SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (11 page)

Trasker MBE gave Henry a look of severely disapproving incomprehension.

'It would have to hang in my study. Then it wouldn't need to bother you, would it dear?'

Awful lot of money for something that's only ever going to hang on the wall of your study.

Henry was in a dilemma. He badly wanted to get back to his wine, but couldn't really go and get it without offering his potential clients one as well. He also needed to sell that painting. He decided on a strategy.

'Can I offer you both some red wine? Sadly, it's pretty ropey stuff. Cheap French plonk, but until I manage to sell one of these paintings here, I'm afraid it's all I can afford for the moment.' He hoped two birds might be slain with this one stone.

'No thank you,' said Mrs Bernard Trasker firmly. 'Very good of you, Henry. Don't mind if I do.'

As Henry went to fetch the wine, Mrs Trasker found herself listening to the music. When the gallery owner returned, she fixed her stare on him once more. He knew that stare. It was a stare that existed even when not attached to Mrs Bernard Trasker.

'He's playing the wrong notes, that piano player.'

'No,' Henry said evenly, 'he's playing the right notes. Your ears may not be accustomed to them. He is playing a lot of second intervals, where you're probably used to thirds, fifths and sevenths. But Monk himself said that there are no dissonances, only consonances we haven't got fully acquainted with yet. Schubert plays a fair number of second intervals in his
Sonata in
B
Flat Major,
but you've probably got used to them by now.

'Monk?'

'That's the piano player you're listening to. Thelonius Monk.'

'What a very odd name. Was that his real name?'

'I believe so, yes.'

'Can't imagine any of Bernie's colleagues in Whitehall with a name like that.'

'Thelonius Monk, OBE. No, it doesn't sound quite right does it?'

Be
rn
ard
was still squinting admiringly at the Nolan. He was in fact a very knowledgeable collector. Henry found it utterly baffling that he could endure living with this wife of his for more than a day. Might she have brought money to the union? Could that have been her house at the top of the hill? Or was it possible that once upon a time she had been the most amazing fuck? Henry felt that the human imagination was in the process of reaching its limits here. Her suit was immaculately tailored, and she had evidently been to the hairdresser's recently. Her hair had been dyed, and had now attained the texture of illuminated hay. It reminded him of those Knossos pizzas. Blinded minotaurs and beautiful women. The two men sipped at their wine, which wasn't all that bad, in fact. They'd both swigged worse in their time. Still, it was nothing like the
Chateau
Neuf
he'd
be returning to later.

'Tell Henry about Ludlow, Bernie,' Mrs Trasker said. Bernard was jolted from his reverie. 'Go on, tell him. You'll like this, Henry.
’

Bernard sighed, turned away from the Nolan, and proceeded.

'We'd gone down to Ludlow for the day. Even before we set off I had this pain in my thigh, but I get so many pains these days I decided to ignore it and while we walked round town, up and down the streets to the castle and what-have-you, I forgot all about the blessed pain. It was only when I was climbing into the car again that it hit me. But this time it had moved up to the ... well, you know.' The two men looked at each other. They knew all right. What man doesn't?

'Right slap-bang in the middle of the whole caboodle. But by now it was so sharp, such a lethal stinging sensation that I suddenly knew what it had to be. I just knew it couldn't be anything else. The black proboscis of some malignant insect was injecting my tackle with its poison.' At this point Henry stopped drinking and put his glass down on the table. He stared at the other man with grave concentration. 'So I jumped back out of the car, unfastened my trousers and pulled down my underpants. There and then.' Mrs Trasker now interposed.

'I had to shout at him, "Bernard, have you gone barking mad?

This isn't the beach at Tenerife." There was a poor woman crossing the car park with her shopping bags who turned tail there and then. Obviously thought she'd finally come face to face with the phantom Shropshire flasher. Dropping carrots out of her bag in her haste to be gone.'

'So what was it?' Henry asked. 'What was what?'

'This poisonous creature that had decided to make a meal of your ... well, of you?'

'That was the extraordinary thing, you see,'
Bernard
said, turning up to the ceiling a mild look of philosophic distraction, the look of a veteran recalling distant battles, 'because it wasn't an insect at all. It was a needle.'

'A needle? What sort of needle?'

'Just an ordinary sewing needle. With its point a full half inch into my scrotum.' As if moved suddenly by the extent of the ordeal,
Bernard
walked back to the painting, put his halfmoon spectacles on, and gave it a good long look. Henry picked up his wine glass and drained it. He stared at Mrs Trasker: 'I think you'll find in future that a small wax doll will normally serve just as well.'

Then the telephone rang. It was Sylvie.

'Excuse me,' Henry said, 'but I need to take this in the other room.' He went through to the kitchen and, with the handset crooked between his shoulder and his ear, he re-filled his glass. 'So how are you?'

'Confused Henry. I'm a very confused girl at the moment.

You're not planning on confusing me any more, are you?' He knew exactly what she meant.

'Try not to.'

'We're friends who meet sometimes for a little comfort.'

'Don't leave it too long then, will you?'

'Did you by any chance get a caller with a Scots voice yesterday?' Henry thought for a moment.

'Yes, I did, funnily enough. It was a wrong number.'

