Lempriere's Dictionary (32 page)

The doorway of the coffee shop was crowded. Septimus had already reached it and was looking back for Lemprière. As he signalled to him over the crowd, a woman dressed in blue, her skirts grimy even from this distance, pushed her way out of the door and through the knot of people
clustered outside. They stared at her, as did Lemprière, recognising her as one of the unfortunate bookmakers from the previous night. He tried to gesture the fact to Septimus, but the woman was moving quickly away behind him. In fact, it seemed to Lemprière that she was trying to catch the attention of someone ahead of her. He strained for a view, but was buffeted at that moment by a large man. Apologies followed and when Lemprière was able to look again, she had disappeared; the object of her pursuit likewise.

Lemprière’s passage across the road was full of jolts and bumps as he cut through the men and women moving up and down the street. He reached the door with some difficulty and, imagining a haven within, knocked a departing patron to the floor in his haste. Lemprière reached down to help the man up, but this only confused matters as the victim rose, readjusted a broad-brimmed hat and moved through the door in a single, quick motion. Lemprière’s apology went unacknowledged.

The interior of the coffee shop was crammed with men disputing points with their neighbours, holding forth on the iniquitous state of the roads, the ban on dancing, the King’s health, cat torture, departed trends, and the poor, all with a noisy brio as they sank foaming pots of coffee and belched contentedly in the smoky air. Septimus had moved to the back of the shop and was already engaged in debate with its proprietor who sweated and wiped his hands on a stained apron as he explained, ‘This is a
coffee
shop….’ Septimus was insisting upon tea. Lemprière joined them and wearily attended their debate as Septimus grew more impassioned.

‘Tea, tea, tea! Were the eyelids of Bodhidkarma shorn off for nothing? Did the serendipitous Emperor Sri Nong suffer his happy accident in vain? When a man is weary of tea, he is weary of life! Doctor Johnson said that….’

‘No, he didn’t,’ the proprietor interrupted.

‘But he
believed
it,’ Septimus came back at him, then launched into a series of long, dull quotations from the Ch’a Ching of Lu Yu and obscure tracts by the late Kitcha Yojoka before switching abruptly to the France of Joan de Mauvillain.

‘“
An the chinensium mentis confert”?
A rhetorical title if ever I heard one, pah!’ But the proprietor was rallying his cause and, when Septimus quoted the advice of Doctor Bontekoe that two hundred cups a day was not excessive, he pointed out that the good doctor had been paid by the Dutch East India Company, major importers of tea then as now, to say just that.

‘Profits don’t come into it.’ Septimus rejected the insinuation of sharp practice, but his opponent was off and Lemprière listened as the man countered with an impassioned defence of the coffee-bean, its pedigree, provenance and usage, a long, rambling tale of Arab slave raiders riding
hard over the stones of Ethiopia, Kaldi the goat-herd whose frisky goats first alerted mankind to the berry’s insomniac qualities and Ali bin Omar al Shadhilly’s restitution to the king’s good graces (after enjoying the favours of his daughter) by curing an itching-fever with the same red berries ‘which even now I am roasting, grinding and boiling, risk of fire notwithstanding, and serving to ingrates such as yourself. Does the self-sacrifice of Mathieu de Clieux Nantes mean nothing to you!’

Septimus retorted that it did indeed mean nothing at all to him, prompting the man to recount the whole story of Mathieu’s theft of a coffee-plant from the King of France’s
conservatoire
and his transport of the same to Martinique in his jacket, even going so far as to share his water ration with it whilst enduring the most grievous taunting and pranks from his fellow passengers. ‘Scum! Ignorant scum all of them!’ he spat with polyphenol vehemence and was about to launch into the yet more extravagant story of Francesco de Melho Palheta, a coffee plant and the wife of the governor of Martinique (being a kind of sequel to the first) when Lemprière himself intervened and said that thank you they would both be very pleased to take a mug of coffee, which, when it came, he found rather to his taste. Septimus was peeved at being interrupted in mid-debate and it did not suit him. Lemprière eyed him defensively over his mug, sipping cautiously at the hot bitter liquid.

