Lempriere's Dictionary (30 page)

It was a single room, a low-ceilinged, ill-lit den with unswept floors and filthy tables; a pervasive smell of cabbage and onions hung about it, leavened by the stink of stale beer and the jakes out back. Septimus slapped his knees as he sat down, still looking about as though he were a spectator at the Lord Mayor’s ball.

‘Quite itself!’ he said enthusiastically and Lemprière silently agreed. He still felt nauseous, and Septimus had grown no more quiet. The eating-house was empty but for themselves and two gentlemen who sat silently at a table on the far side of the room. The two did not speak, even to each other, and Lemprière wondered if they were together, or just happened to occupy the same table, for it was nearest the fire. He sat down.

‘Breakfast?’ Septimus demanded of him, but Lemprière shook his head. It was out of the question. Septimus’ pie arrived presently, a bilious, irregular object which squirted brown juice when faced with the knife. Lemprière looked away as Septimus guzzled happily, then propped his head in his hands. The table loomed into view.

One of the gentlemen on the far side of the room called morosely for another drink. He had a faint Scots accent. Lemprière gazed down at the table-top and tried to decide what colour it was. Brown was his first impression, then he thought brownish-green, tinged maybe with dark red and mottled in orangey-ultramarine, with a rich mauve understain and the whole thing tinged with a yellow that, somehow, verged on black. That seemed to sum it up. Really, he conceded, it was no colour at all, or one somewhere between all these in which, on closer inspection, Lemprière now picked out a mass of scratches, signatures and score-marks, sundry acts of vandalism and self-expression, bad jokes, abuse and obscure warnings. ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ was still visible in one corner, along with slogans from more obscure campaigns, the Yellow Tallow Riots of 1777 and the Great Comb Protest. The centre of the table-top was thick with obscenities. People’s names, the names of their lovers, or ex-lovers, hearts with arrows or circles with chains, all these had their place. The latest addition was the beginning of a word ‘BOSW’, scrawled lightly over more than half the table.

Casting his eye over all these, Lemprière speculated on their authors, the men, and women, who had idled away the hours here, alone or in company, one hand round a pint-pot, the other scratching and scraping away at the table’s surface to leave the marks he saw now. Malcontents certainly, and agitators too. But also dreamers and projecters, enthusiasts and virtuosi, all united here on the scored surface. What did they want?

As Lemprière traced these ragged inscriptions, he began to notice an outline made up haphazardly from the various scratches and signatures. It seemed to run close to the edge of the table, though veering away from the corners, a rough circle in fact, which he now began to follow with his finger, an irregular line full of indentures, outcrops and deviant tangents, until he suddenly came up against the edge of Septimus’ plate.

‘Pie,’ Septimus chomped vigorously, and made as if to offer Lemprière some. He had nearly finished.

‘See Ernst and Elly,’ confided Septimus, ‘zoom’. He swallowed. ‘Soon, I meant.’

Lemprière nodded. His palm was flat on the table. He could feel the ridges and grooves; voices from the wood like hamadryads. Septimus cleared his plate and sipped from the tankard before him. The woman came over and took his plate. She glanced down at Lemprière whose hand remained flat on the table’s surface.

‘Don’t you mark the surface,’ she warned him sternly. Septimus finally drained his tankard and they both rose. They had walked over to the woman and Septimus was patting his pockets before he remembered his purse, Lemprière’s in fact, from the previous night, which he had left at the table. Lemprière retrieved it and returned with an odd expression on his face. The woman was impatient, tapping her foot.

‘I found it in my boot,’ Septimus was explaining. ‘You spat it there. Look, your winnings. The bet, you remember?’ And, taking it, he showed Lemprière his increased wealth, to prove the point.

‘Winnings? Yes,’ Lemprière answered absently. But he did not suspect Septimus. When he had fetched the purse, he had looked again at the table-top and the outline he had unsuccessfully tried to trace. Then, he had not seen it, but now, after the removal of Septimus and his plate and mug, it was plain. It was not a circle, or rather, not a whole circle. It was broken at one point and the inner arc was fantastically irregular. Lemprière stared at it. He knew it, a malformed ‘C shape, but it eluded him, not quite tangible and the woman was waiting.