'It wasn't actually. It was our Director of Studies, a grubby little schmuck called Hamish Flyte, who has taken to keeping records on us all for future use. All our little peccadilloes noted down.'

'Like a Chief Whip.'

'What do they do?'

'Keep tabs on everyone, dark notebooks filled with all your nastier moments, in case it all comes in handy for a bit of blackmail, when a division's looking iffy. But this isn't
18
90. You're not breaking any laws, for God's sake.'

'I think he's just building up collateral. He reckons there might be a plot against him. He thinks we all hate him.'

'Why does he think that?'

'Because we all do. Nobody can even remember how he got in to the Institute; let alone how he ended up almost running it. He can still make the difference between grants and fellowships being renewed, all the same. Poisonous little toad. If he phones again, tell him to fuck off.'

'From both of us?'

'From both of us.'

'
You could always come over and tell him yourself.' There
was a pause. 'When will you come and visit me again, Sylvie?'

'I don't know, love. If it's regular comfort you need, I think you should tryout one of those fragrant Shrewsbury ladies.'

'Would it help if I turned vegetarian?'

'Wouldn't make much difference with those pizzas. You even said that yourself.'

*

Why vegetarian? The ancients believed in a homeopathic diet: if you want to be strong like a lion, then eat a lion; if lustful like a goat, eat goat. If you want to be cunning like the snake, cut the snake from its skin, cook it slowly with herbs and then consume it. To sing sweetly, swallow the nightingale before the song in its tiny throat starts congealing. To swim with savage grace, catch, roast and eat your shark. If you want to mock the gods and defecate in their sacred places, chew monkey in great quantities.

Now as for Sylvie, all she really wanted was to be as calm as a tree in the shade, quiet as grass in a storm, and so she had become a vegetarian. No blood would ever again pass her lips, not even the blood of the lamb. She reckoned slaughter's debris clogs the mind, making the spirit viscous and sluggish. It coarsens the delicate ganglia that connect us to time's wounds. And yet she was fascinated by Picasso, the least vegetarian of artists; he ate the world's flesh raw so as to make it his own. Ate years; became history. Swallowed ancient art, the flesh of unimaginable times and unimaginable minds, vivid traces of lost worlds, so as to become the one great primeval heir; Pablo, unquestionable Iberian son of the ages, erect in his cloak of flesh. Sylvie believed that her diet explained in part her equable temperament, though she didn't feel all that equable at the moment, if the truth were told. Work. She had some work to do. Constellations and lenses. Lecturing tomorrow.

What she was trying to get across was how reality was always lensed. And the easiest way to do this was to point to the seventeenth century. There the telescope and the microscope expanded the human imagination at both ends. The great vision of falling bodies which opens
Paradise Lost
would not have been possible without Galileo's telescope. The English poet had visited the Italian scientist. Milton even pays a handsome tribute to him in Book One. Now in fact we don't know how far back in history the invention of the telescope goes. We're not sure what the
merkhet
of the Egyptians was; or the 'queynte mirours' and 'perspectives' mentioned in Chaucer. Roger Bacon's 'glasses or diaphanous bodies' were evidently optical devices, and in the sixteenth century Thomas Digges and
John
Dee both appear to have made use of 'optic tubes' of some sort, but as far as we know they employed them solely for the magnification of terrestrial objects, to bring faraway visions closer to the eye.

The truly momentous year in the history of this device, the one which had made its use obligatory and shifted the perceptions of humankind irrevocably, redefining in the process the extremities of perception, was
16
09 to
16I
0, when Galileo stared through the telescope he had made for himself. Here Sylvie drew a red line down the side of her margin. She must get this across clearly, or there was no point in any of them being there at all. So what did Galileo see? Lionel, will you take your beady little eyes off my legs for two bloody minutes, and focus on the overhead projection please?

Galileo saw that the Milky Way was more crammed with stars than anyone had previously dreamt, and that Jupiter had four planets, previously undetected. He could see a covering of earth
-
shine on the moon's surface, our own sunny reflection handed back into the darkness of space, but noted also our moon's asperities, its ragged, pock-marked surface, its irregularities and protruberances. Aristotelianiasm began to die there and then, for there was not, as the Greek philosopher had asserted and the European intellectual tradition had maintained for nearly two thousand years, perfection in the celestial sphere. The same laws applied up there as apply down here. This fitted in nicely with Galileo's previous discoveries: that bodies fall, all bodies fall, unless a force acts upon them with sufficient potency to prevent them from so doing. Soon enough everyone would have to accept that the planets didn't move in the celestial perfection of circles either, but described instead a circuit of imperfection, the gravitationally distorted ellipse. Soon everyone in Europe who could afford it, wanted to have one of these telescopes. Galileo tried to make sure he had a few spares with him whenever he performed his demonstrations before princes, since even scientific geniuses need to make a living. And later that year when Galileo's book,
Sidereus Nuncius,
was printed, every fellow of means had to get hold of a copy. Sir Henry Wotton wrote a letter to the Earl of Salisbury on March
13
,
16I
0, in which he said that the work 'is come abroad this very day'. Pirated editions were soon far more numerous than the authorised imprints. The heavens were at last yielding their secrets, though some of the defenders of heaven itself weren't best pleased at this turn of events.