communication, or even comprehension, which sometimes stood in the corner of his eye like a tear. You could hear him sighing on the stairs in the morning after his bath. He patted himself dry with a soft towel.

The other uncles disliked him; my sisters regarded him with contempt, claiming that when they were younger he had tried to put his hands up the back of their pinafores; but to me he was a continual delight, because he was so often used as an example of what I would become if I didn’t pay attention, and because he had once given me a book which began:

I was in Viriconium once. I was a much younger woman then. What a
place that is for lovers! The Locust Winter carpets its streets with broken insects;at the corners they sweep them into strange-smelling drifts which glow
for the space of a morning like heaps of gold before they fade away. . . .

Imagine the glee with which I discovered that Uncle Prinsep had written this himself! I could not wait to fail my mother and go there.

One afternoon a little after the spring thaw, when I was eighteen or nineteen, he arrived unexpectedly and stood on the doorstep shaking his coat under a sky the colour of zinc. He seemed distracted, but at the tea table his tongue was loosened at last. He talked about his journey, the weather, his rooms in the city which he said were untenable through burst pipes and draughts: my mother couldn’t stop him talking. If there was a silence he would suddenly say, “I was in mourning for six people last May,” causing us to look at our plates in embarrassment; or, “Do you think that souls fly around and choose bodies to be born into?” My sisters covered their mouths and spluttered, but I was mortified.

He couldn’t hear enough, he said, about the family, and he interrogated my mother, who had by now begun to look down at her own plate in some confusion, mercilessly about each of the other uncles in turn. Did Dando Seferis still go fishing when he had the chance? How was—he snapped his fingers, he had forgotten her name—
Pernel,
his wife? How old would the daughter be this year? When he could pursue this no further he looked round and sighed happily. “What wonderful cake this is!” he exclaimed; and, on being informed that it was a quite ordinary
kuchen
: “I can’t think why I’ve never eaten it before. Did we always have it? How nice it is to be home!” He nudged me, to my horror, and said, “You don’t get cake like this in Viriconium, young man!”

Later he played the piano and sang.

He made my sisters dance with him, but only the old country dances. To see this great fat man, face shining with perspiration, shamble like a bear to the strains of “The Earl of Rone” or “The Hunting of the Jolly Wren” moved them to even greater contempt. He told us ghost stories before we went up to bed. He managed to corner me on the stairs after I had studiously avoided his gaze all evening, to give me a green country waistcoat with some money wrapped in tissue paper in one pocket; I sat in my room looking at it and wept with fury at his lack of understanding. After we were asleep he kept my mother up, talking about their father and his political ambitions, until the small hours.

We had him for two days, during which my mother watched him anxiously. Was he drunk? Was he ill? She could not decide. Whatever it was he went back to Viriconium on the morning of the third day, and died there a week later. In keeping with her evasive yet practical nature she told us nothing about the circumstances. “It happened in someone’s house,” she said with a movement of her shoulders which we recognised as both protective and censorious; and she would admit nothing more.

He was brought home to be buried. The funeral was as miserable as most winter occasions. Rain fell at intervals from a low, greyish-white sky, to bedraggle the artificial flowers on the cortege and the black plumes of the funeral horses. Some of the other uncles came and stood with their hats off by the grave, while rooks wheeled and cawed overhead in the rain as if they were part of the ceremony. The cemetery was frozen hard in places, already thawing in others; and the flat meadows beyond were under a single shining sheet of water, up out of which stuck a few black hedges and trees. My sisters wept because their dresses were soaked, and after all they had not meant to be horrible to anyone; my mother was quite white, and leaned heavily on my arm. I wore with defiance a pair of yellow shoes.

“Poor Prinsep!” said my mother, hugging us all on the way home. “He deserves your prayers.” But it wasn’t until much later that I learned the sad facts of his death or the sadder ones of his life.

By then I could be found in the pavement cafés of Sour Bridge, with a set of my own. We favoured the Red Hart Estaminet, not just for its cheap suppers and boldly coloured art posters but because it was the haunt of visiting painters, writers, and music-hall artistes who had come from Viriconium to take the
Wasserkur
in sheds outside the town. When they weren’t being hosed down with ice-cold water for their bowel disorders and gonorrhoeas, I suppose, it amused them to make fun of our scrubbed young faces, provincial romances, and ill-fitting suits.

It was at the Red Hart that I first met Madame de Maupassant, the famous contralto, by then a creature bent and diminished by some disease of the throat, with a voice so ravaged it was painful and frightening at the same moment to hear her speak. I could not imagine her on the stage—I didn’t know then that to maintain her popularity in the city she still sang with deadly effort every night at the Prospekt Theatre. I thought of her as a menacing but rather vapid old woman obsessed with certain colours, who would lean over the table and say confidentially, “When I was in church as a girl I observed that flies would not pass through the lilac rays from a stained-glass window. Again, it would appear that all internal parasites die if exposed to the various shades of lavender; the doctor is disposed to try a similar remedy in my case.” Or: “An honest man will admit that his most thrilling dreams are accompanied by a violet haze . . . Do you know the dreams I mean?”

I did.

One day she said, to my surprise, “So you’re Baladine Prinsep’s nephew. I knew him quite well, but he never spoke of a family. Don’t you follow in his footsteps: all those years at a woman’s feet, and never more than a smile! There’s a patient man for you.”

And she gave her characteristic croak of a laugh.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What woman?”

Which made Madame de Maupassant laugh all the more. Eventually, I suppose, I persuaded her to tell me what my mother had kept from us, what Viriconium had always known.

“When your uncle came to the city,” she said, “twenty years ago, he found the dancer Vera Ghillera at the height of her success, appearing twice nightly at the Prospekt in a ballet called
The Little Humpbacked
Horse
choreographed for her by Chevigne.

“After every performance she held court in a dressing room done out with reds and golds like a stick of sealing wax. There was a tiger-skin rug on the floor. You never saw such dim yellow lamps, brass trays, and three-legged tables decorated with every vulgar little onyx box you could mention! Here they all came to invite her to supper, and she made them sit on the tiger skin and talk about art or politics instead: Paulinus Rack the impresario, ailing and thin now, like a white ghost; Caranthides, whose poems had been printed that year for the first time in a volume called
Yellow
Clouds
and whose success was hardly less spectacular than her own; even Ashlyme the portrait painter came, stared at her face with a kind of irritable wonder, and went away again—his marriage to Audsley King put an end to anything like that before it could begin.

“Your uncle knew nothing about the ballet then. He saw the ballerina by chance one day, as he was looking out of his window into the street.

“He was young and lonely. He had taken rooms near the asylum at Wegs, where she went in secret once a month, wrapped in a dove-grey cloak. He soon became her most ardent admirer, waiting on the stairs outside the dressing-room door, fourteen white lilies under his arm in green tissue paper. Eventually she let him in and he had a favoured seat on one of the gilt paws of the tiger. He could be seen any night after that (though what he did in the day remained a mystery), staring up at her with a melancholy expression, taking no part in the conversation of the great men around him. She never gave him any further encouragement; she had her own affairs. In the end he died there, as uselessly as he had lived—much older then of course.”

I was profoundly shocked by this, and stung, though I tried not to show it. “Perhaps the arrangement suited him,” I said bravely, trying to invest the word
arrangement
with a significance it plainly did not have; and when the famous contralto had received this with the blank stare it deserved: “Anyway, he wrote a book about the city,
The Constant Imago
. He gave me a copy of it.” I raised my voice and looked round at my friends. “It is my opinion that he was a great artist, genuinely in love with art.”