Читать книгу The Memory Palace - Gill Alderman - Страница 8

His hands ached badly, as they often did at the end of a long keyboard session. He flexed his fingers while he looked out, beyond the screen, into the twilit garden of the old rectory. It was a little cooler; he thought the rosebushes trembled slightly. There might be a breeze, one zephyr only: just a breath of air to end the stifling day. The lawns merged with churchyard and field and, in Humfrey’s Close, the Norman castle mound looked bigger than it was, worn down by nine hundred years of weather, rabbits and grazing sheep. A mile or so away, Karemarn’s dark slopes were beginning to merge with the night sky.

The sun had set. The only light in the room came from the screen of the computer before the window, a luminescent shield which occulted the world outside as effectively as the steep hill hid the rising moon. It was covered with words, the conclusion of his newest novel and – as necessary an adjunct to his storytelling as the hallowed and familiar phrase ‘Once upon a time’ – with his authorial adieu to the reader, that essential phrase with which he always signed off at the finish of the task: ‘THE END’. Then, his last words, his hand upon the creation: ‘Guy Kester Parados, The Old Rectory, Maidford Halse, June 24th 1990’.

He stretched, reaching high, yawned wide. A grisaille light as glamorous as that cast by his mind-mirroring screen filled the garden and the small field beyond it. It was time to be gone. He clicked the mouse under his right hand and saw his work vanish into the machine. He would leave it now, to settle and sift out of his mind; when he returned after the break, he would come to it refreshed. Then, one or two readings, a little tweaking (especially of the unsatisfactory last chapter) and a punctuation check should suffice and he could be rid of it for ever, in the future seeing it only as an entity given public birth by others, separate from him, one more title on the shelf – He made a copy and, reaching up, hid the floppy disk in the customary place in the cracked mullion.

‘You may now switch off safely.’ He read the prompt and, reaching for the switch, said ‘I shall, I shall.’ It had been a long haul, this one, through the fifteenth. The landscape of the novels was so familiar that he no longer had to consciously invent it, only travel the road with his chosen company, as used to his fictional country of Malthassa as to the hedged and crop-marked fields of the rural Midlands outside his study window. It was an old picture, this place outside the house; he no longer needed to look at it to remember it, but only inwards, into his mind, where those more perilous places, the dangerous rocks, the wild steppes and untameable floods he had created called him persistently.

If I had gone in for the Church, he thought, would it have made me any happier? Would that honest life have felt more just, more true, than this of spinning the thread, weaving the cloth, cutting and stitching the garment of the storyteller? Would Helen have avoided me, or seen me as a greater challenge? I was a pushover for her after all, most eager to co-operate.

Maybe Dominic will prove to be my truest throw. I’d better take his card with me, and the letter.

He tucked them inside the road map of France and left his study with its confusion of books, papers and ideas; shut the door on it. In the bedroom, he rummaged, flinging socks, pants, shirts on the bed. Bliss it was to be alone, each member of his family far from home engaged in pursuits he could ignore, each task complete, all the bills paid with the monotony of forging sentence after sentence down the years: twelve volumes of his New Mythologies, the Koschei sequence; two other novels; three collections of short stories. And all the ghosts accounted for.

When he had packed his canvas grip he went downstairs. In the hall the ivy girl, the dryad his wife had carved a dozen years ago, bore her containment with grace. She was but half a girl, the remainder a contorted and leafy stem from which she stretched up, always reaching for the moon – his children called her, simply, ‘Ivy’ and hung their hats and coats upon her limbs. Just now, she wore a cricketer’s sunhat on her tangled head and a silky Indian scarf about her slender waist. He took the keys to the Audi from her outstretched hand.

‘Goodbye, Alice, I’ll soon be back,’ he said softly, speaking to the household ghost; but she did not answer him. Instead, the tawny owl called from his roost in the cedar tree, ‘Who-o-o-o?’

Dark now, enough for stars. He walked on the lawn and looked up at them. They used to shine more brightly; he had forgotten the names of their constellations. He looked at the fantastic bulk of the house with its turrets, machicolations and flying buttresses. A fancy place for a man of the cloth – but a good home for a writer of Fantasy. He had already paid off the mortgage.

The car was still on the drive – he hadn’t bothered to garage it the night before. He had paid for that too. Any top-of-the range car would have done but he had always had an Audi of one kind or another, since his first successes. He moaned about the cost of it, and enjoyed it.

The red car was his escape vehicle, deliverance from jail. He laid the map on the passenger seat and flung his grip into the back. Perhaps he would stop in Christminster, see Sandy; perhaps not – and, for once, decisions did not matter. Nothing mattered, except one fact: that he was now on holiday. On the road, he sat alert in his speeding chair, in control. The car filled the quiet, starlit lanes with noise and rushing lights but, within, cushioned from the world, he found and felt a new intensity, a rebirth of the spirit, free of its monetary and marital chains. That was the illusion. He cherished it.

On Ottermoor he turned aside from the A-road, braked gently and stopped the car beside a gateway. He stretched the ache from his hands, unbent himself and got out. The shire lay before him, silent, dark; it might have been a haven of hope, a place to nurse – what? Not ambition: he had had enough. Dreams? There were too many. Those big fields and the marshy thickets which were all that was left of the old moor were spoiled, despoiled: by today’s constellations, the clusters of orange lights above a roundabout; by the whisper of tyres which had replaced the song of the wind; by the small size of the modern world, forever shrinking, caving in upon itself. He could hardly see the moon for manufactured light. There were no otters.

The morning blazed upon him. Another scorcher. He adjusted the air conditioning and the sun visors, put his sunglasses on, flipped through the CDs, selected – ah, the old favourite, Layla. It flung him straight back, into 1973; and yet was just sound, a pop song; he felt none of the despair – no, the anguish with which he used to experience the song. ‘Darling! Won’t you, please?’ In those days he had not known what to expect of the next day, much less the future undefined and, while he wondered how (and where) he might seduce Helen Lacey, wailed internally with the music, wrote short stories, went to parties, danced with a variety of women, even with his wife – what was a party in the seventies if it was not a long dalliance to music, truly a series of sexual overtures? ‘You’ve got me on my knees.’ No more. He was mature, old to some, and he knew how the world wagged. He turned the volume up and felt return also, as he passed a string of company cars, the sense of adventure and urgency which had set him going; he forgot his painful hands. They, the suited men with order books and briefcases, must be thinking (for they had seen him coming up, a red dot in their mirrors), ‘There the bastard goes.’

Here on the motorway time and motion, art and science, were united. On the endless ribbon flowed, grey lanes merging and parting, pale bridge-arches springing nimbly, artfully, over the traffic, gone to be forgotten as the music played. He ought to slow down but the fast car’s marque was a logo and an advertisement of his abandonment to the luxury of speed. The four linked circles on the bonnet were symbols of the diverse worlds he had set out to pass through, but not linger in. He had become a gypsy with no goal but the next horizon.

Names and numbers flicked by. The names of the service stations were more relevant than those of places, directionally astray, for the new geography of the motorway had obscure rules where north, south, east and west were always left. The traffic moved frenetically, dancing down the shimmering lanes. He was a part of the cavalcade, held safely in the steel and upholstery of his car, passing from lane to lane, putting his foot down, overtaking with all the energy and dynamics of the vehicle at his command. Outside the ever-changing constant life of the road, the blue lamps glimpsed ahead and the smooth deceleration to a steady seventy; fellow-travellers gliding by, black, white or Indian, once a Dormobile full of red-necked Australians. Lorries were a species apart on high: Norbert Dentressangle, Christiaan Salvesen, Geest and Reem Lysaght. A transporter bore yet more, cars to fill the M25, a fleet of new Renault space wagons with the iridescent colours of beetles’ wings, metallic green, bronze, amaranth, blue.

‘Bloody caravans,’ he muttered as he passed a swaying line of them. Caravan of caravans? Caravans of dreams? Squat wagons, like him in going south pursuit of lost ideals; lightly and impossibly named: the Sprite, the Lapwing, the Pageant, the Corniche, their destinations uncorrupted birds, whispering salt marshes and the sea, the easy hedonism of topless beaches in the South of France, castles (in Spain perhaps) or moated chateaux lapped by vineyards where wine could be tasted and bought.

Helen’s painted caravan had been the gateway to ecstasy.

The aching sensation returned again on the M26. He flexed his hands against the wheel. Sod it. But he wasn’t going back. Some aspirin or paracetamol would settle it or that new stuff, what was it, Nurofen? Check with a doctor – in Dover maybe? No. He would leave all that behind him, with Sandy, Jilly and the family stuff, and the completed The Making of Koschei.

He pulled off the glaring tarmac into a service station. It was called The Clover Patch, and he laughed cynically. He felt tired and persecuted. A group of lorry drivers stared at him, and at the 20V: envy. He paid for his coffee, drank it quickly and, on the way out, bought a paper.

Ten minutes later, he stopped a second time to pick up a hitch-hiker, a young blonde. She did not appreciate his car nor the acceleration it was capable of; he could see one of her hands, tightly gripping the material of her loose, art student’s smock, and she sat silent, utterly without small talk. On the busy motorway he had no chance to turn his head and be polite, smile at her.

‘Going far? Dover?’ he asked.

‘I dunno,’ she returned and he, the writer, the man whose business was with language, was immediately struck by the earthiness of her accent. ‘I’ was almost ‘Oi’. He negotiated a way past a coach and glanced at her, about to ask: Was she born in his shire? She returned his look, a sprite of ancient mischief capering in her speedwell eyes; and yet there was a deadness on them, a dull glaze of the kind he had seen when he drowned the blue-eyed kittens. She could not be, she was – very like the hanged girl, Alice Naylor. It was luck, some whim of a guardian demon, that he did not steer into the crash barrier, and the girl lurched forward in her seat.

‘For God’s sake, do up your seat belt,’ he said, took one hand from the wheel and passed it over his face.

He overtook a pair of lorries, trembling with the effort, and had to tuck himself in smartly behind a minibus. The leading driver leaned on his horn. The fast lane was empty. He veered out to a chorus of horns, and accelerated. 85, 90, 100, 110 – what was the engine capable of? He glanced to his left: the girl had gone, vanished just as Alice Naylor used, without a goodbye or a smile, to leave him in turmoil, bereft and aching to touch her beautiful, insubstantial body. Could Alice have followed him? Was this an omen or merely a sign of his mental exhaustion? He could not answer his own questions and concentrated on the indisputable reality of his fast and powerful car.

He stopped at the next service station and, in the gents, dashed water across his face and drank huge quantities from his cupped hands. His face, in the mirror above the basin, looked perfectly normal. It was the weather; too much hard work, this last week, his imagination fired up and unable to rest. In France he would shake off these dangerous fancies; and the aching hands. The phantom hitch-hiker! People did not, of course, hitch-hike on motorways. He laughed, and bit off the sound immediately as the door opened and a half-unzipped hulk of a lorry captain walked in and casually showered the urinal with pungent golden rain.

In the car, he first switched on the radio: normality, sound bites of news and chat; next bathed his shattered ego in tacky Queen: amazing how they had kept on going, changing style and image, yet turning out the same old reliable performance. ‘Another one,’ they sang, ‘Another one BIT THE DUST’ He was in Dover, automatically had slowed to a sedate street pace. A woman with a buggy standing still to watch him, some boys on bikes. What a fool he’d been back there, driving so dangerously. Lucky no police. The player switched moods for him: Bach, clear and refreshing as water, a quality fugue; anyone could play Queen.

