Lempriere's Dictionary (23 page)

‘Saturday then!’ he shouted as he went, practising his left jab down the stairs.

Now Saturday had come and he knew no more than before. He turned pages listlessly, barely looking at them now. Remains. Could it matter that much? Here was a ship’s inventory, here was a broad-sheet ballad like one Father Calveston had given him (by mistake?), here was one that Septimus had ruined. He swiped at the papers in irritation. As they settled and came to rest only a few feet away, it occurred to him suddenly that these were the first words he had read in weeks. Strange. Why had he not thought of that before? Of course he had not packed any books (of course?), but then….

He had set off on this line of thought and now he did not wish to follow it through. Peppard had read the covenant; he had only glanced at it himself. He might have read it, had he wanted. He had not wanted. Books had led him to all this; already further than he wished to go. All books though? No. Only the books he had loved most, books with gilt letters on the spine, rag-paper leaves, the Ancient books, the stories that had stayed. Stories of times when the deeds done meant nothing more than they pretended to, when the world could be plotted from its centre. He thought of his father’s body as it lay by the pool. He thought of the story he had read idly. The dogs ran low over the ground. He never dreamed it could come true. And yet he
had
dreamed. The cloud above turned the waters grey and his father’s blood turned them red. The dream was his and no-one else’s.

It was getting too late for all this, it was getting too dark and far too late. Lemprière rose, put on his coat and boots and stamped downstairs to the street. Cold?
Your father?
No. His feet tap on the cobbles, the street oddly empty and very little to distract his thoughts as he hurries along, coat wrapped tight against possible rain. Quicken up now, don’t want to be late. Why do the feet curl in like that? Must be why boots wear through at the instep, a good anatomist could put England’s cobblers out of business, skeletons never his strong suit…. Left, right, left at the Henry VIII and Seven Bells, onward and upward, why we’re all Protestants, seminal baptism of the new faith.

Puddles reflect his face as he keeps his head down, avoiding the pilasters with their Doric bottoms and fussy Corinthian capitals, the gaze of caryatids, other relics and remnants. He turns into Hogg Street, walking faster still. Excessively baroque masonry might fall and crush him to death at any moment, no-one can say the streets are safe, tap, tap, tap on the cobbles.
Your father?
No, not yet, better to wait, or a passing eagle might drop a tortoise on his head like Æschylus, better to work round to it, press-ganging makes the worst sailors, the triremes manned by freedmen, galley slaves a thing of the future…. This is more like it, wondering now about the ceremonies Septimus mentioned. He is in the mood for company, and singing (although he can’t) no, yes and perhaps drinking too, cantilevered here between something approaching hysteria, walking even faster now, and that other voice that he hopes he has lost somewhere in the backstreets to be found murdered the next morning; death by tortoise-bombardment.

Above, the moon is being unnaturally silvery, cloud illumination high on its agenda tonight. Well to its rear, several particularly pluvial specimens are making their way eastwards over the shires to demonstrate cloud functions (moon-eclipse, rain, symbolic needs of one kind or another) to the city that chance has dictated as their destination. At the moment though, compact, woolly puffs (strictly scenic) amble around the sky, dissolving as they pass the lunar face and providing it, momentarily, with a wispy fringe of hair.

Had Lemprière looked up he might have drawn an analogy between this phenomenon and the steel-grey leonine head of the ranter who appeared to be waving a flag in fury at an invisible opponent at the other end of the street. The flag-waver is very angry as he shouts about vanity and the exchange of goods and the land of our fathers. Really, Lemprière thinks, it is too late for this kind of thing but a crowd of fifteen or twenty people are standing around listening, excuse me, excuse me as he finds a way through, ‘… and the worst of it, the worst of it is this,’ (more flag-waving)…. But Lemprière never hears the worst of it, at least not until too late, because now he’s through them, around the corner and anticipating his entrance at
the inn, whose sign he has spotted just a matter of yards away, hurry up now, nearly there and distractions a-plenty, find out all the things I, fumble the door, all the answers, all the questions….
Your father?
No-oo, here we go….

‘
Wel
-come to the
Pork Club!!’
Septimus, mountebank, impresario, is in full flood, jigging on the table. The place is heaving. Is this what he agreed to? Around and about, a herd of brocaded fops conduct intercourse of several sorts with sozzled and unbuttoned beauties.