‘Thank you.’ She took the coins and the two of them turned to go. As Lemprière passed the man he had earlier observed a hand closed about his arm. Lemprière looked down at the man’s face which was staring straight ahead, just as before. Tears were running silently down the man’s cheeks. He was clearly drunk. Lemprière made as if to pull away, but at that moment the man turned his head and spoke in a voice thick with grief.

‘Sam’s dead!’ he cried.

‘Been dead for years,’ the woman retorted harshly and without looking up. Lemprière looked down at the distraught man.

‘I am terribly sorry,’ he told him with some feeling.

‘We used to sit over there.’ The man gestured to the table at which Lemprière had sat. ‘But I’ve not the heart now.’ He looked down once more and Lemprière felt the hand on his arm fall away. The woman motioned silently at him to go. The man had resumed his former position staring straight ahead in misery.

Gaining the street he found his companion waiting, wanting to know what had detained him. ‘Have you ever thought about being alone?’ he asked Septimus. ‘Never,’ Septimus replied and immediately set off at a
furious pace leaving Lemprière to stumble along behind. The bells, for the moment, were silenced. Nausea had receded but his headache had increased.

‘Ernst and Elly are friends of mine….’ This was a phrase Lemprière was learning to distrust.

‘We are going there now?’

‘Now, yes. You did agree to this, in a way it was your idea.’ Lemprière’s idea. He had no recollection of it. Presumably he had agreed to it, when he had spoken to Septimus on the bridge, or perhaps before, or after, or not at all and it was some form of practical joke, or something worse. What
had
he told Septimus? Everything, everything.

‘You’ll like them, at any rate, they will like you. Ernst is quite brilliant, after a fashion….’

‘Yes, but what are they? Why are we going there?’ They were walking past a terrace of modest houses. Septimus suddenly came to an abrupt halt and knocked loudly on a bright red door. Then he turned to his questioner. ‘They are doctors of the mind, John. And we are here because you are not sane.’ Not sane, Lemprière’s face momentarily dissolved. Then the door was being thrown open and he recovered himself in time to see a bulbous, smiling man greet Septimus like a long-lost son.

Introductions were dispensed with and both of them ushered directly to the drawing-room, which doubled as a consulting room for Elmore Clementi and Ernst Kalkbrenner, men who, in their time, had been called heretics, sodomites, amateurs, quacks, seditionaries, and, most lately, friends of Septimus.

‘Victims of calumny,’ Septimus confided as they entered the room. ‘Good friends, damned good friends.’

The drawing-room was overwhelmingly red. Dark crimson bokhara rugs lay on the floor, red velvet curtains and oils on the walls in magenta and vermilion. The piano on the far side had been stained a dark rust-brown. Their usher stood expectantly as they came to terms with all this. A pinkish striped clothcoat lined with scarlet silk, scalloped cuffs à la marinère and death’s head buttons, overlaid a double-breasted waistcoat of crimson velvet embroidered with orange fleur-de-lys, both being topped by a lace-trimmed cravat wound multiply about his neck. His face was powdered and rouged beneath a carefully coiffured ramillies plait whose tail swung freely as he bobbed from side to side, awaiting an introduction.

‘Septimus?’ he warbled after a few seconds had gone by. Septimus came to.

‘John, my learned friend, Elmore Clementi.’

‘Call me Elly.’ The creature offered his hand.

‘And I,’ came a voice from behind them, ‘am Ernst Kalkbrenner.’ A tall, thin figure dressed in grey appeared in the doorway. ‘Welcome again Mister Septimus.’ He offered his hand to Lemprière, who returned the handshake.

‘We seek your opinion,’ Septimus announced.

‘Splendid, splendid. Elly, tea I think?’ At this, Clementi threw up his hands in a fluster and disappeared. Septimus and Lemprière took places on the mauve divan in the centre of the room. Clementi soon returned with tea.

‘There’s a little camomile in it,’ he confided to Lemprière. ‘It will help clear out the system. Awful stuff, drink….’ Lemprière was secretly impressed by this diagnosis. He sat sipping tea, which did indeed make him feel a little more robust than before. The red was becoming more bearable. Ernst Kalkbrenner had taken up position by the piano while his patient occupied the velvet armchair opposite. He turned to the pair on the divan.