A long sleep somewhere south of Paris, he thought – in a small country hotel with a good restaurant. He handed his ticket to a taciturn collector and was given a boarding card. No need for the passport here, though despite the Community some officials were – officious; but I’ll need it for the bloody bank, in France. That poster: ‘Prelude’, the perfume Sandy wants. Does she see herself like that, stretched on a grand piano at dawn, waiting, naked under a dinner jacket, a conductor’s baton in her hand?

A man was waving him on. He drove across the tarmac acreages of the port into a moving queue, bumped up the ramp.

Once upon a time he had been a poor storyteller, one of those who lived in a figurative garret and strove away at his art. He no longer thought of it as Art, that was too presumptuous, too precious a name for his hacking; yet it was still an art and something he had always been guilty of practising, the telling of stories – since early childhood: ‘Mummy, Mummy! There’s a wolf in the wardrobe!’ ‘Muum! I saw three monkeys up the apple tree!’ Unaided, he had turned this facility for imagining the worst and the most bizarre into a career.

Guy settled into the reclining chair but did not open the newspaper he had bought on the road. His eyes ran with tiredness and his hands needed to be bent, stretched and massaged one upon the other. It was hard to break off, be free. He had left the two communications from his unknown son in the car, the postcard with the picture of the hairy Lascaux horse and the brief letter, and so must rely on memory to peruse – the letter, one in a pile from his fans, had dropped into the placid pool of his existence and stirred it up – he had known nothing of this child, Helen’s boy; heard nothing – she had left him in December ’73. He had not even known she was pregnant! Then, less than a fortnight ago: ‘Dear Father –’

Dominic skied and played rugby, ‘not cricket like you.’ He had been born in Lyon – born fully grown into his father’s consciousness, nearly seventeen, to take fourth place in the hierarchy of his children between Phoebe and Ellen. There was no photograph; he must imagine what a handsome lad (or bulky prop-forward) resulted from his union with Helen. Dominic was also a reader. The card referred to the alternative world of the New Mythologies: ‘This reminds me of the Red Horse of the Plains’ – and, indeed, the sturdy Neolithic animal, if it were caparisoned in catamount skins and bridled with leather cut from the hide of a forest ape, would pass for one of the Imandi’s herd, a durable mount for one of the Brothers of the Green Wolf.

A wave of guilt passed through him, winding the tension up: he exercised his taut hands once more. He had said nothing to Jilly. No need.

His son’s final sentences were the most arresting, the ones he had been fed: ‘I am to tell you that Mother knows you are a handsome and successful storyteller who has learned all the skills of life and loving. She longs to confirm in the flesh what she has read.’ Then, the clincher, the reiteration of the announcement which had driven him to finish his book and set off for the unknown: ‘Your son, Dominic’.

Yesterday. All was yesterday.

Yesterday, when the painters had at last gone home and left the stinging smell of gloss paint behind them, evening had enveloped the stuffy house, wrapping it in a pause, an interval of quiet. For a while no vehicle had passed on the road beyond the wide lawn with its twin cedars and monkey-puzzle. The heat was Capricornian, tropical: a bath in which he was immersed to be boiled gently, to be done to a turn. It summoned unlikely longings to lie with ice-maidens or with the cruel Snow Queen; to plunge into the eternal cold, there forever to die; to have no identity, to be himself no longer.

To be, he had thought, to be nothing, nil, no more man but flesh, dead meat decaying to the bone and then to earth, all one with what was and will be.

The smell of paint and turps had been pervasive and perhaps accounted for the light-headedness he had felt; he was mildly poisoned, a middle-aged solvent-sniffer. He had sat by the open study window and watched the shadows gather beneath the rose bushes. The house remembered, its garden a notebook on whose pages many had sketched their designs. The gold and white pillar-rose marked the place where he had first seen Alice Naylor, knowing who she was, and the memory of it to this day lingered with him, a corrupt but sweet odour which counterpointed his memories of her whose brief life had been brought abruptly to a premature close by the hangman’s noose. He had lost count of the times he had seen Alice as she walked about the Old Rectory, or sat quietly on an invisible stool in the very heart of her enemy, the Church Victorious’s camp. Her face – which death had drained of all colour – always wore an expression of profound terror and about her neck was a purple scar, where the hangman’s rope had bitten her.

He had turned quickly from these painful memories to the other story, the fiction on the computer screen. One or two paragraphs were needed before the final lines he had already composed. He had forced his hands to type.

The frenetic mood, which had overtaken him at the start of the summer and remained with him, had subsided. He leaned back in the chair and took deep lungfuls of the hot and stale air. The ship vibrated as her engines turned; she stirred and trembled as no car ever could, almost alive, wanting to be under way – this most ordinary cross-Channel ferry. Sunlight slanted into his eyes and he masked them with his sunglasses.

How is it that I let myself be troubled by the past? He sank once more into yesterday, physically conscious of his hands. He remembered his initial panic at the intermittent ache: Is it a symptom of the advancing years? Must I learn to live with this neural gnawing, toothache of the tendons; appreciate it for what it is, my particular and personal infirmity, my own mnemonic for mortality – a pocket vanitas or portable skull-surmounted tomb. The escapement shudders, the sands run faster through the glass isthmus – Is it arthritis? Something worse? Incurable? The shadow that stalks us all.

Sandy’s explanation was small comfort. Three initials, RSI, encompassed and explained his ills.

In the car last night his hands had kept troubling him. He had tried to forget the pain on the motorway; to lose it in speed – always being ready for the police in their unmarked cars. It was a short stretch before ‘Christminster’ flashed up its exit number and he fled around the intersection roundabouts and drove more sedately along the Badbury Road.

That way, you missed the dreaming spires. Unless? God damn his habit of turning every thought inside out to discover its psychic symbolism. But fucking Sandy was easy: she gave as good as she got; and he had been in need. He parked the Audi behind her Escort and opened the garden gate. There were shadows on the kitchen blind and he was about to put his key in the lock when a peal of female laughter from the open window made him cautious. He rang the bell: Dr A.F. Mayhew – my literate sex therapist, my sensual D Litt, he thought, and smiled.

His mistress, merry and flushed, opened the door.

‘Guy! Good heavens!’ she said. ‘It isn’t Tuesday is it?’

‘Jesus Christ, Sandy,’ he said, irritably. ‘I’m not a dental appointment. And it’s Monday.’

‘Well, what do you want to do? I’ve a kitchen full of summer students – my American ladies. We’ve just opened a few bottles.’

‘I want to come in,’ he said, and did so. ‘Next, I want –’ He kissed her.

‘I don’t suppose they’ll miss me for a while,’ she said. ‘Mary’s showing them the video.’

‘Not blue movies in the suburbs!’

‘Really, Guy. It’s a record of their stay. They leave tomorrow.’

Sandy’s waspish mood began to fail her. Guy was stroking as much of her as he could reach, in the narrow hall.

They went up to the bedroom. The worn teddy which Sandy kept on her pillow annoyed him: a dumb and idiotic rival – which had been in bed with her many more times than he. He shoved it and it fell on the floor.

‘You brute,’ said Sandy. ‘Aah, mmm.’ Afterwards, he told her he was on his way to Dover, to the ferry. ‘“Prelude”,’ she said, ‘That’s what I like – as if you didn’t know.’ She got up and he slept. In the morning, she was there again beside him, ready to hit the button of the alarm before it shrilled.

‘Six fifteen, my God,’ she said, yawning. ‘I didn’t get rid of them until two. You’ve had a fine sleep, anyway.’

‘I needed it. I’ve been working hard. Ow!’

He massaged his hands.

‘What is it?’

‘They ache. It’s worst when I wake.’

‘Poor chap! Have you been using your PC a lot?’

‘I don’t write in longhand!’

‘That’s what it is, then. RSI, Repetitive Strain Injury – like a sports injury. You’ve over-strained the tendons. The holiday will help – unless you start using the laptop.’

‘I didn’t bring it, just paper and pens. I might do some real writing, in my own hand.’

‘Instead of Times?’

‘New York actually. In the early days I did write everything in longhand. Then I typed it. It was the only way I could make sense of myself.’

‘Unbelievable,’ she said. She was a lot younger than he and knew him only as a best-selling phenomenon, comfortably placed, and comfortably off – once, he had driven her through Maidford Halse, the Hantonshire village he had lived in for nearly thirty years, and she had glimpsed his house, bulky and solid with accrued respectability, across shady lawns.

‘I won the Christminster Prize for my first novel, Jack’s Tank – the story of a National Service recruit. It’s out of print now –’

‘I didn’t know – never guessed. What happened? What turned you into a Fantasisr?’

‘Sex,’ he said, and she laughed, but with some puzzlement. ‘A mortgage and a growing family – as you’ll find out yourself one day, when I’m history – or experience.’

Telling this white lie was easier than attempting the convoluted tale of his past misdemeanours and haunting loves.

‘Couldn’t you have gone on with the serious stuff as well as the Mythologies?’

‘Authors of Eng Lit are supremely selfish,’ he told her. ‘Successful pulp novelists can afford to be generous to their families, and their mistresses into the bargain. Look at you: what paid for your abortion and the weekend at Le Manoir afterwards?’

‘Koschei’s Envy, I suppose. That was the last, wasn’t it?’

‘I finished The Making of Koschei before I drove here last night.’

Sandy looked into his face.

‘Does it matter what tale you tell,’ she said, ‘as long as you have the power to overwhelm your reader’s senses and hold him in your grip – for as long as the story lasts?’

‘In theory, no; in terms of monetary reward, yes. Tell me, Sandy, do you give your students in-bed tutorials? Must I write a dissertation before I get my oats?’

He embraced and fucked her vigorously, quite certain that he demonstrated much more ardour and skill than a younger man; lay relaxed and satisfied across her and played with wisps of her titian hair (the colour was natural, unlike his wife’s).

‘You should get some Chinese balls,’ she said, dreamily.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Her comment startled him. He was not sure if she was joking, or criticizing his performance in some obscure female way.

‘Chain of thought,’ said Sandy. ‘Like these, look.’ She leaned from the bed and took from the bookshelf a small, cloth-covered box which she opened to disclose two silver balls resting on red velvet. ‘They keep your fingers supple, a kind of physiotherapy. Like this: roll them about on the flats of your hands. Might help your aches. Avis Dane swears by them. She’s a pianist and she uses hers every day to exercise her hands.’

The balls rang softly as they travelled round her outstretched palms.

‘Bells too!’ said Guy. ‘Very dubious, one of these pseudo-scientific cures. I bet it has its origins in magic – or is an urban myth, like the Child Who Was Kidnapped At Disneyland, or the Phantom Hitch-hiker.’

He tried to imitate her, bending and tilting his hands so that the balls rotated. It was hopeless. One after the other they slid off and landed with dull chimes on the bed.

‘There’s a lot of alternative medicine about – it works, too,’ said Sandy doggedly. ‘I take evening primrose oil for PMT. I suppose it’s a New Age thing – but real enough, not gypsy stuff.’

‘I used to know a gypsy well,’ he said, half to himself.

‘Mm?’

Unwise to tell; and again, too complicated. Besides, he was sleepy.