‘Oink!’ They turn as one to acknowledge their heralding master of ceremonies. No-one (except Septimus) is actually shouting, but the din is horrible. Lemprière blinks nervously, this is not what he expected at all and now Septimus has spotted his entrance and decided to leap
over
the assembled Pork Club members in a greeting designed at once to draw attention to his bespectacled friend and confirm this bundle of first night nerves as party to all this, one of the gang. As he attempts this manoeuvre, a shrieking chit and her swain feel that this is the moment to propose a toast. Bottle waving and leaping coincide as Septimus boots the vessel inadvertently, crashing into the crush where bystanders break his fall.

‘Ha!’ He bounces up. The bottle, meanwhile, has continued along Septimus’s aborted trajectory, over the crowd and ends up,
slaap
, in Lemprière’s hand.

‘Have a glug,’ a voice from somewhere down near his hip. He glugs.

‘So you’ve met?’ Septimus has disentangled himself from a mêlée of arms and legs, rejected the importunings of something with too much mascara and approaches with perfect composure, one hand fishing in his pocket.

‘Bacon?’

‘What … ?’

From the folds of his coat Septimus produces the longest, reddest, greasiest piece of bacon that Lemprière has ever seen. It has to be a yard in length. Is this the first of tonight’s ceremonies? A pig the size of a horse died for this monster but Septimus doesn’t actually expect anyone to eat it, does he?

Seems not. It dangles lewdly as Septimus makes the introductions.

‘Teddy, John Lemprière. John, Edmund de Vere.’ So this was the earl. First impressions were not always the best.

‘We’re playing together later, John,’ he continued to Lemprière, then lowered his voice, ‘Don’t drink too much. Hold yourself in reserve.’

‘Playing together? Playing what?’

‘Foolish boy, the Game of Cups, of course,’ beams Septimus.

‘Er … Septimus?’

But Septimus has already disappeared back into the crush to find that
little redhead he’s promised a sure-fire piquet cheat, the one where the Knave of Clubs is tucked inside the garter….

‘S’alright,’ the lordly slur near his hip issues in boozy gulps which, being slightly warmer than the surrounding air, rise to his twitching nostrils and mingle there with the odours of smoke, fire and pipe, sweat, half-stifled farts, Bergamot snuff, Jessamine hair-butter and something else….

Septimus has retreated (is, in fact, draping his flaccid rhabdos about the neck of an unsuspecting maid at the far side of the room, the piquet trick can wait) so it can’t be that. His nose scans the olfactory scene until, there, he lights on the fireplace from which delicious porky fumes are lacing the air with memories of bacon-for-breakfast and sausage-for-supper, sizzling chops and glistening gammon steaks. Yum. Suspended over the fire, trotters touching one side of the chimney, snout grazing the other, a pig of obese proportions oozes fat into the flames below. The spit bends under its lolling weight and on its face (apple in snout notwithstanding) is an expression of ironic martyrdom recalling Saint Lawrence who, after twenty minutes on the griddle, asked to be turned for fear one side was becoming rather well done.

This pig obviously holds some numinous significance for the assembly. The revellers nearest it are tending towards the racy-conversation-and-pipe-smoking side of indecency leaving the far side of the room to the more gymnastically inclined while the crone giving it an occasional prod with her stick is treated with the greatest respect; nods and gentlemanly ‘good evening’s are coming her way thick and fast.

Meanwhile the voice at his hip has been replaced by a hand. He swivels about, an apparition in creamy satin and red ringlets is already explaining, no sorry, mistook you for someone … so sorry, before gliding away, leaving only the scent of rose-water and a short trail of cards that drift to the floor from their lodging somewhere beneath her aprons.

‘Spectacles!’ The leering Warburton-Burleigh reels up, ‘Grog?’

‘Thank you, no I….’ Lemprière stiffly.

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ and with that he snatches the bottle, heading back for the seething swell in which Lemprière catches sight of Septimus demonstrating a spirited
pas de chat
while, in the corner, someone has attached eight bottles on strings to the bannisters above and is trying to pour
just the right amount
of beer into each one to get doh, ray, me etc. Unfortunately, every time he pours too much in, he is having to drink it down to the right level; success looks remote and the cooing wench who, just half an hour ago, expressed a wish to hear a song from the auld country played in this manner is bitterly regretting ever opening her mouth while Monsieur with the moustache over there is showing his shiny, yellow teeth and winking at her in just the way she likes.

