Wilful Impropriety (47 page)

Surely, Sam had thought before, there would be demons for the evils of the world, just as there were saints and angels for the better aspects, though he’d found himself dubious of a few of those. He’d not previously, however, thought of it the other way around. He had not considered that what was demonic might, at least, play the part of an angel now and then.

The papers were surely official, and Sam found himself thinking of bread and soup again as he looked over the gilt-covered seals. Yet he said nothing, and the barrister said much, though none of it was anything, because the papers said it all, and Sam could, at the cost of his own great effort over many years, read rather well, and knew better than to let himself listen instead, on a morning such as this was becoming.

The verbose papers could have easily been reduced to one simple word—
property
. A piece of land, formerly occupied by a building, for lack of a better word, and all that was contained therein. An unknown Uncle Andrew, for reasons of his now eternally mysterious own, had in a flourish of papers like this transformed Sam from a peasant to an owner of property—not property such as the rough bed he slept fitfully in, or the table he’d made himself out of discarded pine scraps, carefully hingeing together each piece like a puzzle—but property with
value
, enough to call for the signing of papers worth more than the shack in which Sam silently regarded them.

Finally the rich man stopped speaking in the language of his kind and Sam said, “Yes. I understand. Only show me where to affix my signature, and give me the keys to this—” He peered at one of the papers again, hardly able to believe what was plainly stated, “—‘collection of antiquities and wonders’ which have made a merchant out of me.”

•   •   •

Sam spent the rest of that first day in the trousers, because he knew even the strange and forgiving company he kept would take him more seriously when he approached them as the boy.

He thought of it that way, himself—not so much that he
was
the boy, or that, when so attired, she
was
the girl, but rather that Sam was always Sam, and which side emerged to be worn on the outside of Sam when the day began was an enigmatic matter with its own capricious agenda. Although not so much that Sam could not, when necessary, decide upon which it was best to wear rather than waiting until it felt clear.

Having been called forth and given directions, the companions he’d gathered met him at the address that he could now rightfully call his own the next afternoon—few of them were gainfully, or at least legally, employed, and therefore were lucky if they rose before teatime, let alone ventured forth into the harsh light of day. It was unlikely they’d have arrived before dusk if not for the fact that a pub quite dear to most of them happened to be just across the way, though none of them, Sam included, had ever taken notice of the shop before, so quietly did it keep to itself.

Each had their own reasons for avoiding the daylight—drink, or sloth, for some—but neither of these vices had ever much appealed to Sam, whose own difficulty with mornings came mostly in the form of lying awake for hours before deciding what to wear that day, which door of the wardrobe to open. In this twilight of self Sam would sit, feeling not so much indecisive as impossibly decided—the problem was not which sex to emulate, but that occasionally, in the center of Sam there was a feeling as if, impossible as it seemed,
both at once
would be most appropriate.

Of the thirteen quick visits he had made the day before—delivering a speech that ended with a dramatic and pleasingly bell-like jangle of keys—somehow seventeen hopeful young faces appeared. This was likely due to the part of the speech which had included the promise that anyone who arrived to help Sam empty this place in order to sell its contents as quickly as possible would have some part of the profits thereof distributed back to them.

Sam had been vague on this point, not yet knowing how big the pie he was promising to divide might turn out to be. Yet as he surveyed them gathered and eager for paying work that involved dust instead of soot, he became keenly aware that any size slice at all would do for this ragged assemblage.

•   •   •

Packed neatly away, the wonders of the shop were somehow even more desolate than they had been in their jumbled time on display. It was how one thing fitted against another, though neither had a regular shape to it—a broken cuckoo clock, hand-carved, tucked sideways against an old shaving mirror, its tarnished brass frame warped, its yet intact glass nestled carefully by a stack of worn rag dolls.

And so on, until all the wonder had been taken away and what remained was just a room, smaller than before, as if its evicted inanimate residents had created over time a way of folding space, until a single shelf came to feel as though whole infinite rows of shelves would pull out from behind it if it were removed. Only dust and cobwebs were there instead, and so the room was smaller now, but Sam wondered—then let it be, with an easy flick of his mind, where he knew all too well there were no maps or compasses when the forest of thoughts there turned wild.

There was a fascinating presence to the walls themselves. Once exposed, they made Sam a little ashamed of his own prior cynicism toward the place. There
was
treasure here, and not the flimsy tin kind men in linen suits sold along the docks in any city with a port.

The tired but satisfied haulers of wonder had, on finishing, found themselves surrounded by panels, five to each wall, and two more in the drop ceiling Sam hadn’t even glanced at until now. Each panel fitted into the other like a puzzle, with metallic protrusions and eclipses intertwining so delicately and yet so precisely that it became difficult to determine where one panel ended and the next began.

The skirting boards revealed the answer to this visual conundrum—brass bolts, somehow kept to a perfect shine while the faux wonders were left to decay, held each panel in place along strips of varnished wood—some tree which was dark and surely exotic, from how it seemed to hint at a bigger, deeper world. Sam’s collection of workers stood at the center of them, their chatter slowly falling into silence as they contemplated what they had uncovered, and then immediately began a lively debate over what should be done with it.

Sam surveyed them again and found he only knew a few of them well, though the stowaways attached to the core were also familiar for their habit of following wherever their center wandered.

There were Antoine and Tristan, at the moment inseparable despite their frequent fallings-out, the racket of which would echo down the whole row as they cursed and tussled in their rooms on the ground floor of the building at the corner of the street. With them as always was an ever-shifting collection of lads, always just a shade younger than themselves, who seemed to regard them as beyond reproach and correct in all their oft-expressed opinions, which of late had been unsettlingly Chartist for Sam’s nervous disposition.