‘Oh, nothing, thinking ahead,’ he said, pulling Sandy down beside him. She was warm; she was short and tucked neatly inside his embrace, like his wife – but was without Jilly’s middle-aged creases and sags, smooth, taut-limbed. Poor Jilly, away in the States being mauled by art-lovers. Her carvings were more exciting than she, these days – shouldn’t have had another child, so late. Could he remember Helen’s body? She had been – what? Years ago. Perfection, exact of proportion, well-endowed by Dame Nature or by one of those dead mother-goddesses she’d revered. He was on his way to see her. Possibly. And Dominic, their son. He slept and dreamed of a boy and a man, who both looked like himself; they fished in a bran tub and caught Christmas tree baubles and silver bells. Then he had to run: something huge and clanking rushed past him – he had to catch a train! He had to catch up with someone! ‘Helen! Wait for meeee!’ he cried, but his mouth was sewn shut with black thread. He jumped awake.

‘– time?’ he asked.

‘Seven.’

‘I’ll never catch that ferry now.’

‘Yes you will. You still have four hours.’

Sandy, in her dressing gown, made breakfast for them. It was her kind of breakfast with yoghurt, muesli and freshly squeezed juice; usually, he delighted in the differences between her way of life and his own. Today, they irritated him. That Garfield poster above the fridge. Why on earth? – she was a bright girl. They had said goodbye lightly, and left a great deal unsaid.

Coming to, he saw his fellow passengers about him, heard their incessant chatter and the magnified voices booming from the television overhead. He sat upright to massage his hands, imagining the strained tendons chafing in their narrow sockets. RSI. What a bugger, what a hollow laugh: he had a fashionable complaint. Last night he had needed sex; now he needed a drink.

Guy Kester Parados, author (BA Christminster, Caster Cathedral School and Fawley College, born Alfrick-on-Severn 1941, married Jillian Meddowes, sculptor, 1962, six legitimate children and four illegitimate excluding two abortions and one miscarriage), went to the Camargue Lounge. Under his left arm he carried a copy of the Independent and two books, A Year in Provence and the first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu. He wore jeans and an Armani tee-shirt. A linen jacket was slung across his shoulder. He was about six feet tall, with thick grey hair, grey or blue eyes, and was clean-shaven. He might have been any age between forty and fifty, although he was two months short of his forty-ninth birthday. He had no peculiar distinguishing marks and kept himself fit by playing cricket and by taking long country walks; had, in any case, no hereditary tendency to fat.

He experienced some difficulty with the number of objects he carried and resolved his problem by stacking the books and paper on the bar while he removed his RayBan sunglasses. He ordered a pint of Theakston’s Ale. When it was served, he took it to a table by a window and nursed his glass. After putting on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, which gave him a bookish air and made him look suddenly older, he opened the paper and read steadily, scanning the headlines first before turning back to peruse the articles in detail. Occasionally, he took a drink from his glass. He looked up once to stare at a blonde girl who sat at a nearby table, shook his head and read on; again looked up, at the mural on the opposite wall of ibis making piebald patterns against a landscape of fluid sky and marshland.

‘I began building the year the Sacred Ibis left the marsh. The foundations were soon dug and the footings laid. It was, after all, a small building. Many years passed before my spiritual troubles began, coinciding with the first extensions.

‘A new building for a new decade (my third). I was full of hope and my plans for the future excited me almost as much as the architectural drawings themselves; and far more than the white hands which, joined in prayer and resting on the sill of the confessional, were all I could see of Nemione Sophronia Baldwin, the youngest daughter of the reeve.

‘I had almost resolved to leave the Order. Strict observance of the Rule was very hard for a young man of twenty who could control neither himself nor his dreams, which were of an explicitly sexual nature. Yet Nemione’s self-sacrificing patience was an object lesson to me. Though I was tempted to abjure my vows and join myself to a battalion of the Brotherhood of the Green Wolf, I resolved to remain at Espmoss for two more years of study and then take what came. My courage was not of a high order. My disordered infancy followed by a childhood spent learning the Rule had made fear a close companion. I had often been whipped, at school by the proctor, Baptist Olburn, and in the cloister by Brother Fox, the Disciplinarian. The contemplation of freedom seemed sin enough.

‘We were free in all other respects. That I was allowed to begin this building (now such a remarkable edifice, as you see!) demonstrates how liberal was the Rule toward ambition. I had successfully completed my years as altar boy and novice: my building and the beautiful drawings of it were a kind of reward. The lodge (it was too small in those days to be called a palace) would contain both past and present, that much was obvious but, before I laid one stone, I had a tantalizing decision to make: should I now commence to erect the walls – they were to be of the finest white marble – or should I forsake the dark footings while I designed and planted the gardens?

‘The reeve’s daughter wore a gold chain about her slender neck. A small gold cross hung from it, one of the symbols of our faith. The four arms of the cross represent the points of the compass, north, south, east and west, and thus, our world, both material and spiritual. The device also represents the many cross-roads which we will find ourselves paused at, during life, while we ponder a vital decision: which direction to take now?

‘I had come to such a node myself or, if the metaphor may be laboured a little more, stood simultaneously at two. I had chosen to ignore the one; the dilemma of the other, smaller problem, lodge or garden, I solved in an ingenious way: I would attempt both tasks at once, devoting the cool mornings to the garden and the afternoons, which the sun made warm and pleasant, to the building. I determined to plant the equivalent of Nemione’s cross, our life, in my garden, and make it the basis of my design. This was difficult. Perhaps if I sited the building at the centre of the cross … but that precluded all additions. I might construct the cross-design in one’ quarter of the whole – such exquisite and nice considerations! The extensive gardens should both begin and complete my pleasure. The forbidden word again; it haunted me. A Green Wolf has every opportunity – is master of himself and of all the worldly delights I forbade myself. A Wolf would not linger in the cloister, hoping to catch a glimpse of Nemione. He would stride out to look for her.

‘I wanted to make nothing less than a shrine in which every object, animate or not, made spiritual sense. This is the reason for the incompleteness of the “wilderness” walks. They should be creations of artifice but I could not exclude such intruders as the wild rose and the coconut-scented gorse, nor these fine thistles and docks – and why waste genuine sports? I am even now too ambitious; and still too lazy to achieve all my ambitions.

‘Notwithstanding these outside imperfections, the interior of the building is, as you will see, in perfect order. We will climb the staircase (genuine porphyry – but mind the broken step!) and enter by the brazen doors which, yes, resemble more than a little the Gates of Paradise.’

The old man took a key from the leather wallet he wore on his sword belt, fitted it to the lock and turned it.

‘I love to entertain my visitors (few enough) with such speeches,’ he said. ‘They are props to the ailing structures of my mind. As for the palace – here it is. I cannot escape from it. It has swallowed me whole, mind and body, hates and loves, possessions, beliefs, gold – that which glisters and is my fool’s reward and grail attained.

‘Since I am the one you never forget, it will be easier if I show you round. I’ll make you regret your memories of me! The grand tour I think, the one that takes in all the sights, leaves not a stone unturned. I do not have the resilience of some, not now. I lack the boldness of those outside.

‘Here we are. I’ll close the door – it lets in too much light, and also dirt, from outside. This is the chamber in which I was born. You must begin at the beginning, you see, if you are to make sense of my memory palace.’

His guest craned his head forward as he tried to distinguish from the general gloom the heavy pieces of furniture with which the room was furnished.

‘Could we have a little light?’ he asked.

‘A glimmer!’ His guide struck a match and lit a small bull’s-eye lantern. But even with this it was hard to make anything out – the furniture seemed very big and also far away, the sort of dim and massive wooden giants he remembered from early childhood, of bottomless chests, cavernous wardrobes and tables as big as houses. He stepped gingerly forward.

There was a bed. The covers were partly thrown back, white sheets, blue blankets and a patchwork quilt. He might just about manage to climb up. His teddy bear lay on the quilt; the smell was right – Castile soap and eau de Cologne, a faint overlay of sweat.

‘Mummy?’ he said and heard the dry laugh of the old man with the lantern.

‘Sorry, young man. I cannot preserve your memories.’

‘But this is my mother’s bed; where I was born, not you.’

The old man laughed again.

‘That remains to be seen,’ he said. ‘The case as yet is unproven.’

Guy read the book review in the centre pages of his newspaper. It spoke highly of a new biography of the Jesuit priest and scholar of Chinese, Matteo Ricci, who in the sixteenth century had invented a mnemonic system which used an imaginary building, such as a palace, and its furnishings as an aid to memorizing (for example) tenets of the Catholic faith. When published for his Chinese patron, Ricci’s method attracted many converts: the memory palace was open to guests, who used its courts and statuary to understand the new faith. Guy shivered. This kind of thing happened all too often: he devised a fictional description or idea and, a few days later, read of it in the newspaper or heard someone describe it on the radio.

He re-read the article, his imagination caught and held by his parallel idea of a building full of memories, a cenotaph of reality as phantom-like as memory itself, and then, remembering he was on holiday, he turned to the sports pages. He read the breakdown of the cricket scores and forgot them immediately. The last lines of an old story came to mind: ‘“Damn you,’” she scrawled across the parchment, “you sucking incubus, you salivating fiend from the abyss, you who have stolen my voice and left me with shadows; left me nothing but a dark palace peopled with ghosts and my fantasies.’”

The words sank beneath the troubled surface of his mind. He looked out of the windows: these huge sheets of glass could not be described as portholes, nor anything nautical, and belonged to the holiday fantasy. The sea was calm and sunlit; the busy Channel, on which the traffic moved as steadily as on the motorway, had a peaceful, purposeful air. He enjoyed being at sea and let his gaze wander over the other holidaymakers in the room. The girl had gone, it was mostly families – someone had left a hat on a nearby chair, a familiar, frayed straw with a wide brim and a loose band of white chiffon. He remembered where he had seen it: by the Congo, the Amazon, the Nile, the Ganges – all on TV; and by the Thames when its owner, Etta Travis, had leaned on the Embankment wall beside him. After somebody’s party. They had talked about the river below them; what treasures, such as the Battersea Shield, it had given up; what might remain concealed beneath the succulent mud. Then Etta had run suddenly after a taxi, hailing it with her hat; and she and the famous hat had been whisked away into the summer night.

Etta was approaching him from the bar, a glass of wine in her hand.

‘Guy!’ She had a pleasant voice, was pleasant altogether and feminine, always dressed in skirts, never trousers, even in the remotest outback, jungle or prairie, her habitat so much more than the streets of London. They were long skirts of gauzy Indian material; indigenous peoples respected her because of them, she maintained. Yet, if her style had not been so well-known, such dress would have been anachronistic here amongst the garish shorts and jingoistic tee-shirts of the other passengers.

She retrieved her hat and sat down beside him.

‘This is a prosaic way to begin an adventure,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘I’m on holiday – on my way to a cousin in Tuscany. Yourself?’

‘Likewise. Just drifting. Jilly’s in New York – exhibition.’

‘I saw it in The Times. What beautiful work! I must buy some for myself before it all disappears into the mansions of the seriously rich!’

They continued to make small talk. He was disappointed in her: an anthropologist who travelled the world as she did should be incapable of such chit-chat. He wanted her to tell him tales of centaurs, mermen and sirens, long yarns of her perils amongst the anthropophagi; to fulfil the fantasies he, and her viewing and reading public, had of her wading through crocodile-infested rivers, smoking with head-hunters, chewing coca high in the Andes – and always commentating, telling everyone what, why and wherefore. In exchange he wanted to tell her of the places he knew well, those way beyond her wide experience, those she – however determined she was, however much she desired to explore them – might only visit by proxy in his storyteller’s magic shoes: the eternal forests, endless plains and everlasting cities of Malthassa. She met extraordinary characters, he created them; he explored an internal world, but hers was external and bounded by space and time, by the present and only time she could experience: this crowded bar, these inane, sentimental, holiday-making Brits.

