Lempriere's Dictionary (31 page)

‘Happy or sad?’

‘Sad,’ replied Lemprière promptly.

‘Just so, a universal response, but we shall not pursue that line quite yet….’

‘Something of a last resort,’ Clementi added. ‘Alcmaeon might have pronounced you perfectly sane simply from that, but we have moved on from Crotona, isonomy will not suffice. Empedocles would have concluded that you were part-piano and Protagoras would agree, adding that the piano be part-Lemprière, of course. This brings us to Aristotle….’ Kalkbrenner moved on, through a fluid series of dismissals to the accompaniment of Clementi’s rapturous endorsements. Plotinus, Augustine and Aquinas were incidental travellers along the highway he had chosen, Descartes’ fixation with the pineal gland was risible and Linnaeus was a scribbler, an oneirodyniac who only dreamed he was awake…. Kalkbrenner had the measure of them all, his teutonic demolitions left nothing but the ruins of buildings built in outmoded styles. He admitted a partial admiration for Locke but excused himself on sentimental grounds.
It was only when he began intoning the name of Etienne Bonnot, L’Abbé de Condillac that his tirade ended and panegyrics took their place. ‘Le Divin Abbé’ (for so he addressed him) had had a profound effect on the young Kalkbrenner. He had the apostate’s zeal and as a young man had been observed sucking the toes of a marble statue in Darmstadt, but the authorities (’Cartesians to a man, damn their hybristic
sums’
) had refused to understand.

‘How could they, their experience being conditioned by the very system I proved to them was false? “Sedition! Exile!” they cried, and thus began my years of wandering, alone but for dear Elly here, through the Low Countries and France; this was before the troubles began, thence to your own fair shores spreading the words of le Divin Abbé as I went. It has been a hard time, has it not Elly?’ Elly nodded sadly. ‘But we have borne our vicissitudes as true voyagers.’ He was reaching some sort of climax. ‘And, in our small way, we have helped the cause.’

‘The cause!’ Elly toasted his companion with a raised tea-cup.

‘Thank you, Elly.’ He paused in his story and allowed his fingers to dally once more on the piano. Two or three notes rose up. Kalkbrenner picked out a well-thumbed book from the shelf behind the instrument.

‘This. The
Traité des Sensations
. Your story brings to mind its dedication.’ His eyes roved heavenwards as he held the talisman and recited. “We cannot recollect the ignorance in which we were born. It is a state which leaves no traces behind it. We remember our ignorance only when we remember what we have learned. We must already know something - before we can attend to what we are learning. We must have ideas before we can observe that we were once without them.” He sighed. ‘Sublime….’

His eyes closed at the
ex nihilo
grandeur of the lines. ‘Is that not the situation of every doctor? “We remember our ignorance only when we remember what we have learned….” Just so; my friends, take heart from these words for their message is universal. The statue becomes fully sensible, fully alive only through knowing its own former emptiness, through seeing the construction that came to be itself. This is what we must divine in you, sir,’ he said, looking at Lemprière. ‘We must take your story and trace its cogs and levers back to the original fault; we must make the screw adjustment, the crucial quarter-turn that sets you ticking properly….’

But despite this prolegomena, Doctor Kalkbrenner had not the slightest intention of hearing the story of Lemprière’s life. He continued to expatiate on the principles of the human mind, to sing the praises of ‘le divin Abbé de Condillac’ and now and again would touch on Lemprière’s case as if it were quite incidental to these favoured themes. Occasional questions were
asked and answered by Lemprière whose nausea was returning, replacing his headache, brought on, he suspected, by the redness which surrounded him. After digressions on the case of the pregnant woman and the porpoise, a remarkably shrunken pineal gland he had come across in Aix-de-la-Chapelle and a ‘Monsieur Sienois’ whose obsessive urinary retention had only been cured by his neighbour setting fire to his house, the good doctor at length arrived at his diagnosis.

‘… and so it is clear from these examples that the condition you suffer from, a peculiarly rare one I might add, is none other than projective-objective palilexic echopraxia. Palilexia I first came across in Salzburg, a gentleman there had read a handbook on obstetrics, in reverse of course.’ He gestured with his hand as if the results of this were too terrible to speak of. ‘Echopraxia is more normally associated with mass hysterias. The tendency to mirror the bodily motions of those about one is commonplace in military environments. L’Abbé de Condillac does not treat of those matters directly you understand…. You seem to function as a conduit of some sorts; read, secrete, excrete would be the pattern….’ Kalkbrenner frowned.

