Lempriere's Dictionary (6 page)

But he did not. He had imagined the goddess and she had come. He had fallen at her feet and she had elevated him. He had been beset by enemies and she had protected him. He was Paris faced with the outrage of Menelaus, the cuckold’s horns tipped with bronze to gore him. The sweaty fear of pain, the dull throb of thickened blood in his temples, the strength-sapping wrench in the pit of his stomach, the smell of anticipated harm: and then Aphrodite with a cloak of sea-mist. To wrap it round him, hide him and spirit him to safety, yes, he was hers for the taking. He walked on towards home, imagining the goddess furling him in cloud. It touched his
skin with cool, electric fingers, stealing under the folds of his clothes, touching him. If he tried to cry out she would stop him, she would place her hand which was nothing but the mist of thought and yet it was her hand…. Over his mouth. He would kiss that hand, being borne upwards through the aether, safe in her close embrace.

Lost in these thoughts, he began the climb up the hill towards Rozel. Sandy-coloured dust exploded out from his feet as he kicked aimlessly. His spindly legs stood out like a marionette’s and from a distance the reflected backlight from the track shaved them to pins. They danced, kicked and sprang as Lemprière decided to run the last half-mile home.

He was greeted at the door by his father.

‘Good morning John. Were we missed at church?’

‘Father Calveston had his eye on the Matts girls….’

‘Ha! And you had an eye on Father Calveston. That leaves one eye for the road.’ His son’s strenuous brushing had not been completely successful. ‘So at what was this surplus eye directed I wonder? The Matts family too perchance? Ha, ha! Come now, lunch awaits.’ This last was almost bellowed. His son was more than a little taken aback at this hearty badinage. Charles Lemprière’s manner was more normally reserved. On entering, his mother’s constant sniffing hinted broadly at the reason behind his father’s dissembling jollity. What
had
they been discussing? The meal proceeded similarly. His mother sat in virtual silence while his father carved mutton, commented on the vegetables or the weather, joked and made small-talk. The son did his best as his father, in the space of an hour, doubled the number of words he had spoken to him in the past year. But his mounting bafflement did not fail to discover the tension behind this charade of good humour.

The meal over, John Lemprière escaped to his room in some disarray. He picked a book at random from the small stack by the bed on which he had thrown himself and held it, his arm dangling over the side, like a talisman. Solid and cool to the touch, its compact weight obscurely reassured the young man. If he brought the book up and opened it he would immediately find himself in a, what was it, an elsewhere. Yes, an elsewhere that was here, that was also him. There for him at any moment, an anchorage of memories; a nice phrase. The book warmed in his hand and the moisture from his fingers smoothed its passage as it slid in leisurely fashion from his grasp to land with a thud upon the floor. And why had he not said that he had exchanged greetings with Juliette Casterleigh? Normally he would. Secrets bred secrets bred secrets; secret pleasures. She had saved him, perhaps, he groped hopefully, for a purpose? He dragged himself away from the tempting vistas to which this speculation might lead and fumbled on the floor for the book. He bent his arm round to display the
title on the spine; ‘Sextus Propertius, Opera’. The Roman Callimachus. They all claimed that.

He remembered his first meeting with the poet. Not a meeting, a passing glance exchanged between countrymen on soil foreign to both. Quint’s classroom entered his thoughts and revisited its tedium upon him. The dull monotone throbbed in his memory as he recalled the airless room and its malcontent inhabitants. Quint’s views on the Ancients were eccentric and applied as dogma. Endless afternoons reciting grammatical rules by rote and learning passages of Latin prose had been the schoolmaster’s stock in trade. He had resented the boy’s precocious ability and derided his youthful taste for the lyric poets. In return, the boy had gleefully pointed out the most minor of Quint’s mistakes and argued interminably against the merits of the prose writers whom Quint professed to favour, and in whose defence he might even have been said to wax lyrical. His exaltation of Tully, whose pompous, inflated rhetoric might run for pages unhindered by punctuation, knew no bounds. Tully was the ‘complete master of oratory’, he contained ‘a compendium of figures that may dance for us if we construe them correctly’, his ‘eloquence was unbounded’. The young Lemprière had wondered when Mister Quint had had occasion to hear Mister Tully. In such a schema neither Lemprière nor Propertius had fared well. Propertius ‘was of some interest for his archaisms, but to be esteemed far below Tibullus’, while Lemprière, master at the age of fourteen over any text Quint was likely to teach in the foreseeable future, was fast becoming an embarrassment. He had left school the following year to pursue the
Novi Poetae
on his own. The train of thought petered out and he lay there with his mind blank for a long time. Familiar sounds of domestic activity reached him vaguely from below. His room was very still, the only movement his arm swinging almost imperceptibly at the side of the bed, his hand still holding the book. Like a pendulum, counting nothing and the hours passed empty-handed.