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, this is a slow old way to reach Italy,’ he remarked. ‘I should fly.’

‘My car’s down below. I shall take a few days over it, drive south, maybe east into Switzerland, drop down Europe that way –’

‘No undiscovered peoples?’

‘Europe gave up her secrets long ago. Excuse me now –’ She drained her glass. ‘Or will you join me for lunch?’

‘I’ll wait until I can get some French cooking.’

‘It’s habit with me: eat what’s available in case there isn’t any more. Goodbye, Guy – nice to see you again. Bonne chance!’

‘Bonne route!’

The interlude with Etta Travis had made him restless. He gathered his books together: perhaps he should buy something for his son – but what kind of boy was Dominic? What were his tastes? Should he buy some small gift for Helen? He made his way through the crowds, towards the duty-free shop.

The reception area near the shop was thronged; he had not realized before how busy the ship was. Lots of people, mostly young backpackers, sitting on the floor; some seasickness cases lying flat. Someone should clear a passage: what if there was an emergency? He was stepping over and amongst the bodies when his gaze, always quick to interpret the printed word, was arrested. One of the poor sailors had fallen asleep with a book open in her hand. He could just about make out five words at the page-heads: Lèni la Soie and Evil Life. He knew something of Lèni, Silk Lèni, poor French silk worker, prostitute and accomplice of a psychopathic priest beheaded (for that, call it what you will, ‘guillotined’ or, dully, ‘executed’, was what had been done to him) in Lyon in 1884. Helen Lacey had kept the original of Lèni’s diary in her gaudy gypsy van; presumably had it still, unless it had been consumed in the fire. The acrid smell had filled his lungs and filtered into every one of his garments, remaining there for weeks, a distillation which evoked the heap of smouldering ash which was all that remained of the van and its ornate fittings.

The sleeper stirred. Now he must notice her whom he, on holiday to escape his personal Furies, had tried to ignore: the blonde girl in baggy-kneed leggings and loose shirt; the girl, of no more than sixteen or seventeen years, who was so naively beautiful.

The book – the god-forsaken book! It had slithered to the floor and closed. He could read the words, printed over the drawing of a guillotine blade, on the cover:

THE EVIL LIFE OF SILK LENI CURSED BY HER BEAUTY, CONDEMNED BY HER APPETITES, LENI WAS DAMNED

There was a conspiracy. Some devilish conjunction of memories and events was following after him, was there before he had time to think or act. This girl, whom he had noticed drinking lager in the bar, was like the one he’d given a lift to, or thought he had: the mute (for she still slept) expression of some kind of prevision or hallucination, a being he had brought into life by thinking. She looked like ghostly Alice Naylor.

Nonsense! A daydream, a girl, a book he should have known about. These added up to nothing more sinister than coincidence – and perhaps it was stupid to try to combine a restful holiday with a visit to his one-time lover and their son.

A little regretful because he wanted to steal the girl’s book and read it at once, he made a mental note to buy a copy when he got home, stepped clear and paused to look back. The girl was stretching, her regular Quattrecento angel’s lips drawn back, her mouth open in a wide yawn. He reached into his pocket and extracted his sunglasses; put them on. Now invisible in his disguise as an older but fashion-conscious and confident man he entered the duty-free perfumery, where he was again confronted by the id-Sandy, black jacket open, scarlet, lacquered nails closed eloquently about her conductor’s baton: a symbolic prelude indeed! Now Helen’s favourite perfume – would he find that here? He remembered its name perfectly: ‘Sortilège’ – Spell.

The car ferry Spirit of Adventure passed easily through the crowded waters of English Channel. Her wide decks were dazzling in the sunlight, her red, white and blue logo and liveries placed and labelled her; she came to Calais, if not precisely in peace, at least in the certainty of commerce.

Most of the vehicles that clanged off her car decks were family conveyances, big, new, shiny – but crammed with luggage, children and their toys. Henrietta Travis drove a small Peugot and was alone. She glimpsed Guy’s flash red car behind her and smiled. He would be taking the autoroute, eating up kilometres and fuel while she, on routes nationales and by-ways, headed for Alsace – or the Franche-Comté. She would take the road for Reims, make no firm decision yet. The sun still shone, hours before dark – but now, there was a delay, one of those inexplicable stoppages common to all traffic queues. After ten or fifteen minutes, they began to move again and soon were rolling past the barriers. No one stopped Etta.

At the ferryport gate the usual cluster of hitch-hikers waited. Etta stopped her car beside a pale-faced girl whose choker of black velvet only emphasised her pallor. She looked sick and bewildered.

‘Are you all right?’

‘It’s just the sea: I travel better by air.’

‘Want a lift?’

‘Paris? The AI?’

‘I’m going to Reims, but I can drop you near Cambrai. There’s an intersection: you ought to get a lift south there.’

‘OK.’

The girl got into the car. She was very slim and very young, Etta noticed; but clearly an experienced traveller. Etta had started travelling in such a way herself, made no judgements and asked no questions. They talked about holidays and clothes.

Guy was relieved to be back in the Audi. While he waited in the queue, he re-read Dominic’s letter to verify his destination: ‘Coeurville, Burgundy’, that was all. When he reached the town – or village – he would have to ask. He hoped it was a small place.

The official at the passport control barrier, who had been busily waving cars on, signalled him to stop. He took a cursory glance at both versions of Guy’s face, grinned and said,

‘My wife reads your books, Monsieur Parados, the translations. There is money in books? I shall tell her you come to France in your beautiful Audi – “Vorsprung durch Technik”, Monsieur! Good holidays!’

Guy smiled vaguely, and drove on. Even the grey bypasses of Calais looked welcoming in the sun, which shone as fiercely as it had on the English side of the Channel; but he did not linger. Calais must always be a place to leave.

The car went faster in kilometres, 180; reading this speed and its mph equivalent on the dial, he had to remind himself that both were illegal. At three o’clock he pulled into a service station and bought coffee and pain au chocolat – a childish pleasure this. Though you could buy the stuff at home these days it was a quintessentially French delight. Who else would think of enfolding dark chocolate in flaky yeast pastry and serving it as a snack?

He walked back to the parking area. He was clear-headed now and relaxed, the pain had left his hands: it had been a result of tension, nothing more – and damn Sandy’s theories and her odd Chinese therapy. After a bad start, the holiday had begun. Before he started the car, he made sure of his route, AI, Périphérique, A6, and chose a CD to begin with. Phaedra was suggestive of continuous speed and a longed-for destination.

He turned the key, signalled, glanced in the right-hand mirror, began to drive away and glanced again: a girl, the girl, was there, a little way behind him, walking on the grassed reservation in the centre of the car park. Ghosts did not behave like that. He stopped the car and touched a button: the window beside him glided down and he looked out.

She was exquisite, striding out; untouched like a painted icon or a very young child. An orange backpack hung from her right shoulder. He, to her, was old; but he would presume, confident now that he was sure of his priorities and certain that the holiday had begun.

‘Do you need a lift?’ he called.

That was all he was offering, for God’s sake.

She looked up, located him. Her voice came clearly to him.

‘Please!’

She was running, her breasts lifting her shirt as she moved, her backpack bumping against her shoulder; she was beside him. Her face, as she looked at him, was innocent and he was relieved to see that it differed from that other in his memory, the sly and shy face of the dead witch, Alice Naylor; and disturbed again to see that she wore a black velvet choker fastened tight around her long, white neck.

‘Get in, then,’ he said, committed. ‘Here, let me take that.’

She was there, in his car; seated beside him. Her leggings were marked with dust and her shirt had a coffee stain on it, but she had recently combed out her hair and smelled of the soap in the restaurant toilets.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Hello. Which way do you want to go?’

‘Oh, quickly, quickly: what a lovely car. Are you famous or something? It’s called “GUY 5”’

‘I am Guy. It’s my fifth Audi. I am going past Paris and down the A6 toward Auxerre. Is that any good?’

‘Who cares? – yes. I have to be in Lyon by Friday: Dad’s picking me up.’

‘He’s already on holiday?’

‘He lives in France. He and Mum are divorced – she’s in Eilat with her toy boy.’

‘I see.’ A prematurely old, wise child; and made so by the behaviour of her parents, he thought.

He drove, and she talked. She made this journey several times a year, she said, from her Kent school to her father’s house near Lyon. Of course, she was meant to fly (Dad sent the air fare every time) but she, although hopeless on a ship, preferred to take the ferry and hitch. No one ever checked, neither the school nor her father – and it would be easy to invent a likely story. She spent the money on clothes and CDs.

‘What CDs have you got?’ she asked. ‘Here?’ and rummaged through the stack.

‘You’re an old hippy, like Dad,’ she remarked. ‘Did you know that Phaedra hanged herself?’

‘Yes,’ he said, but he was thinking, the association no doubt triggered by the music and her remark, that she was about the age of his eldest daughter, Phoebe.

‘She fell in love with her stepson, who rejected her. Then she hanged herself,’ he said.

‘Do you have any children?’ the girl asked.

‘Yes.’ He thought, Gregory is twenty-two and married, with a baby daughter; Daniel is seventeen; Phoebe sixteen; Ellen fourteen; Grace eleven; Ben six. ‘They’re on holiday.’

‘They?’

‘’Fraid so.’

Dominic was sixteen too.

‘I’m going to visit one of them,’ he offered.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said and suddenly and lightly touched his knee. ‘I have – um – four half-brothers. One of them is black.’

‘Oh?’ She had removed her hand but left a sweet and subtle disturbance with him, of both body and mind.

‘Who are you, then?’ she enquired. ‘Guy –?’

‘I write,’ he told her. ‘I expect you’ve seen my books – the Malthassa series, the New Mythologies.’

‘Really? You’re Guy Parados. We did Malthassa for GCSE.’

‘Jesus Christ! That’s recommended reading? I’d no idea.’

‘You should be pleased: all those teenagers reading about sex and magic, though they cut most of the sex out of the school version. I bought my own copy and read the whole thing.’

He felt his past experience propelling him, as surely as the car. His right foot, sympathetic, bore down and the car’s acceleration blurred the green fields of France. The girl drew in her breath and, expelling it gustily in the word, exclaimed ‘Wow!’

‘And your name?’ he asked, lightly holding the car on course. ‘Alice, Alice Tyler.’

He misheard her, wilfully or by that psychic trick which turns what is heard into what is desired. Distant memories called him with soft and echoing voices.

‘Alice,’ he said, ‘Alice Naylor?’

‘Not “Naylor”: “Tyler” – T for Tommy. And I’m usually Allie.’

The bright world of the autoroute, its unfolding, motionless ribbon and his speed held him in their turn.

‘Oh, no,’ he said, and grimaced; then smiled. ‘You are not an Allie, you are most definitely an Alice.’

‘Who’s Alice Naylor? Your girlfriend?’

‘Alice,’ he told her, ‘is someone I read about.’ (He could not say ‘know’) ‘She died a long time ago, in 1705. She is buried in my village.’

