The Biographer's Tale (22 page)

In the end, all I can do, is read the biographer's paragraph on his subject's dead body and make an
imaginative stab at
the penumbra of his words. My own ideas of the duties of a “biographer,” of “thinking with pain,” “of mortal remains,” of “a fitting end for what must one day perish” confer life, but not necessarily more truth, on what Pearson had, in his own terms,
quite adequately expressed
.

But no string has an end. Like spider-silk unreeling.

I have managed to trap myself in digressions, if there can be digressions in a project that appears alternately to have too little and too much form. I start too many hares. (What
does
that mean? I have never seen a hare run. I am an urban animal. Ah, but in the mind's eye … And whose voice is
that
, with its plangent Ah, but …?) I shall go back to my list of what was, before I or Destry-Scholes interrupted it, a reasonably coherent “hybrids and mixtures” cluster.

Card no. 54

Card no. 55

Card no. 56

Card no. 57

The last card may be thought to be more appropriately a part of my next cluster, which I have tentatively called
“(Composite) portrait photography.” Or possibly “Composite portrait (photography).” It was easy enough to identify the quotations from
Peer Gynt
and
When We Dead Awaken
. The fish/sea card, which might also go into my “drowning” cluster, is part of Ibsen's notes for
The Lady from the Sea
. Writing down the reference to the Strange Passenger reminds me of my own Strange Customer, Mr. Maurice Bossey.

I looked at some of the Web sites he had listed. They were, as I believe I had always suspected, sites of a pornographic nature. They showed pictures—both still and moving—of … I don't have to write down what they were of. I could find a string of little, cold, categorising words. Pederasty. Paedophilia. Sado-masochism. Sadism. Some of the collars and claws and forks and chains and things were quite funny. Some of the flesh was, too. Like rubber balloons. Some of the photographs were better than others, you got convincing gouts of blood (well, they were real, in some place, at some time, I imagine, I suppose). There are other words. Pain. Hurt. Damage. I suddenly saw the
point
, so to speak, of the semiotic thrust of all Maurice Bossey's little implements, his knife, his screw, his piercer-and-cutter. All these photographs were intermingled (from site to site) with idyllic or Edenic holiday “suggestions.” The photography for some of these was very lovely. Gold-skinned pre-pubertal boys ran across white sands under waving palm-trees, and rolled, open-legged, in the softly curling edges of the surf. Next to them, naked babies played in pools, patting liquescent sand-towers with sharp spades.

I had never liked Maurice Bossey. Now the thought of him made me feel sick. (That is the way
I
am. It is no good pretending to a breadth of sympathy I don't have. And don't
want to have. I know a victim when I see one, however sweetly he smiles.)

The real problem was that the sickness I felt spread over into my feelings about my absent employers, so gently, so variously hedonistic, so comprehensive in their provision of pleasure for everyone. Had they left me alone with Bossey as a
test
? Or did they not know about Bossey, was he a contact of the absent Pim or Pym whom they had never once mentioned? The images of the unpolluted beaches on Pacific atolls which were part of Puck's Girdle's furniture of human dreams merged in my mind with these sweet images of terror and pain, and would not be separated again, as though sun and sand were filmed over with the sickly scent of blood. (A mixed metaphor. Let it lie.)

I had no one to talk to about any of all this. I intended to present Ormerod Goode with my selective and
arranged
account of the card-box, when it was done. That left Vera Alphage, who appeared to wish to keep a pleasant distance. She did not, for instance, ask me how I was getting on, though she continued to provide tasty little snacks. Then one day, as I was leaving, she called me into her little sitting-room. She had set up a green-felted card-table—there was a bizarre moment when I expected her, like Miss Havisham, to require me to “play.” I first thought she was playing some intricate and unusually numerous kind of solitaire against herself. I then recognised Destry-Scholes's marble collection, deployed across the green field in little clusters and lines, of varying colours and sizes. She said,

“I had the idea, in an idle moment, of seeing whether I
could fit Uncle's names to his marbles, so to speak. You know—he's got this list of names, and then the lists of the clans and cohorts and so on of the army—if it is an army and not a hierarchical society, or an imaginary kingdom, or whatever. Then I got rather annoyed—you find you've got six possible marbles to one name, and six possible names to one marble, and others that are just
baffling
. I decided to start by dividing them into colours. Blue, green, brown, purple, white and clear, red, pink, and so on. I got out the table because I had to put what I call the
overlaps
or
links
—ones that are equally blue and green, or yellow and brown—between the major groups. The ones that are merely flecked with one colour, but predominantly another, I've put with the colour.

“Then I've divided the colours into opaque and transparent. Then I've got oddities, like turquoise, and fawn. And a couple of iridescent ones. Like opals. There's a whole group of names which are merely precious stones—Jade, Jasper, Chrysolite—though
not
Opal—and some, like Sapphira that are
almost
stones, or Smaragdine, which turns out to be an old word for emerald, and Sardonyx. And Topaz. The only one that looks much like a topaz is also the perfect candidate for Tiger's Eye.”