Outside, the sun was setting and the young man turned again to his book. He read idly as the vast red disk seeped out of sight. Flicking from page to page, scarcely conscious of the breaks between the end of one poem and the beginning of the next, he savoured the lateness of the moment. A final sliver of red narrowed to the greying blue behind it and dusk fell. He turned the page.

Qui mirare meas tot in uno corpore formas,
accipe Vertumni signa paterna dei

The impossible choice. Lemprière matched verbs, subjects and objects one to the next, arranging and revising, and relished the slow movement into clarity as he construed the lines.

Who marvels, no, whoever marvels, or supply a pronoun, more dramatic…. You who marvel at so many forms, shapes, better, in one body, a single body, accept the fatherly signs, no, ancestral signs of the god Vertumnus. Accept into your mind, learn. Yes, learn was right. Formae, corpus, a good tension for late Rome, the first city of deceits.

The gold greyed and turned leaden, the sky darkened. Clouds of insects swarmed in the dusk and fed hungrily on the soft necks of the cattle grazing under the trees. The fields were untended; lead turned to iron, turned to rust on the plough as the light decayed and released the forms of night. The single light of a cottage some two miles away weighed anchor and drifted in the gloom, trees shifted and merged with the sky behind. The fields rolled and rippled. He was sweating. The trench the stream had gouged for itself down the slope before the trees seemed to suck the sheets of turf into its maw. Learn what? The last light floated down to the fields on either side to be snatched by some tremendous undertow towards the long, thin mouth which snaked away into the dark, wavered, and now, his hands whitened around the bed-frame, widened. Opened, a monstrous, formless mouth, like the victim of an hideous burial, the face decayed and interlaced with roots which writhed and tore through its surface, falling away in clods. The face was crumbling away and beneath it a dull glint shone feebly. He tried to work his tongue, his throat was knotted and dry. The black slash of its mouth writhed, its lips splitting in tatters, peeling away until the bronze figure beneath began to emerge. It melted then recomposed. It softened, then redefined. It formed only to collapse. Its aspects shifted second by second, each complete metamorphosis being the herald for the next. But through it all the bronze eyes remained fixed and focused on the young man who breathed in quick, shallow gasps, chest tight, limbs rigid on the bed.

And the eyes too melted, after a fashion. For they cried. The shining drops gathered in the corners of his eyes and fell soundlessly to the earth below. Huge, sad eyes spoke soundlessly through the voided air which closed around them, of youth, courting Pomona through the orchards inland from the shores of Laurentum, winning her. Garlanded, handsome I was when the crown of plenty dangled from my fingers, and the songs sung of me and how they were sung less, later not at all…. Of my silence! The black earth which reclaimed me, I would speak of it…. And yet the dark interment weighs heavy on my thoughts, too long in silence, too long…. And through his rambling melancholy the tears fell, until the darkness thickened around him. His eyes fell back into the forgetful, sad centuries of which they spoke, narrowing to points, to pin-pricks until they vanished mutely into the dark. The tears of an abandoned god, a last appeal before dark.