He drove on through the Vallée de I’Oise while the girl chattered. Sometimes he had the illusion that he was driving his eldest daughter; Phoebe had picked up the same vapid talk and culture from her friends. He watched the road, as he must, and noticed the traffic on it which, lighter than that of England though it was, had still a good variety of vehicles. There were obvious differences, more Mercedes and Renaults, no Vauxhalls, and, while he wondered what had become of the motorists from the ferry, they passed a little clutch of British cars. No salaried holidaymakers in these, a Rolls and a new Jag, two big Rovers. Then came three British lorries, giant kith and kin of the European trucks he had passed on the M25. The road signs looked international. How long, he wondered, before the cultures merge? This is Europe, not France. Individuality is disappearing.

Alice spoke,

‘The secret places have gone – the deep tree-filled coigns, the lazy rivers and grassy banks, the unexpected flower-studded meadows,’ she said. ‘This is all there is – motorway, bridge after bridge after bridge. Europe has shrunk.’

‘What?’ He was annoyed – no, just mildly disturbed – to hear her speaking in such an adult and authoritative voice.

‘You were thinking how much things have changed, weren’t you?’ she replied. ‘Don’t worry. The perilous places still exist – they’ve just moved over a bit. In a sense, they are even further from ordinary people than they were before, they are so hard to reach. But a storyteller can find them.’

He glanced at her and while he thought, so briefly, that her mix of semi-adult profundity and teenage chat would be odd if it were not so engaging, noticed only that her expression was demure and that her hands were folded, not in her lap as they would be if she wore a skirt, but because of the encasing leggings, against her groin.

Rain surprised them as they passed through a national park. He read its name aloud, from the sign: ‘Pare Jean-Jacques Rousseau.’

‘I wonder where the noble savages live now,’ he said, half to himself. ‘Perhaps Etta knows.’

‘There?’ he wondered, as Alice waved to a group of bikers.

‘They’re giving us the V-sign,’ she said.

‘We’re going faster than they can.’

‘No. Like Churchill not “up yours” – aren’t there noble savages in Malthassa?’

He frowned. The world he had created in his mind had grown so vast, he sometimes had trouble remembering all of it. It had got away from him, he felt, and was trying to live on its own. The frown helped him grasp and hold it.

‘No,’ he said. ‘There are only the Ima and they are neither noble nor savage.’

Then they were entering the choked sprawl that is outer Paris and were caught in a crowd of traffic as dense and wild as any London jam. It moved erratically but always at high speed and he had neither time nor attention for Rousseau’s philosophy.

‘Look out for the signs which say “Lyon”,’ he snapped. ‘No, don’t talk.’

‘OK, OK.’

His hands involuntarily tightened on the wheel and a painful spasm passed through them. He felt a waterfall of sweat run down his back, despite the air conditioning. No wonder: the heat. The signs above the road shimmered with it and he read the ambient temperature on one, 28C; checked it against the readout in the car. As he looked at it, the 8 became a 9. Alice had found the bottle of water he kept in the car and she undid and passed it him without comment.

Nemione Baldwin knelt to dip water from the river. She lowered the brass cup into the current and held it steady there, so that the water which filled it flowed with the stream.

‘Thank you, nivasha,’ she said, and spilled a few drops of water on the ground. I leaned forward anxiously to look into the water but could see nothing there except the stones of the river bed. Should I have seen the nivasha lying on her underwater bed of green weed or, worse, swimming towards me, I would have been mortally afraid – and eternally curious, filled with the same desire for change and danger that makes men climb mountains or trek into the forest’s infinity. Nemione handed me the brimming cup and I drank gratefully.

She had changed a great deal; but no more, I suppose, than I. Her loose, maiden tresses were gone. The fair, almost white hair was braided and looped about her ears and pinned in elaborate merlons high on her head – that was how it looked to a military man. She wore a long gown of green stuff, open from the waist down to show white petticoats. There were rings on her fingers and jewels at her throat and in her ears.

But in all this elaborate show there was no hint of seduction or carnality. The gold cross of our Order hung chastely amongst her trinkets.

As for myself, the reflection in the slower water at the riverbank showed a dark and travel-weary face above a dented cuirass from which the embossed wolf’s head had all but worn away.

‘So you became a licensed outlaw,’ said Nemione.

‘And you a lovely and fashionable lady!’

She laughed – the sound was richer than it had been when it echoed in the cloister – but it suggested wit and a keen mind, rather than woman’s art.

‘What gallantry! Who would have thought that silent Koschei Corbillion would grow into such a cavalier?’

She drew a fan from her pocket and flicked it open; put it to her face and looked at me over its rim. Her eyes were the colour of male sapphires, or the Septrential Ocean, and they matched the blue eyes painted on the fan. She flicked the fan which subtly and rapidly was changed, becoming a thing of grey estridge feathers, then a froth of rose and white blossom; again, and it was as green as her skirts, a simple chusan leaf.

‘Perhaps not “My Lady”, but Prestidigitator,’ I said.

Nemione shook her head.

‘That is for gypsies and mountebanks.’

‘Then … Sorceress?’

‘For the time being let us agree on Prentice.’

She touched the leaf and folded it away like a fan.

‘You, Sir Koschei, Wolf’s Brother,’ she continued, teasing me. ‘Are you in search of your fortune, or a pretty wife perhaps?’

‘I have left one war to journey to another,’ I told her. ‘That’s the truth of it. My apprenticeship will be as long and as hard as yours.’

‘But fighting only lays waste to the body!’

‘Not true. It saps the spirit just as well.’

‘But you are young, and strong enough for it. How long is it since you left our Order?’

‘Two years this day week.’

‘Then I left it only days after you.’

A breeze came rustling through the forest and stirred her fortress of hair and her finery. She sighed and tapped one foot on the stones by the river.

‘I would travel more simply,’ she said, ‘but I thought this frippery a good disguise – the peasants will do anything for a high-born lady. Did you see my dwarf as you came along the track?’

‘I saw nothing but the birch trees and the birds in them – and a hind in the shadows.’

‘He is an idle knave! I sent him forward to spy out the way.’

‘Surely it is dangerous to be here, alone. What if I were more Wolf than Brother? What if I were the Duschma with her sharp nails full of poison and her ulcers festering with the pox?’

Nemione stood up straight. ‘I am in no danger,’ she said, with more than a hint of pride. ‘I may be an apprentice but –’ With a dextrous twist of her fingers she made the folded fan disappear and, in its place, a narrow tongue of flame grow. She held out her hand and invited me to touch the flame which, notwithstanding my fears, I did. It was cold.

‘Now watch!’

She tipped her hand and the flame slid down it, dropped to the ground and burned there. Soon it was licking through the grass and leaves, rapidly growing into a hazard.

‘Stop!’ I cried.

‘You are afraid, Koschei. Of a little fire? See!’

The fire collected itself together in one place and Nemione, gathering her yards of silk about her, sat down beside it and held both hands up to the blaze. At that moment also, a short and stalwart figure stepped forward out of the bushes.

‘Bravo, Mistress,’ the dwarf said, applauding her. She smiled a welcome. I realized that her abuse of him was, like her costume, an affectation, and that they were as fond of each other as mistress and servant may be.

The little fellow looked somewhat like an eft or newt in the breeding season, or like a scorpion perhaps, with a sting in his rapier. He wore a breastplate and cuisses of silvery scales, and his skin had a silvery cast too. I remembered what my mother had told me when I was a child at her knee: that a dwarf of the Altaish, though he leave his mountain home for ever, must always retain this ingrained livery, tincture of the metal he had dug and abandoned.

‘This is Erchon,’ said Nemione.

The dwarf bowed low.

‘And you, sir,’ he said, ‘do not need your armour to be recognized as a Brother.’

‘Good day, Master Scantling,’ I returned, and he bowed again, with a flourish, and walked on down the little stony beach and into the river, where he waded thigh-deep.

‘Take care!’ I shouted.

‘Peace, Wolf’s Head,’ said Erchon. ‘The nivashi cannot smell a dwarf.’ From close beneath the riverbank he lifted a fish-trap which he opened and emptied on to the bank. A mass of writhing fish, as scaly and argent as himself, fell out and the dwarf in his turn fell on them, banging their heads against a stone. Soon he had spitted them and was roasting them at the fire.

‘The trouble with this pretence,’ said Nemione, as her dwarf offered her a portion of the fish, ‘is that silks are not practical for the wayfaring life. I had better give up being a lady and turn myself into a gypsy. It will be easier that way.

‘Eat your fish, Erchon, Koschei. Do not look at me.’

The dwarf obediently turned his back on her and began to devour his fish, not bothering to separate them, flesh from bone, but eating them whole, heads, bones, tails: all. I bowed my head and used my knife on my fish, trying hard to concentrate on the food.

Yet I could not help peeping at Nemione. I saw her prepare herself for conjury with a whispered charm. Then she closed her eyes and started to strip off her jewellery. I do not mean that she unclasped and unpinned the many pieces she wore but that she touched each one and, at her touch, it vanished. I had to bite hard on a piece of fish to stop myself exclaiming. She stroked her embattled hair. At once it began to writhe, twisting about her head like a nest of vipers as it freed itself from its confinement and settled about her shoulders like some errant and lusty cloud. I had to bite my hand to stop myself crying out in fear.

Next, she began on her garments.

Perhaps the spell was a primitive one; or, more likely, she did not know enough to transform her dress with one pass. Her garments melted successively from her and left her sitting there in nothing more than a thin, white shift.

I thought, I am a Brother and I should take what is offered me. I moved my hands, putting down the fish.

‘Cheat!’ cried Nemione, opening her eyes. She glared at me.

‘You are very lucky, Brother Koschei, that I did not slay you where you sit!’

Judgement had the upper hand. I was quiet. If she could not make the unclothing spell more elegantly, I reasoned, she was unlikely to have the powers of life and death. After a moment or two had passed, when we were both calm, ‘Forgive me, Mistress Baldwin,’ I said, and bowed my head.

So I did not see what Nemione did to clothe herself again but only that, when I was allowed to look at her, she wore the red and orange garb of a Rom and a burden of brassy necklaces around her neck.

‘No more lady,’ she said.

‘You look as well in this gallimaufry,’ I said.

‘Oh, empty compliment! Now I am a dirty hedge-drab.’

‘You have the same angel’s hair.’

‘I can’t change that,’ she confessed. ‘Help me, Koschei, for old times’ sake; help me to darken my hair.’

By good fortune I had with me a bottle of the dye with which we Green Wolves used to darken our faces on moonlit nights. I took the stuff from my wallet and showed it her.

‘This may help. You must dilute it in water. Then rub it on.’

‘Perhaps if I use my comb – oh, fie! It is gone with the gown.’

It was my turn to laugh; but I only smiled gently.

‘I have a comb.’

We worked together, Erchon and I, he fetching water from the river in the brass cup, which fortunately had been left on the bank and so had not packed itself away in whatever ethereal trunk or closet the fine clothes were laid; I mixing a proportion of the dye into each cupful and combing it into Nemione’s hair with my soldier’s comb of steel. It was hard to do – not the dyeing, which worked admirably – but the combing of her gossamer hair. Never before had I stood so close to her. The only women I had touched were rough camp followers and country girls who, knowing their business with men, were greedy and sharp-tongued. Nor did their skins smell sweet as a damask rose and feel like one petal of that rose, fallen in the dewy morn.

‘Spare me,’ I whispered in her ear, so that the dwarf would not hear. ‘I am a man.’

‘Pretend we are sister and brother,’ she said. ‘As once we were, in the Cloister.’