If ever there were men who had no sense to keep their heads down and their names out of the mouths of the rich, it was those two and their pretty young denizens—still, they were also the most talented, devoted and unusual artists he knew, and more passionate on the subject of defying the traditional techniques and accepted subjects of the Royal Academy than Sam could find it in himself to be.

Certainly he felt art should be and indeed necessarily was, by its nature, an exploration in progress at all times—but had never in his own painting paid much attention to why he was going about it entirely wrong, whereas Antoine had come from France and therefore had much stronger feelings on the subject, and Tristan was by his nature a contrarian for whom defiance was less a political or artistic philosophy and more a way of life.

They and their hangers-on made strange company with the rest, who were mostly young women, since Sam had found that those who wore skirts and bonnets as a matter of habit were more inclined to be of an open mind toward keeping company with someone who did so seemingly at random. They were, like Sam, all artists—some painters, some sculptors, a few like Tristan who did a bit of both and also found fascination in the possibilities of mechanized display—but all united in their determination to keep on scrabbling at the edges of a world which had thus far found them insignificant, regardless of its judgment of their work.

Jyoti was the most colorful, in the long skirts she stitched together herself from what appeared to be pieces of old curtains, in different textures and patterns, creating a strange patchwork in which, for example, a scrap of lush purple velvet was sewn neatly aside a thinly green-striped strip of cotton. Sam imagined she scrounged them up when the aristocracy felt time for a bit of a freshening-up around what they surely called a “cottage,” despite its dozens of rooms and staff of willingly cooperative workers when it came to passing on the odd bits and pieces.

She would have been colorful even in white, though, like a diamond—she seemed to fracture light around and through herself as she moved, so that from one angle she looked shadowed by some perilous mystery, and from another bright with inspiration.

She spoke quietly, but there were times when she spoke firmly as well—not insistent, but with certainty, as if the discussion were a chess match she’d already calculated herself winning.

She had that tone now: “There is another way, a balancing.”

Antoine, who had been holding forth on the subject of how the panels might be removed and reassembled for display, halted at once, as part of the charm he had which induced forgiveness of his arrogance in others was his ability to know when it was wise to let them speak instead.

Jyoti went on. “What we must do foremost is honor these walls. They are a gift from our greatest patron, the Holy Spirit, who has given us through an unknown artist a way to become ourselves as God wills us to be. Yes, it is true that any gift, once given, is then the domain of the grateful recipient, who may display or alter or even discard it at will and according to his wisdom. So let us use our wisdom, as guided by the Spirit within us.”

“We make it part of the show,” Sam said. “We use it somehow, not just tear it down and mix it up. She’s saying, We found it, it’s something we found incomplete, so we have to complete it.”

Silence in the room, for once—not even fabric shifting, as each by each they were struck with a vision, and lived in it for a moment . . . before beginning to argue again, but this time in much more specific and useful ways.

Sam slipped away and aside, to stand with one hand resting on one of the exquisite panels, tracing the lines with his fingertips and wondering if Uncle Andrew himself had created this marvel, or merely discovered it and found it an appropriate encasement for his wares. He was so lost in its complexity that he only knew he had company at the last moment, when the delicate scent of powder reached his senses.

Ingrid, unlike Jyoti, rarely wore colors at all, though her paintings were full of them, so explosively vivid and unusual that more than one viewer had felt they must surely be somehow offensive despite any obvious display of crudity. Her dresses were somber, and even the rows of buttons she’d patiently sewn on, each by each, were small, carefully polished fragments of dark shells she had collected, so that they blended into the dark fabrics almost entirely.

When she spoke, it was with a seriousness matching her attire—but also with a bluntness that seemed to echo her paintings, so that the whole picture of her somehow emerged between the two seemingly opposite poles.

“Are you entirely sure of what you’re about with this?” She was speaking low and almost directly in his ear, and for a moment he could hardly breathe for wanting to turn and touch her face, and find in her expression reflected what his heart had, through their years of friendship, never found the courage to convey.

“Not a bit,” he answered cheerfully, turning indeed, but only smiling, forcing his hands to return from the panels to his sides rather than her cheek. “All I know is that there’s no reason we shouldn’t have a permanent exhibition of our own, for our kind of work. They have theirs, so let us have ours as well.”

He’d meant to speak quietly, but as he finished he found the crowd had fallen silent and turned its attention to him. He spread his hands at them—what more was there to say? And almost in one slow synchronized motion, their regard turned toward Antoine, who was already clearing his throat in preparation to say it, at some length.

•   •   •

Eventually, the endless talking descended into general agreement that the debate should be moved to the pub across the way, which they had all nicknamed ‘the Absolute’ so long ago they could no longer remember what amusing absolute they had decided it was on the night they’d so christened it.

Sam could have reminded them that the property was emphatically and officially his own, which they seemed to be forgetting by the moment, but found himself unable to care—unable to really think of it as not belonging to all of them already, despite his distance from their heated discussion over how they ought to shape its destiny. Half their earnings for the work would go directly to the Absolute tonight, he knew, and the rest would slip through their fingers in hardly any time at all.

And so instead of joining them, and knowing she would refrain as well, Sam followed Ingrid when she slipped away, despite feeling all the while that he should
instead
turn down every path that branched away from her. Any small alley or dung-riddled crossing would do, and he’d be a free man again, making choices that were his and not some miserable form of destiny pressing his body forward like a strong wind on the deck of a ship at sea.