Lemprière jerked violently as every sinew in his body snapped out of tension. He was shaking. He drew his knees up and rocked on his heels. His breath came quickly and his neck ached. What have I witnessed, he wondered. It cannot be, it cannot…. Better that I am mad than it be true. He looked out of the window. The stream, trees and fields looked much as they ever had. No trace remained of the vision he had witnessed. The god may have returned, may have risen and mourned his neglect, but no sign remained to betray the fact. And what of me, he thought then. It is I who read of him. Did I call him? But the other possibility hammered insistently in his skull, the thought that could not be faced for fear that it was true. I called him, I must have called him. He clasped his head in his hands. His temples pounded and a low groan gathered in his throat. Hammers in his head. He threw himself off his bed, ran to the window and, drawing breath, shouted into the dark,

‘I called him!’

The darkness was blacker than he could ever remember. An absolute silence followed the falling off of his voice. But the sound within was still there, barely audible, there, like the drops of water which as a child he had seen falling from the glistening roof of the cave at Rozel Bay and which, given time, produced the squat stalagmites on the cave floor. One might catch an hundred, a thousand, a million of those drops, they would produce the stalagmite just the same, each tiny deposit adding its layer until it reached the roof. He turned from the window and walked back to his bed. Lying there, staring into nothing, he opened the gate in his mind.

‘It is me.’ He spoke the words aloud and would have chuckled at how simple and how terrifying a statement he had just made. Somewhere within me, he thought, is a god who tears his face out of the ground, who has not walked the earth for two millennia and who walks outside my window. Then he wondered, what else walks within me?

The room was silent for some time. A few splutters were heard which gradually grew more frequent until they became recognisable as high-pitched giggles. Alone and in the dark, Lemprière laughed to himself without the least idea how or why he did so. The laughter rose and fell. Gaps of silence between the outbursts grew longer, until, exhausted at last, he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. Outside the window the moon broke through the clouds and cast a bleaching light over the young man’s face. His limbs twitched periodically as his body released its inner tensions; his face was white in the moonlight and calm. He slept on.

Father Calveston applying grease to his contraption, dammit he hadn’t wanted to be a priest anyway, a shepherd for wayward sheep. He snorted. Constant interruptions, cretinous old women asking if they’d go to hell for being rolled in the hay forty years previously, a miserly stipend. Every week the sermon, every other week another puking, screaming brat that would piss in the font while its clottish parents trod mud down the aisle and pondered, ‘should we call him Ezekiel?’ when there were already four in the parish and four too many at that. He wasn’t suited for the job, he had no vocation. They’d told him as much at Oxford. ‘Calveston’, they’d said, ‘have you considered fully the fact that many are called but few are chosen?’ Considered! Dammit, he’d thought of little else. Except he’d been sent, not called, and when the sender was his father he was destined for the Lord’s service whether the Lord wanted him or not. On balance, he reflected, He probably did not, but what choice was there? Dear brother Michael had the land, and sold it with father’s body still warm. He had the church. Dammit! He cursed aloud, not so much at brother Michael, conniving little spendthrift runt that he was, as at his own clumsiness - he had jammed his thumb in the complicated piece of machinery he was cleaning and it was proving hard to extricate. Aah! It came loose and he stood back to survey the object of his labours.

It stood about four feet tall, its cast iron sides gleaming dully. It looked something like a waterpump except that the cylinder through which the water would have been drawn up was partially cut away. A complicated mechanism of meshes and cogs could be seen together with the end of a piston-like object which presumably extended the length of the cylinder to the handle. It was his own invention, the first he had seen through successfully from conception to existence. His chicken-plucking engine had been too ambitious a project. It had worked well as a chicken disemboweller, but a disembowelled chicken with feathers had proved a commodity without a market on Jersey. The hair-cutting engine too had had its problems. No wonder the Crewe boy had made such a noise. Still, the hair had grown back to cover the marks. But his latest and greatest invention was of a different order. Ouch! He pulled his thumb out of the mesh which had pinched it for the second time and sucked it ruefully. He would be a great Inventor, a Man of Science yet. If only his duties were not so time-consuming.