So I finished the task. Nemione, looking into the dye-bottle exclaimed,

‘It is all gone!’

‘I shall easily get more,’ I lied. I knew that the penalty for losing any part of my kit was three month’s duty without leave and possibly a flogging at the end of a rope.

The stuff was drying in her hair, turning it as black as a night-crow’s wing. She looked as bewitching as the Queen of Spades.

‘You will soon get a gypsy lover, Mistress,’ said Erchon the dwarf.

‘Look in the river,’ I said. ‘You will see yourself how much you look the part.’

She stood there a long time, on the river’s edge, gazing at the rippling simulacrum of herself.

‘I shall journey safer when I have found a band of Rom,’ she said. She turned and looked at me.

‘What can I give you Koschei, for your patience and your dye?’

‘A little piece of yourself – to meditate on and to love.’

‘I will give you some strands of this counterfeit hair. But that is not enough. I have a long and perilous journey ahead – but I do not need Erchon any more. What gypsy lass has her own dwarf? I will lend him to you and, when I send, you must discharge him from your service.’

‘Very well.’

She pulled some long hairs from her head and gave them to me; I coiled them up and put them, wrapped in my neckcloth, in my wallet. Then she gave me Erchon, telling him to march smartly to my side and there remain, until she called.

‘Goodbye,’ she said, and turned and walked away along the track, her brave gypsy clothing bright in the shadows of the overhanging trees. She did not look back but Erchon and I watched until we could see her no more. Then, facing each other, we exchanged smart salutes before we shook hands.

‘Will she soon find company?’ I asked the dwarf. ‘Do gypsies travel in this locality?’

‘Yes, Master – and many of them at this time of the year. There is a horse fair in Vonta, fine trotters, proud pacers, sumpter horses, palfreys, vanners, destriers, barbs – what you will. And the mountain men bring their cast-off slaves to sell.’

‘Yet there is danger for Nemione.’

‘She will survive it, more than half nivasha as she is,’ the dwarf said.

‘She is the daughter of the reeve at Espmoss.’

‘But who was his mother? And who is her mother?’

‘Why does she journey?’

‘Ours not to ask, Master; nor to reason why.’ As he talked, Erchon busied himself in tidying our temporary caravanserai, and trod upon the ashes of the fire. He heard the rumble before I did, and the jingle of harness.

‘Hark!’

‘Into the trees!’

‘Too late, Brother Wolf. There is the caravan-master and he has seen us. Smile as they pass and pray they will soon overtake my lady.’

We stood aside to watch the procession of gypsies pass.

‘Look, gypsies!’ Alice exclaimed.

‘I can’t. Tell me.’

‘You can see the ripe corn. They are camped on the edge of the field. The chrome on their vans glitters in the sunlight and they have a lorry – two – and a car; there’s some washing on a line – gone now. Out of sight. What a pity gypsies gave up horses and painted vans.’

‘I knew one who lived in a vardo black as coal, and every line and carved curlicue upon it was picked out in gold and red – and a great hairy-heeled mare pulled it.’

‘Dominic’s mother?’

She must have guessed it.

‘How do you know?’

‘I read your letter when you went for a pee.’

It was the sort of thing Helen herself would have done; that this Alice had pried in his guilt did not make him angry, but irrationally fearful. She was cheeky and unpredictable, that was all, he reasoned, the child of a broken home; and he had left the letter and the postcard on the dashboard.

‘Why did Dominic send you the picture of a horse?’ Alice continued.

‘Thought you’d read my books.’

‘Not all. I suppose there is a horse like that in one of them.’

‘Right! The Ima, who live in the Plains of Malthassa, herd horses – we were talking about them earlier, when we passed the sign that said “J-J Rousseau”. The best ones belong to the Imandi, their leader, and the best one of all is the Red Horse.’

‘What colour was Helen’s horse? I can’t remember.’

Again he was disturbed. He was sure he had not revealed Helen’s name; and Dominic had not written it down. He had not told her what colour the horse was either: he was certain of that.

‘I didn’t tell you,’ he said. ‘She was brown and white – skewbald, or “coloured” in gypsy parlance. They prize pied animals highly.’

‘Half and half, like good and evil; neither one thing or another, like me,’ Alice said and then, before he could respond to this new slant upon her puzzling character, reached forward and reinforced his unsettled mood with a fresh CD.

‘You don’t have to do that each time,’ he said. ‘Put in a stack.’

‘I want this one.’

Clapton again; and the album was called Backtrackin’ – what he was at, to drive half way down France on this fool’s errand; doubly a fool for picking up this precocious waif? Well, it wasn’t so far to Auxerre, where he would drop her. She would easily find another lift there, or a room if she intended to stay overnight. He listened to the music and felt the morass of nostalgia stir and individual memories rise up like wraiths.

They had reached Burgundy and were passing a sign to Sens. The landscape was rich and rolling: you could see how lords and princes had prospered here, he thought, and built their chateaux forts and later on, when there was a kind of peace, their tree-embowered, swan-encircled chateaux set like still islands in a motionless sea, so formal were the pleasure gardens. As if to echo these thoughts, a brown road sign with a formalized chateau, turreted and neat, came into view and, beyond it, the edge of the forest which covered the hills on either side of the road. Other signs warned of deer, though a high deer fence marched with the margins of the wood.

‘They used to hunt all the time here,’ he said. ‘In the Middle Ages. In fact, Saint Thibaud loved the hunt so much that in his church, ahead of us in Joigny, he is shown on horseback, off to the chase with his dog. And Archbishop Sanglier was of course known only as “The Boar”. I wonder, was he a thickset, muscular man, a grasping priest who loved the riches which gave him the freedom to hunt? – the riches of Mother Church. There is a famous Treasury in the abbey at Sens.’

‘Wasn’t it in Sens,’ the girl said, ‘that Abélard was condemned?’

How could she know that – a history lesson at school?

‘Not for loving Héloise,’ he said, ‘but for an intellectual sin: for refusing to set limits to the activity of human reason.’

‘Reason? Peter Abélard?’

‘He was a great churchman as well as a lover. A formidable intellect! Though, it is remarkable that he did not lose his reason after he was set upon.’

‘Thinking was all he had left,’ she said. ‘Thinking of Héloise and praying.’

‘Excuse me – but you’ve studied the period in class?’

‘Oh, no. They don’t tell us young wenches about castration. ‘Taint a fit subject for a liddle gal.’

Phoebe spoke like this sometimes, putting on the accents of a yokel.

‘Oh, ah,’ he replied in kind, looked full at her and caught her watching him. He knew then he had won that joust – this time she had not fooled him into a delusion – and continued casually,

‘Burgundy is famous for happier things as well.’

‘I bet you wouldn’t say that if you lived in the Middle Ages!’

‘I don’t suppose I would. But look, here’s another reminder of hunting: a service station called L’Aire de la Biche – the Hind’s Place. Would you like a coffee?’

‘Please!’

They sat opposite each other at the table. She drank her black coffee and eagerly devoured a large slice of gâteau. This is the first time she has eaten today, he thought and asked her ‘Would you like a proper meal?’

‘Later?’ she said, the question mark riding high in her voice.

A woman was watching them with unconcealed curiosity; he had seen several men glance and he leaned back and looked at the girl as if to confirm that he saw what the others saw. She had the kind of beauty many men divorced good wives to gain, that unknown and conjectured many who would envy him, escorting her – if that was the correct term for his role in this surreal interlude.

‘Later?’ she had said. Although an interval of time had passed, he decided to reply.

‘OK. Later on.’

He saw the shape of her clearly now, both intellectual and physical, and in that moment knew that he would try to seduce her, though his conscience would attempt to save them from this pleasurable and questionable conclusion. Sandy was well into her thirties; this girl was little more than a child. He calculated. Thirty-two years separated them, at least.; but he wouldn’t be the first – there was that Stone. OK. And several Country singers. He opened the sun-roof when they were back in the car and again drove fast, breaking the speed limit. He knew, without looking, that Alice was smiling with pleasure, heard her laugh as she held down her slip-streaming hair. It was about fifty miles to Auxerre. Soon the town rose up in the hills on their right-hand side and ‘There’s the cathedral,’ Alice said.

He remembered Saint Edward’s, where he had been choirboy and chorister; another time, another country, almost another religion, his, pared down from the excesses of Catholicism. His conscience gave a feeble flutter. Polanski, it said.

‘I’ll drop you in Auxerre,’ he offered.

‘I’d rather come with you!’

She had said it, condemning him. He felt his lust recognized and justified.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you are absolutely sure.’

‘Oh, absolutely!’

A little later, when they were paused at the tollbooth, the girl laughed softly and said, ‘My father is always telling me not to accept lifts from strangers.’ He gave his daughters the same advice.

‘What can I say to that,’ he asked her, ‘without being totally flippant?’

‘You could say – “Soon, I won’t be a stranger”!’ She laughed again.

They left the autoroute and took a lesser road which followed the course of the Yonne. The signposts said ‘Avallon’. While intelligence and education told him that the name must be derived from that of a long-dead Celt, the chieftain in these wooded lands, an older and intuitive sense recalled Avalon, the island vale Arthur was carried to in death. Dusk inhabited the roadsides and waited in the trees. They passed through Lucy-le-bois. He felt heavy with fatigue and unwanted symbolism.

In Avallon, he was pleased to see, the houses were tall with open shutters laid back against stone walls; trees in the squares, flowers in troughs. A civilized place. The town was quiet, as if its citizens had already retired to bed. No one about to witness the betrayal of his conscience. Yet he drove past the big Hotel d’Etoile and parked in a narrow street. The silence of the town invaded the car. He sat still and the girl beside him did not move.

While the car, as its expanded metals cooled, made the only noises to be heard, he unfastened his seat belt and twisted in his seat until he faced her. He felt that he should make some overture or heartfelt confession which would sanctify what he proposed.

But Alice’s unfathomed sensibilities moved faster.

‘Avallon,’ she said, pronouncing the word in the English fashion.

‘Av-eye-yon.’

‘I know.’

‘Or Arcadia?’ he asked her. ‘Paradise?’

‘Paradise? Not yet – look, there’s a hotel. At the end of the street.’

He held her face in both hands and kissed her, at once wanting all of her – but ‘wait’ his noisy conscience said and he released her. She laughed loudly and, putting on a new accent, said,

‘’Ow romantic!’ She laid her head against his chest and laughed again. They both laughed, rocking in their seats, releasing their tension into the stuffy air.

‘Come on, Miss Essex,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

The dusty footpath was only wide enough for one. They walked in the road, hand-in-hand. He looked at his watch.

‘We’ll eat. First,’ he said.

The hotel restaurant was papered in red, and shabby. He read the menu quickly and, while Alice studied it, looked about him, embarrassed. He had erred. It looked the kind of place to which commercial travellers brought their pick-ups. The red paper made him think of hell, not paradise (though, conceptually, what was the difference, both asylums for different breeds of ecstatics?). The fires burned low for want of heretics and adulterers to incinerate. He peered into the gloom and made out a waitress lingering by the kitchen door. Near her, a bizarre group sat at dinner – French, a family – and he recognized the hotel proprietor who had booked them in. Perhaps the waitress was his wife? Who, then was the other middle-aged woman; who were the other women? Two sons and an idiot – correction, a boy with learning difficulties: three sons?