‘It would be best if you explained to me the exact nature of the problem,’ he began.

‘Ernst is a stickler for exactitude, an absolute stickler,’ said Elly.

‘Elly.’

‘Pardon me, please explain. If you like, it can be difficult, I know….’

Lemprière turned to his companion.

‘John was rather drunk,’ began Septimus.

And it was raining, thought Lemprière. They were on the bridge.

His legs had given up. He sat heavily, finally in the wet. He could hear his own voice breaking up in the downpour, the unstoppered heavens pouring down on them both. Two women in blue dresses were being drawn slowly out of sight, moving clumsily like ragdolls past the far end of the bridge. Septimus was saying, ‘Tell me everything,’ and his own voice was lurching forward to meet that question, stumbling and picking itself up and going on with the story, its characters dissolving like ink in the rain and the scoured fibres of the page emerging clean and snowy-white, pristine and candid, perfectly blank. He could not remember. ‘Go on,’ said the voice at his side. The ink was dissolving in reverse, coming back as greys and dark blues, irregular patches merging and emerging out of the blank tablet, returning for a second scene, a simulacrum of the first except now the tangle of surds and glyphs was a tangle of arms and legs, motile cells and released agents running over the surface, fast and low over the ground
suck
the nightmare-scene was seeping back not as a tame tale in a book but a grey contagion, a seepage of black into his brain’s soft sponge
suck
the story he had read was unfolding in his father’s flesh, a famished parasite bursting out of its host, the expended body rolling over in the
water and far away on the far side of the island the story settled back into innocuous paper and harmless print. The sound when the teeth had met in the calf.
Suck
.

‘Elly!’

‘Pardon me, I do beg your pardon.’ Clementi pulled the thumb out of his mouth and wiped the offending digit dry. Septimus had finished his recitation. Ernst Kalkbrenner pursed his lips in thought.

‘Reads things?’ Kalkbrenner cogitated aloud. ‘They happen? Can’t quite see it. How would a shop sign happen? Just as an instance, or a bill….’

‘Oh,
they
happen …’ Elly piped up, to be immediately quelled.

‘Not everything,’ Septimus said. ‘It’s happened twice for certain, perhaps twice more.’ Lemprière nodded. Septimus was at least direct; he could imagine taking all day telling it himself. ‘First there was a fourteenth-century….’

‘Fifteenth,’ Lemprière corrected him.

‘… a fifteenth-century Athenian king in a stove on Jersey; then a local deity, the Vertumnus, who stalks about the fields outside his parents’ house; then Diana, with her dogs, also on Jersey.’ Lemprière looked away. ‘Lastly, there is the transformation of a Covent Garden madame into Circe. This was last night.’

Lemprière cringed with embarrassment at this recitation. It sounded ridiculous even to himself. Kalkbrenner, however, was deep in thought, Clementi watching him with the air of one confidently expecting revelation. Septimus had already begun to fidget. At length the good doctor signalled his readiness to diagnose by beginning to pace up and down before the piano.

‘I believe,’ he announced, ‘that I have discerned a common thread running through these incidents.’ Clementi’s hands flew to his mouth; Ernst was about to deliver judgment. ‘Correct me if I am mistaken,’ he continued, in a tone which forbade such presumption, ‘but is there not at work here an
antique
element? A touch of the Ancients, no?’ Clementi beamed.

Lemprière wondered if this was meant to be a quip, perhaps to set him at his ease. Septimus was nodding without a trace of irony.

‘Very astute,’ he commented.

‘Of course, we might describe this unfortunate condition. We are able to do that….’

‘Describe it, Ernst!’ Clementi burst out.

‘… but it would be pointless. We must begin from first principles, compare and contrast; symptomatic classification is for the
encyclopedists.’
Lemprière was beginning to lose the track of Kalkbrenner’s reasoning, a fact which brought with it a feeling of security.

‘The mind only exists by virtue of the qualities it shares with other minds, thus.’ He flipped open the lid of the piano and struck the keys.