‘Perhaps a diversion,’ offered Septimus.

‘Exactly the solution I was coming to,’ Kalkbrenner affirmed.

‘O Ernst!’ from Elly.

‘A hobby, perhaps….’

‘… which would provide an outlet for this excessive reading,’ Septimus completed the sentence.

‘An outlet? Oh. Yes, an outlet. I was just going to suggest the same. An outlet would be the thing, a valve yes, an outlet.’ Kalkbrenner’s cure was taking shape. ‘Now the form of this outlet; surgery offers us several alternatives….’

‘… which only a man of your own experience Doctor Kalkbrenner would have the confidence to reject. As your admirable Condillac advises us, it is the mind which probes the mind,’ Septimus intervened.

‘He does indeed, he does indeed. Ah, the mind. The mind needs a mental outlet….’

‘An activity,’ interrupted Septimus again. ‘Something to do to exorcise this
reading
.’

‘To exorcise it? Well, not that quite but these are the general lines of my diagnosis, yes Septimus.’ Kalkbrenner was groping for the answer; “the mind”, “the outlet”, “the reading”, shunting these counters around, the shape was coming into focus…. ‘To write!’ he exclaimed. ‘He needs to write!’

‘Bravo, Ernst! Bravo!’ shouted Elly.

‘Of course,’ said Septimus as if stunned by the sheer rightness of
Kalkbrenner’s prescription. ‘The answer was staring us in the face but only you could have unearthed it. Well done, Ernst. Well done!’ Kalkbrenner was mopping his brow and smiling, half-embarrassed - had his brilliance been too ostentatious? His instincts told him no.

‘To write?’ Lemprière’s voice was lost in a general, self-congratulatory hubbub. ‘Write what?’

An hour later, in the same place, the four of them were moving towards an answer to this question by a process that had become one of elimination. On the criteria, they were agreed: it must embrace Lemprière’s love of the Ancients, and at the same time, it must treat of all the ways in which this love might return to haunt Lemprière’s waking hours, including those instances already mentioned. ‘Lay the ghosts of Antiquity to rest!’ Ernst had exclaimed. ‘Do it to them before they do it to you.’ Septimus had endorsed the sentiment. ‘But what?’ Elly had asked.

Rejected so far were:
an almanac
(too late in the year),
a breviary
(pointless),
a cadaster
(too bourgeois),
an encyclopedia
(would take too long),
a fescennine verse-dialogue
(only Lemprière knew what it was),
a glossary
(too many already),
an homily
(no),
incunabula
(too late),
juvenilia
(also too late),
a kunstlerroman
(too early),
a log
(Lemprière hated boats),
a manual
(boring),
a novel
(too vulgar),
an opera
(over-ambitious),
a pamphlet
(too humble),
a Qu’ran
(already was one),
a replevin
(too arcane),
a story
(too simple),
a treatise
(perhaps, but little enthusiasm),
an Upanishad
(too fanciful),
a variorum edition
(of what?),
a Weltanschauung
(onanistic),
a xenophontean cosmology
(out of date)
and a year-book
.

Lemprière, Kalkbrenner and Clementi were sunk in gloom, stony ground for Septimus’ suggestions whose rate had slowed to the occasional thought thrown out with little conviction or chance of acceptance.

‘No,’ they said to the latest (a
Zetetic tract)
. ‘Too inquisitive.’ Even Septimus seemed disheartened for a moment. Abruptly his expression changed. He stood up and strode briskly to the bookshelf opposite. He had spied two large, identical books. The author’s name gleamed in gold on their spines.

‘I have it,’ he said, picking one out. ‘This is it. This is what you must write, John. Write one of these.’ The name stared up at him. ‘Samuel Johnson’.

‘Samuel Johnson’ he read aloud.

‘Samuel Johnson’ echoed Kalkbrenner. ‘Of course! How could we have missed it? You are indeed correct Mister Praeceps; Mister Lemprière you must emulate the good Doctor Johnson, that is my final and certain prescription.’ Septimus brandished the book like a club then threw it across to Lemprière who caught it and peered curiously at its frontispiece.

‘What is it?’ asked Elly.

‘You wanted a work which covered everything, did you not? This is that!’

‘Right,’ said Lemprière, his head in the book.

‘How clever of you, Ernst, but may I ask what it is?’ cooed Clementi.