The waitress saw him staring and began ferociously to cut bread. She laid a long loaf on the board and brought down the guillotine blade, bang! bang! bang! He winced. She brought the bread to them and he watched it reforming its squashed self while he gave the order. Alice was mute. He chose a salad for her, lamb, pommes Lyonnaises; the wine. How bad would it be?

‘Monsieur,’ the waitress said, in mangled English. “As good flavour.’

‘“Taste”, Madame,’ he corrected stiffly.

Alice yelped and stuffed her table napkin in her mouth – but the food, despite the odd family, the wallpaper, the dust he could see griming the dado rail, after all was good. He poured a young Beaujolais. It waited in his glass, a toast to Fortune, Life and Youth. He lifted the glass. She was waiting, too, red-blooded adolescence, reciprocal sensation imprisoned in her pretty cage of flesh. She smiled at him and, from the tail of his eye, he saw the family file silently from the room.

‘Now we’re alone,’ said Alice.

‘Near enough.’

She drank.

‘Hello,’ she said.

The time came. They mounted the stairs. The same red wallpaper enhanced the gloom. A low-wattage bulb lighted the turning of the stair; they went higher and there, nearly opposite the lavatory, was their room: 18. The age of reason and responsibility.

‘How old are you?’ he said abruptly as he opened the door.

She affected not to hear. It was not a question he could repeat – not without seeming a total fool – and they passed into the room. The stark central light was on. Her rucksack stood beside his grip on a little luggage stand. The bed was turned down.

Alice spoke: ‘What a place! Wow!’ and ran to open the window.

‘It’s all right. The linen’s clean,’ he said, while realizing he had misinterpreted her words and actions. She was leaning out of the window. The light curtains billowed about her and a hot breeze shoved the musty air of the room aside.

‘We’re in the roof! It’s miles down to the street – I can see your car dozing there as if it was in its own comfy garage, not forced to spend the night outside the police station.’

‘At least no one will try to nick it.’

He too crossed the room; stood behind her. So close, he did not know what to make – of himself, nor her who continued to lean out and report on what she saw with the enthusiasm and fresh vision of minority. Questions marshalled in his mind: Why? Shall I leave – before it’s too late? Is this a legitimate adventure? A sordid romp? While he pondered, he caressed her shoulder, at last permitting his hand to journey down her supple back and gently touch her clefted buttocks in their absurdly thick tights – leggings. No pants. No bra. She must have removed those two surplus (for their purposes) garments when she went to the loo. Her breasts. Against the windowsill.

He could not think. He was entranced. But the girl left the window, brushing past him as if he was already old news. He watched her explore the room, the wardrobe with its extra blanket and pillows for those too soft to sleep comfortably on the French-style bolster, rolled in the end of the sheet; the curtained enclosure which hid the washbasin and eccentric plumbing; the two religious pictures. She undid her backpack; took out washbag, underclothes, a hairbrush, her book.

He hung his jacket on a chair and sat on the bed, his resolution fading; rolled over and looked in the bedside cabinet where, on a shelf above a chamber pot, he found a Gideon bible. That these expressions of human spirituality and grossness should be displayed in such close proximity amused him, and he laughed out loud.

‘What have you found?’

‘The bible and the pot de chambre.’

‘Is that funny?’

‘Only if we need either.’

‘I’m quite godless,’ she said, ‘and I bet you are too.’

‘I –’ he said, hesitating over the sentence (‘used to be a choirboy’? ‘was married in church’? ‘am married to a rather devout Christian’?) ‘I am undecided –’

It was an expression of his state, now, here. He stood up and switched off the light. At once, the context dissolved, the absurd conversation, the prevarication. Night was a better landscape for an amorous conjunction. There must be a moon. Her garments were luminous in the pallid light: her body would have the same lucent quality. He began to be excited: no more words. He approached her swiftly, conscious of the sweat and grime on him, the wine on his breath.

This was not what he’d imagined – champagne, a better room. Beside her he was a rampant giant and for an instant wondered: will she protest? The texture of her unshent skin made him delirious. He bent to take her offered kisses and, as he felt her warm, dry hands upon him, it occurred to him – a new horizon, a fresh Darien – that

the white beer I had consumed, following on the three ritual glasses of kumiz, was doubtless to blame – but there was no time to think further, blaming mere beverages. I had chosen carefully, deliberately; had won the only girl of the year to bear faint resemblance to Nemione Baldwin, a scrawny witch of a creature with a sweep of hair as yellow as the sheaved corn. The contest, to a renegade Wolf, had been simplicity, a matter of judgement rather than ability, some skill in aiming at the narrow target.

I waited, the corn stalks pricking my bare thighs. That I should sit here at all was accident. Tired of my journey and the prospect of more fighting, I had remained on the itinerant smith’s wagon; so, arrived in this village, a poor rat-haunted place on the very hem of the Plains, where a rash of small cornfields competed for bare unattractiveness with scorched pastures where grazed a few horses the Ima had outworn. I had known nothing of the summer festival I walked into, combined propitiation and celebration. Strangers were scarce. The old women had pounced on me and, in truth, they were like corn rats themselves, bright eyed and chattering, nipping at my arms and shoulders with little snatches and tugs. The young women had been driven (mirthful though they were) into a ruinous barn on the edge of the field. I contested with the village youths and one other unfortunate stray, a fat itinerant horse-butcher, upon a shooting-ground which resembled the Green Wolves’ butts as little as my prize did the fair novice-turned-thaumaturge.

Here she came, walking delicately in bare feet across the stubble, veiled in dirty white. As she drew nearer I saw that her bridal veil was an old flour sack.

Well, I had got myself into these curious circumstances.

It was a long time since I had had a woman.

I felt pity rather than desire; also an absurd shame which quickened when I thought that these ignoble deeds must, when they had become memories, be kept with the jewels in the memory palace. I moved the sacking aside and looked into her thin face, averting my eyes from the rest of her wasted body.

‘You need not, mistress, if I do not please you,’ I said. It was a poor attempt at the courtesies I had been taught in boyhood. But that, too, was past.

‘I must,’ she whispered. I had difficulty in understanding her dialect: ‘I want,’ was what she seemed to say.

‘Then where is our bed?’

‘Here, on the dry ground,’ she said; or was it: ‘On the fruitful earth’? – and, without more ado, she flung the sack from her and eagerly knelt upon it where it fell. I hastened to kneel with her; but I wondered, were we about to pray?

‘One thing,’ she said. ‘Before – why me?’

This, I understood, looking askance on my lower body which, independent of my intellect, had begun to prepare itself for the lovers’ contest. Was I to be kind, or cruel?

‘You remind me of the woman I love,’ I said.

‘That is a good omen,’ the girl said.

‘Is she a good woman?’ the girl said.

I lay down in a confusion of body and mind, the myriad facets of my existence dancing in the air and crowding close about me on the rough sacking. The girl also lay down. For ten beats of my heart nothing happened, but the sun beat down; then she was there, covering me, and I thought that Famine rode till she kissed me and I remembered the unsurpassed smoothness of the beer they had given me. After this, her breasts might make milk as sweet as the thick, fermented kumiz.

That was the meaning of it all: a harvest, a child.

Or a simple adventure.

Was this the real meaning behind my voluntary diversion from the journey?

Of course! A simple – and delightful – adventure of a common kind, Guy assured himself. The quarry and reward of men down the centuries. If unlike his affairs with Helen, Susan, Diana, Sandy –

Alice Naylor, her character uncovered by his researches and by her final, unremitting presence in his house, had ingenuity and invention, most alive and most alluring in his dreams where her miserable expression was transformed to laughter; where she always refused him, closed and cold at the last moment even as he tried in vain to enter her.

This other Alice had known very well what she did, where to touch and how, so that, at last expiring in her he came to the summit of the highest pass, the zenith of his ambition; after which her involuted, tender succulence was his.

He watched her sleeping with no sense of guilt. The warm night enfolded him. France herself cradled him. He hardly knew her either: a few jaunts here and there, some holidays in various situations – there was a vastness, and also an unpredictability, about her which England did not have. In a bed, in a house, in a street, in a town, in a green province, in a wide country, lies my love – He grinned to himself in the dark.

In all the building, no sound. He thought of the weary proprietor and his family; wondered where they slept. Close by? In a separate wing?

He lay and sweated, cooling as the fluids dried. A door banged. Someone passed the door – perhaps. A car, long way away. Suddenly he was in the car, driving furiously; and instantly awake. Christ, how his body ached; hard to know which bit to stretch. Must remember – more petrol, postcards, pay the bills – no, on holiday. Now he was wide awake. He stretched out and switched on the lamp beside the bed; rolled slowly back to look again at the marvellous girl.

She lay on her right side, facing away, all white, the blonde hair like straw in a sunny field or the thin filaments of flax Rumplestiltskin span into gold for the king’s daughter. Her legs and arms were graceful, long; everything, breasts, belly, buttocks, neat and under-used. He looked again at those small breasts with their pale pink nipples, touched her shoulder gently, lifted her hair. Her face in repose was delicate; did have, indeed, the features of one of Sassetta’s angels. She still wore her ribbon. The black band tight around so long and white a neck disturbed him; he was not sure if his unease was spiritual or sexual; but ‘I’m quite godless,’ she had said. Curse the inaccuracies of the English vernacular! Did she mean ‘moderately’ or ‘totally’?

He touched the velvet ribbon gently, noticing how its silken edge bit into her neck.

The curious book she’d been reading on the ferry lay there, with her bits and pieces on the chair. He got up softly to fetch it; lay down and opened its lurid cover.

‘The Evil Life of Lèni la Soie.’ Inside was a frontispiece taken from a contemporary sketch; it showed a dishevelled beauty kneeling in prayer before a crucifix. Curious, he thought, how ready we are to accuse every whore and make of her a repentant Magdalen at once attractive and repellent. He turned the pages and found a short introduction.

‘France,’ it began, ‘called La Belle. Imagine two wide rivers and a city of tall stone houses, great squares where people walk, art galleries, churches, gardens, a ruined Gallo-Roman theatre high above the city. This is Lyon today.

‘Now let us imagine another scene. It is the latter half of the nineteenth century and the houses which cover the hilly quarter of Fourvière are falling down. This is the oldest quarter and those who live here, above the city but below the site of the new basilica, are also decaying from the harshness of life, from drink, from hunger. There is so little that even the rats have moved out, away to the Croix Rousse with the whores. Some of these evil-living women are thin, some fat; some even, to cater for all tastes, very old, wrinkled, dry; some are pregnant and some are as beautiful as Aphrodite. Lèni was such a one –’

Guy stopped reading, irritated by the present tense, drama-documentary style; plagued by recollections which streamed up as unstoppably as mist from wet ground in the sun. He had never known Lèni – how could he? She was dead – like the first Alice. He had not known Lèni, but he had read her diary, all the closely written confidential pages of it and could visualize her neat letters exactly and the brown limp-covered book itself, soft leather binding worn bald. It used to live, a landmark amongst the paperbacks, on the little shelf above the bed-place in the gypsy vardo and Helen, rising from him in her resplendent nakedness, had brought it down and shown it him, revealing at the same time her inmost thoughts, for she kept her own diary in it, and also in French. Somewhat bewildered he had read there that he, Guy Parados, was un trésor and also mon amant très fort et infatigable. Schoolgirl stuff on reflection, these days. He had grinned at her and said ‘Thanks! I hope I am,’ and had asked her why she wrote in French, not Romany.

‘It’s the language of lovers, isn’t it?’ she had replied.