For Lemprière, everything seems to be happening
over there
while he is ghettoed
over here
. No matter, he is here on business. He sits down next to the earl, and instantly knows he has done the wrong thing. The earl is playing ‘find the bean’ on the table, switching the three tumblers with surprising deftness given his addled state. The bean has been lost for several rounds now and his opponent wandered off some time before that. Besides, all the tumblers are glass…. The evidence convinces Lemprière that the earl is in no fit state to divulge anything much, but, he reasons, this is going to get worse rather than better, it’s now or never so here goes.

To start with, the earl doesn’t respond at all. Lemprière prods him, which gives rise to some non-specific flailing around and lots of slurring. Nothing of use so far, but he keeps at it, explaining about the meeting between their ancestors and so forth. True, this was a century and a half ago, not of immediate relevance, but didn’t the earl want to buy the record of this ancestral tête-à-tête? Gradually he garners that although the earl knows what he’s talking about, he’s not even remotely interested, and why isn’t Lemprière drinking anyway?

‘Drinking not my strong-point,’ he explains to the drunkard.

‘Good man, never start,’ the earl commends him, offering a glutinous, green substance with one hand and supporting his head with the other.

‘You see, this agreement….’

‘A thimbleful wouldn’t hurt though, would it?’

‘No really, thank you.’

‘Here, try this. It really is very, very …’ The earl searches for an adjective. ‘It really is very,’ he concludes. Lemprière declines again, which seems to depress the earl.

‘I think you might tell me why you won’t drink,’ he demands in injured tones. ‘Only courteous I’d say.’ The earl’s elbow has hit a patch of pork grease, probably dripped there earlier by Septimus’s outsize rasher, and now every time he tries to rest his head on his hand, the arm is shooting out sideways, dumping his head,
bang
, on the tabletop. The conversation proceeds to the accompaniment of these collapses.

‘Of course, quite,’ Lemprière is obliging the earl’s request. ‘It’s very simple.’
Bang
. ‘I was warned not to,’ he pauses, ‘by my parents.’ He looks down for a moment. ‘Now, as to this agreement….’

Bang!

The quiz continues on a more equal basis with Lemprière providing a justification for not drinking every time he asks a question but not much is coming of it and he’s down to doctor’s orders when he throws in a last gambit (the earl can’t last much longer) and offers to sell the document. At this the earl offers thruppence and the advice to try ‘Sebdimus, he’s much more interested anyway….’ Lemprière had been half-expecting this and
would have pumped the earl for more, but the booze-to-bodyweight ratio is against him and the earl seems about to slide….

In point of fact, this observation of Lemprière’s, despite being founded on the soundest inductive principles, is quite mistaken. All appearances to the contrary, Thomas de Vere is not getting drunker, but more sober. There is something in these ruinous gatherings that brings out the progressive in him. A mutant strain of the dissent whose viral ancestor might well have had something to do with the little get-together Lemprière’s so curious about is lurking someplace about Thomas de Vere’s lymph-system and now, between sporadic phagocyte attacks, is busy oozing its idea of happiness through his membranes and venous capillaries. As symbioses go it’s one-sided. The leucocytes are reserving judgment.

Hard to say just what it is or even where it comes from but there’s an austere tinge of self-denial about it. A touch of the Prussian, streaming over like influenza from Königsberg and covering its trail. Only a sprinkling of umlauts give the game away, whispers of a cousin somewhere called Friedrich, or Emmanuel, the faint whiff of bratwurst and a dim, hereditary yearning for black, rained-on forests with the steam rolling down the hillsides in the morning sunlight, everything very
fresh…
.

There’s something very
onward
about it too, a belief implicit in the earl’s intimate biochemistry that somehow things are always going to improve. His drinking exploits are the stuff of legend, but it is a recent legend. It has nothing to do with prowess and downing a flagon of sack merely to reach sobriety has often seemed to him a cruel reversal. To his friends, the earl’s habit of turning up drunk and leaving sober is nothing but a quirk, he doesn’t need a motive but
schadenfreude
will do.