I was interested in her little circles of spheres—perhaps even more so because I felt a pointless but aesthetically interesting affinity with my own clusters of cards. I said,

“The cards in the card index are falling into related clusters. Like the sea, as a theme. Or
composites
.”

“I thought some of those old photos looked rather like Galton's composites,” she said, revealing knowledge I hadn't known she had.

“You know about Galton?”

“Not really. But I know quite a lot about photography, one way and another. I thought one of the marble-armies might be, so to speak,
marine
. I've got Bladderwrack, Wrasse, Tsunami, Maelstrøm, Crest, Chronofoam (whatever that is—it could be a kind of shaving cream). I've got Atoll, Sea-green Ink, Painted Ocean, Wake—which could mean all sorts of things, but there's one or two with trails of bubbles that look just like wakes—”

I said that “sea-green ink” might be an abbreviation of “sea-green incorruptible” and refer to Robespierre. She said that there were the names Thermidor and Fructidor and one called Pimpernel, which might be to do with
The Scarlet Pimpernel
. Then, she said, there were the names of body parts. Thorax and Omoplat, Cervicle, Bum, Lung and Cocky, though that went with all sorts of other groupings, poultry and human attributes like Sultry and Snazzy …

I said it seemed impossible to reconstitute such an arbitrary system.

She said it was
not
arbitrary, each marble had been carefully and uniquely
named
.

She said she loved the little glass balls absolutely in themselves, they were magical. She held up several to the light, and we peered through them. White worms or ribbons twisted wildly through emerald and amethyst caverns. A spiral danced round itself, pink and gold, in clear glass with a blueish cast. Vera Alphage handed me two particular ones.

“I thought
Bum
couldn't be hard to identify. I thought one of these must be Bum.”

One had two white hemispheres in transparent toffee, like
the summits of hard-boiled eggs. One had a scarlet opaque object, with a startling resemblance to the male organ of generation, inside a transparent turquoise veiling. She said, “I don't know what sort of age he was when he started naming them.
Little
boys call the whole system indifferently, “Bum.” Later they differentiate.”

I pointed out that this system was not constructed by a
little
boy. Little boys don't know words like Smaragdine and Omoplat. Vera Alphage said that she had the feeling that the collection had accumulated over a very long period, that he had started with maybe half-a-dozen cherished marbles—and had added, and added, “as one does.” Her empty little room showed no sign of a collector's passion. I said this was an interesting theory, but where was her evidence? She said that the little notebooks showed a development in the handwriting—some was quite infantile, and the lists in this handwriting were short.

She said, “There is a possible grouping of atomic energy names. There is Fusion, and Fission, and Neutrino and Cloud Mushroom. And in that case Atoll would go with Mushroom Cloud, of course. But then Cloud Mushroom might go with Seaweed, and Bonsai, and Chrysanthemum and Miso, a kind of Japanesey group.”

I said surely the lists themselves, the order in which they were presented, gave some clue. I thought of my painstaking numbering of the cards. She said, “But the same names appear in different orders in several of the lists. They obviously changed allegiances, that is to say, categories.” She said, “Often, he doesn't name the lists, themselves. Just little
signs
, like hieroglyphs, or picture-writing.”

I said that was just like his not-quite-system in the boxes.

She held up a very large rose and emerald and cobalt whirl. “Do you think this is Aurora Borealis? Or”—she held up one with a gold rim and a flare of transparent crimson like a dancer's skirt—“this?”

I said I wasn't quite sure what she hoped to achieve.

She said she had no hope of ever understanding the system. But by process of elimination, she wondered whether it would be possible to fix a name to each marble. She did believe each had had one name and one only.

She looked at me defensively. She said, “It's a silly idea.” She put out her arms to roll all her groups into an indiscriminate cluster. I put my hand on hers, instinctively, to stop her. I took hold of her wrist. I felt the blood pulse under my fingers and saw it jump blue under her white skin. (There was a marble called Azurevein, somewhere.) I said, holding on to her wrist, that it wasn't a silly idea, no more silly than what I was doing myself. We were both mapping the mind of Scholes Destry-Scholes.

There was a blue flicker of electricity in the blue veins and my own fingertips.

I let go. What else was I to do?

I see the next cluster, the photography cluster beginning with card no. 75, as the (composite) portrait photography, or composite portrait (photography) cluster. And what came in between, my non-existent reader may well ask. All sorts. A description of an overcoat. A list of high and low tides (I don't know where). A few bits of poetry on subjects I can't track
down (time passing, in various languages, roots and flowers, ditto). None of these are
obviously
connected to the three personages, though a reasonable guess would be that they might be, must be. Anyway, here are some of the photos.