He remembered some of Lèni’s entries. She had, he thought, compared her priestly lover to a stallion and herself she had personified as his breakfast. She had also implied that he was stupid: quel imbécile, quel désastre! Nothing else could be retrieved – except – yes, a homily as vapid as every cliché: ‘Fortune favours fools’, in Helen’s translation; but the French was Aux innocents les mains pleines which, translated literally, meant ‘To simpletons, filled hands’. The innocent, the idiot son of the family downstairs certainly had those, clasping tight his bread and biting into its crust. Guy leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes.

‘Pleine’ had another meaning, probably several, for sense in French was, as in English, governed by context. Ah! It meant ‘complete’ or ‘whole’.

Complete hands to fools. A good hand, a complete flush. No! Nonsense. He was dozing when there was work to do. He skimmed the short introduction, noting the facts: Lèni’s lover, Father Paon (absurd name! – but how it characterized him) was the nutter, a slave to every vice and luxury and deeply involved with other Satanists of the time, in particular Olivia des Mousseaux and a second priest, Henri Renard. They were famous at the time: the decadent novelist, Huysmans, had interviewed them and it was said that their erotic practices had inspired both the Marquis de Guaita and Aleister Crowley. Paon took Lèni to live with him and abused her – yet she remained with him, loyal as a spaniel, and more, she watched him bloodily murder the girls they lured to his Black Masses. Petites rosses insaissisables, Elusive little nags: that was what she had written about the girls! Guilt and revulsion kept Guy fascinated: that this obscure Lyon seamstress whose diary he had held … But the place to which they were brought, that had not sounded like a maniac’s lair. It had another, haunting, name, un paradis inconnu.

An unknown Paradise. Death, he supposed, and the Otherworld: Heaven, Hades, Hell, Avalon, Elysium and the Land of Youth. The Isles of the Blessed. It had many names, as many as man’s fears. He read the denouement of the extraordinary tale:

‘Their own over-confidence betrays Lèni and Paon. They kidnap the daughter of a consul, a dark Mexican lovely. Respectable Lyon and the demi-monde are equally horrified but, even so, it is necessary for the arresting civil guard officers to bribe the militant Canuts or silk workers and to have their protection in order to enter the district, find and arrest the couple, and discover the horrors they have perpetrated. This is what they found:

‘The door of the apartment wide open and Paon, dressed like a dandy in silks, reclining on his ornate bed of shame, his new telephone receiver in his hand and the noise from a disconnected call the only sound. He wore a blank look and offered no resistance. In the kitchen, Paloma Diaz del Castillo lay in a welter of blood on the scrubbed deal table, horribly maimed and quite dead.

‘Paon was guillotined in Lyon in 1884 but his mistress, the beautiful devil Lèni la Soie, was never brought to justice. Helped by her silk worker friends, she had fled into her native territory, the local warren of alleyways or traboules, and there disappeared.’

He wondered how Paon had defended himself at his trial. Historic Lyon was a depository of hatred, a place in which many had been brought to book. He had visited it three years ago with his wife: for a day and a night, time enough for Jilly to spend an afternoon in the Silk Museum, for him to find and choose the best restaurant. They had left the children in England with Thérèse and were trying hard to live harmoniously together. It wasn’t a second honeymoon but they had a good holiday and went on to the Alps. In Fourvière he had explored some of the alleys or traboules with a sense of trespass, for many were gated, others obscure and damp and all along them stairways and doors led to inhabited apartments. He had found a likely restaurant and was standing contentedly in the warm afternoon sun reading the menu when, further down the narrow street, there was a flurry of cars and heavy motorbikes ridden by helmeted men.

A wide façade, cramped up against the pavement, was the back of the Palais de Justice. He had witnessed the departure from it of Klaus Barbie whom the Lyonnais were trying for his crimes against Jews and gypsies in the War. They had even found a lawyer who would defend him.

Who would, or could, defend Lèni? He began to read the narrative which was couched in her words and taken from her journal intime:

‘You, man or woman of the future time, you my Reader and my Judge, will observe that my spirit, like the traboules of the Croix Rousse, goes in as many directions as the compass needle. As for my heart, that too has its yearnings, for my father, for my lover, but most of all for the unknown paradise. I liken it to the hills beyond Fourvière in whose long shadows we lived happily before these centuries of revolution

And I am in Arcadia, he thought suddenly. What have I to do with this miserable stuff? He looked at the girl asleep beside him. Et in Arcadia ego – where, in a perfect, sylvan paradise, Death intrudes. He would wake her and comfort himself with her body.

The black ribbon was tight. He wondered, fingering its soft surface, how she could bear such tightness and he felt under her hair for a fastening. There was a bow, which he untied, and the ribbon slipped off and fell upon the bed while he, recoiling, saw the mark it had concealed, a dark ring of blemishes about her neck. Ghostly Alice wore such an ineradicable necklace, her hangman’s keepsake.

Alice Tyler opened her eyes, blinked pale lids across the blue and put both hands up to her throat.

‘You beast,’ she said.

He was not able to respond. Alice sat up. She switched on the bedside light and retrieved the ribbon. With electric light to illuminate it, the mark diminished. It was not very big.

Alice tied the ribbon and covered the mark.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘What does it look like?’

‘Horrible – I’m sorry. It reminds me –’

‘Of something nasty in one of your books – in your imagination! It’s a birthmark, stupid. Usually I cover it with make-up, but sometimes I wear the choker instead.’

‘I see.’

The girl switched off the light and lay down.

‘Go to sleep,’ she said and then, more kindly, ‘Save your energy till I wake – properly.’

A blighted angel, child of Hell scarred by the woodcarver’s chisel – but he was asleep and dreaming, miraculously able to walk on air amid the wooden seraphim which held up the roof of St Edward’s Cathedral.

Guy stood at the mirror in the curtained enclosure which held the washbasin. He lathered his face. They had ‘made love’ again though it had felt like war. Alice had clawed and bitten him, arousing him to a brutal response. He had not tried to please her, only himself. When he had finished he had looked down at her and found her gritting her teeth.

‘Hell,’ she’d said.

He had apologized and found then that he had opened a door, the way which led to her. She had wriggled and twined herself about him. More sex followed and now it was eleven o’clock. He was exhausted. He was too old.

He looked into the reflection of his own blue eyes. There were shadows there, a dark cast in each eye; his eyelids had a cynical and oriental droop. The white lather made a substantial beard and the gloom behind the curtain had taken the English pallor from his face and replaced it with darkness. Christ, he almost looked like Satwinder staring balefully across the bridge table. He blinked rapidly and shaved away stubble and the foam. The familiar wide-open eyes gazed steadily back at him.

‘Aren’t you ready yet?’ Alice, beyond the curtain, asked.

‘Almost.’ He dried his face, came out.

‘You’ve read some of the Malthassa books,’ he said. ‘What does Koschei look like – the Mage, the chief male character?’

‘Well, if you don’t know –’ she began.

‘I do. I just want you to describe him for me.’

‘OK. Um – he is very dark, hair I mean and skin. A bit Arabian, I suppose. His eyelids droop, to make him look really sinister – and he has a big scratchy beard. Yuck!’

‘You wouldn’t like to be in bed with him?’

‘No way! He’s a nasty piece of work.’

‘Is he? Is that how you read him? He began as a noble man, although a questioner. At first, he was a simple adventurer.’

Pleased by the manner in which my adventure away from the route between Tanter and the battle at Myrah Pits had ended, I sat beside the horse-butcher on his flat cart. It was our raft of oblivion and good will, both conditions induced by our astonishing sojourn in the village and by the stupendous quantities of alcohol administered to us at the end of the midsummer fest.

The cart belonged to the butcher. It had been commandeered by the villagers and used to transport the summer brides in their procession about the fields. An arch of withies had been nailed to it and this, still hung with wilted grasses and small field flowers, remained. The butcher said he might fix a tarpaulin to it, to keep off the sun. He was a slack fellow. He had promised to buy me a meal, but we never stopped at an inn.

In addition to the withered garlands and we two men, the cart carried two dead horses. These, a red and a red roan, lay quiet but nodded their heads – which hung over the tail of the cart – to the jolt of the ruts. The live horse which pulled them snorted and tossed his head to keep the flies in motion.

‘You’re a good horse,’ the butcher said and wrenched on the reins. When the cart stopped he leaped from it through the gathering cloud of flies and into the ditch, where he pissed copiously and plucked a large bunch of herbs. These, he carried to the horse’s head where, standing with legs akimbo and shirt and breeches gaping, he tucked the leafy stems into and under the straps of the bridle. He made a noise, Waahorhorhor! to the horse or in relief, scratched his belly, fastened his buttons and mounted to the driver’s seat.

‘Perhaps they would also like to be decorated,’ I dryly said.

‘Naw.’ The butcher was emphatic. ‘One bunch should do for the lot of us, dead and alive. Strong stuff.’

The flies which had made a sortie to examine the effect of the herbs rejoined their companions and helped them annoy me. But the butcher seemed impervious and soon began to sing in time with the jolting of the cart,

When I _____ was a lad

I __________ loved a lass

But she loved another

MAN

Oh

When I ______

I took off my hat and beat the air with it. The flies rose up like a whirlwind, and descended again. I, too, sang.

In this manner, we travelled some eight or ten miles. The Plains and their mean margins were behind us and I was cheered; but the forest lay before and this knowledge was death to the brief springtime of my heart. I looked at the butcher, whose flushed face was covered in beads of sweat and flies.

‘Do you not fear the forest?’ I said.

‘It is but trees. I have trees in my garden. In the forest there are many more, but they are the same things of trunks and branches.’

‘Then, do you not fear the Beautiful Ones?’

‘I have never seen a puvush.’

‘Hush! There may be one nearby. I think you are a city man who knows the stone street better then the forest track.’

‘All but a few leagues of the forest is trackless, so I have heard. But you are correct. I am a man of Pargur.’

‘Pargur!’

‘It is not quite as marvellous as they say; perhaps only half as much – perhaps half equal to your wildest dreams.’

The forest closed in as we talked. It seemed to me that puvushi might well be hiding under the forest’s canopy, green and brown as the shadows and, beside, that each rill and boggy place was the home of a nivasha. As well as these spirits, I feared the Om Ren, the Wild Man, which might lie in ambush awaiting unwary travellers; and the Duschma, she of plague and agony. I had seen her twice, once in a sleepy village where she watched our column pass and smiled horribly and, again, stalking the battlefield in search of fresh young men to feed on. My sword was blunt against such and, from past and recent experience, I knew I would not be proof against the allure (false though it is) of the earth and water spirits. Soon, I must leave this gross but, nevertheless, human horse-butcher. Ahead, the dwarf Erchon had told me, the ways parted in a wide Y and the left-hand fork went towards the town of Myrah, while the right-hand veered across a tract of forest fringe. Somewhere beyond this, the battle raged. A mighty chestnut tree grew in the cleft of the Y and under this Erchon had promised me he would wait. I should not be alone in the forest; but a dwarf is not a man. They keep their own customs. Erchon, disregarding the duty Nemione had impressed upon him, had left me for three weeks to meet his fellows at one of these arbitrary gatherings.

The chestnut trailed its leafy skirt upon the ground. Erchon was nowhere to be seen; in hiding, no doubt. He fears the forest folk as much as I, despite his boast that the nivashi cannot scent dwarves, I thought. I said goodbye to the butcher, his raggedy, weed-bedizened cart, his dead horses and the flies.