‘The answer at last. Do you think you can do it, John?’ Septimus asked.

‘Yes,’ replied the other, still reading. Septimus marched across to shake Kalkbrenner’s hand.

‘Knew we’d find it.’

‘Well done Ernst!’

Clementi was bobbing up and down offering congratulations and praise to both. ‘Well done all of you! Really, everything seems to be quite put to rights. Might I ask now, terribly ignorant of me, might I ask, exactly what is it do you think?’

Lemprière looked up from his reading.

‘It is a dictionary,’ he replied. He would write a dictionary. But as he was about to announce his decision, Lemprière had the strangest sensation. The events of his life, his infancy, childhood and youth, his love for Juliette, his father’s death, even his tattered memories of the previous night, all of these seemed suddenly to come into view. The events and travails of his life hurtled forward, closing on one another like a hundred chariots with their horses and charioteers crashing together in a tangle of limbs and broken shafts. Lemprière was at its epicentre. From a stillness that lengthened, gathered pace and moved on, he watched them ride off once more, fanning out over the plain like the spokes of their wheels. They were his emissaries, agents of the dictionary.

‘Angels of the dictionary?’ Septimus’ tone was suddenly sharp. Lemprière had mumbled the title aloud without knowing.

‘Agents,’ he corrected his friend. ‘Nothing.’ The three of them were watching, waiting for him. It was quite clear.

‘I will write a dictionary,’ he told them, and they closed upon him, suddenly celebrants of his decision.

A little later, after mutual congratulations and prolonged leave-takings, Lemprière and Septimus were retracing their earlier steps, past the same terraces and through the same streets as before. Lemprière recalled his friend’s account of his own outburst the night before. True, he had listed all that had happened to Lemprière, yet Lemprière knew he had told him more. How much more? He agonised over this as they continued their progress in silence, Lemprière stewing in uncertainty, Septimus preoccupied with thoughts which remained opaque. At length, Lemprière could contain his curiosity, or dread, no longer.

‘You did not mention the girl,’ he challenged Septimus.

‘The girl? Which girl? When?’ Lemprière had framed the question
ambiguously, Juliette perhaps, or another. The girl on the bed, whom he had drunkenly mistaken for the one he loved, but that was impossible. It had not been her. Now Septimus had called his bluff.

‘I believe I was … confused.’

‘Yes, I believe you were,’ Septimus readily agreed. They walked a little further, but the silence, which earlier had been somehow agreed upon, was now onerous. Lemprière felt compelled to speak again.

‘I don’t believe either of them credited a word of it,’ he burst out.

‘Ernst and Elly? What does it matter? After all, it is still possible you imagined all these things. I don’t say you did, but it is possible. Monsters and gods in fields, in stores, Circe in the Craven Arms. You read of them, certainly, and they appeared. But only for you perhaps. They were real to you, but imaginary, you see?’ Red on grey, pool, sky.

‘Not the dogs,’ Lemprière said. ‘I didn’t imagine the dogs.’

‘No,’ Septimus conceded. ‘The dogs were real. And the girl, of course.’

‘The girl?’ Lemprière turned on Septimus sharply.

‘The girl in the pool, bathing, like Diana. That girl.’

‘Of course.’ Lemprière began walking again. That girl. Juliette, naked in the pool.

It was mid-afternoon and as the two of them moved through Holborn towards Covent Garden, the streets began to grow more crowded. Gangs of ‘prentices and labourers were moving to and fro between tea gardens and ale houses, noisy ill-mannered gangs roved aimlessly and various seekers of amusement on the Sabbath pursued various paths, cutting through the streets with airs of vacancy and vague desperation. It was Sunday; there was little or nothing to do. Lemprière and Septimus edged their way through a narrow and crowded alleyway to emerge on a wider street. A group of twenty or thirty workmen had just been paid in the drinking shop a little way up the street and were beginning to pour into the road, bringing a black coach and four to a halt. Lemprière sniffed, and noticed a smell which he recognised from his ill-fated enquiry as to the whereabouts of the Thames in the Jerusalem over a week ago: coffee.

His headache and nausea had reached a fragile equilibrium and although eating was still an unpleasant prospect, Clementi’s tea had proved liquids were possible, with a little effort. Septimus seemed to have smelt it too, indeed was already moving away from the coach and the crowd of workmen, crossing the road for the coffee shop, it was Galloway’s, on the other side.