‘The man where we ate.’ Lemprière spoke to break the silence as much as anything. ‘The sad-looking man. Who was he?’

‘Oh, there are lots of sad men,’ Septimus replied, and Lemprière realised that what he had taken to be peevishness was in fact preoccupation or something of the sort. ‘Coffee makes you barren, did you know that?’ he added. Lemprière shrugged and resumed his sipping.

‘So, a dictionary …’ he began brightly, a few moments later. This had more success, prompting Septimus to recount a long meandering tale about a work of reference he had once read which had marshalled one of the Flemish dialects numerologically. The tale became more anecdotal and the language changed from Flemish to Assyrian, then back again, until Lemprière was forced to challenge him gently.

‘I have never come across such a work,’ he said.

‘No?’ Septimus thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps I was mistaken. That would be the explanation, do you think?’ A short silence followed. Septimus gazed vacantly around the room. Several times it seemed to Lemprière that he was about to speak, but his companion remained silent. Septimus pressed one of his fingers hard against the table, then looked at it as the colour returned.

‘I fear I must leave you now,’ he said, then stood up. Lemprière stood up too, briefly bewildered. Together they made their way to the door,
Septimus pausing to pay the proprietor who thanked him (’A goodnight to you Mister Praeceps!’) as they left the shop.

‘Mister Praeceps,’ echoed Lemprière. ‘You know him?’ He had not realised. Their argument had not revealed it.

‘Yes, yes,’ Septimus responded, ‘he is a….’

‘He is a
friend of mine!
’ Lemprière finished the sentence for him and laughed noisily.

‘Yes,’ said Septimus blankly. Lemprière stopped laughing.

‘The dictionary then,’ he said as if it were a toast. This seemed to focus Septimus.

‘The dictionary, yes. The dictionary is very important.’ The last two words were enunciated with some emphasis. ‘You must begin just as soon as possible.’

‘I shall begin this very evening,’ Lemprière promised confidently. Septimus looked away. He seemed lost, detached somehow. The moment dragged on.

‘Well, good night to you then.’ Lemprière clapped him on the arm.

‘Yes, good night John,’ he returned. Lemprière smiled, then turned on his heel and strode out into the street, on a determined path homeward. Septimus stood there for a few seconds longer, looking about, then wandered off in the other direction.

That night, Lemprière sat at the desk in his room. Ranged before him were his pen, an ink-well and a single sheet of white paper. He dipped the pen quickly in the well, then held it still and watched as three black beads of ink slid down to drop back silently from the nib. He looked down at the sheet of paper on his desk. The pen moved quickly in rehearsal just above its surface. Lemprière paused, then, in the top left-hand corner, he carefully inscribed the letter A.

Now down through the city’s tight skin to the hotch-potch of rocks and earth beneath. Through blue-grey and stiff red clay, crumbly slabs of sediment, black granite and water-bearing formations, past fire-damp flares, shale and veins of coal to pierce a second, more secret skin and enter the body of the Beast. Here, long fluted chambers twist away into honeycombs and open into caverns the size of churches with cradles of silica hanging from brittle calcified threads, ridges, flanges and platforms all frozen in stone to wait for centuries beneath the city. Once it was a mountain of flesh, red throbbing meat and muscle. Now it is dead stone
with its veins sucked dry as dust and all its arteries blown out clean by time; an ignorant monument playing host to nine, then eight men who crawl through its passages like parasites and who differ in their understandings of its chambers, tunnels and lattices, not unnaturally - it can be accounted for in so many ways.

Boffe, vast and red in his bath tub, splashed vigorously and tried to imagine the stone creature which surrounded him on all sides. He sat now in his liquids, contemplating the chamber, as was his custom during bath-time, faintly aware of the millions of tons of ground, rocks and earth pressing down on him from the surface, hundreds of feet above. Sheer weight, a deep bass rumble in his badly orchestrated thoughts. Damn Vaucanson, who had called him ‘the weak link’ and who was nothing without him, he the show’s imperator, the pilot of illusion. Boffe sploshed and gurgled through his ablutions then emerged to towel his steaming bulk dry in the chamber’s colder air. Vaucanson, Boffe’s surface irritant, rose like a rash, deepening Boffe’s irritation. His theatricals (marvellous things), his spectacles and seances, composed, planned, passed and performed were dependent on the other man’s genius; his mechanical contrivances. Boffe needed engines and machines, occasionally actors (though the latter, being invariably stiff-limbed and speechless, taxed his invention so that he had to remind himself that all great art is produced in the face of resistance from the medium). Boffe! he regarded himself in the mirror at the far end of the chamber. He was unmistakable.

Behind him stood the table with his models and plans, little clumps of trees hand-fashioned from sponge and wire, figures modelled in clay and Vaucanson’s engines reproduced in matchwood and string. Boffe was no weak link, the plan before him proved it. Vaucanson disliked him, Cas de l’Île hated him. His poor abused prostituted talents could barely stand it, with Le Mara creeping about like a machine of death and the caves, the horrible caves, he hated it, could hardly bear it, it was too terrible. Boffe patted his stomach in self-regard and dressed. When accoutred he was magnificent, his legs perhaps a little thin in proportion to the rest of him but still serviceable as he walked to the table where he hovered over the miniature mansion and its gardens, the lawn (made of stretched baize) the scrubby ground beyond (dyed hog’s bristles set in papier-mâché) the trees and the centrepiece which was a pyre where the woman would burn in excruciating torment, suffering unimaginable agonies that even Boffe’s ingenuity had found no means to prolong beyond a minute or two.

Vaucanson’s business would be set up behind the trees. Boffe’s thick digit pressed lightly on the top of the leafy canopy, as he saw it. From here the blinding flash of molten torture would be raised, swung over and deposited as though from the heavens down on the unfortunate woman,
into her even. It would be spectacular in the best possible way, giving an illusion of necessity usually only achieved by God.

Boffe readjusted his crotch which had become snarled in the imagined excitement, then turned his attention to the house whence the boy would emerge. His same finger traced a path over the lawn and scrub into the trees thence to the pyre, mentally reviewing the methods of enticement and distraction he had designed which would lead the boy to the required place at the required time to play his role as witness and (so the leader assured him) oblique participant. Boffe conceived the space around the pyre as an extravagant Chair of State in which the boy-king might sit, at once to see and be seen. Boffe glanced again at his brief, the open volume which lay to one side and told of the flaming conception of Perseus, a fabulous visitation of the virgin by Zeus the cloud-propeller, raining down in guileful drops upon her, a shower of gold. The brazen pit would have to be faked-up of course, and there was the woman to think of, though her active participation was not required…. Most of all it was the boy who troubled Boffe. He would be unrehearsed naturally, ambiguous in his relations with the production, perhaps resistant to the whole affair, hmm. But Boffe had built in leeways, resistances, counter-weights and suggestive encounters which should keep him on track, while allowing latitude too, for every sceptic must have his bone of reason. Boffe stood back and admired. So many niggly, logistical problems and he had found solutions to them all! He acknowledged the rude vigour of Vaucanson’s engines, the crane was good and he liked the dog-machines, splendid contraptions.

Boffe gathered up his plans and thought of the other seven, but Jacques was in France, six then, their shocked surprise at his cleverness, an excited critique of the finer points (he would dispose of their objections
comme ci, comme ça
) acclamation, praise and then applause, growing perhaps wild with whole opera-houses rising to their feet, tier after tier, burying him in roses and fame which would last longer than a pharaoh’s tomb. Boffe le Maître, for what was life without the theatre to confirm it as such? A dry shell. One day soon he would emerge from his confinement, very soon, and he would forget that he had ever known the answer to that question. Boffe reached for his lamp and strode towards the chamber’s door. Soon the meeting would begin. His entrance was awaited.