The Secret Book of Paradys (2 page)

“Burn that in the morning,” he said. “It will be unlucky.”

He sat down on the bed by me, pulled off my shirt and tugged down my breeches. Bored finally by the long caresses, similar to those lavished on my papers, which evoked no sustained response, he concluded his act with a violent introduction and sudden achievement, wracking the house with his groans and cries. He fell asleep lying on top of me, on my back, his white hair getting in my mouth, so I constantly awoke to remove it. Once he whispered again. “Tomorrow, I will take you to her.”

A man in a black cowl galloped over and over through my dreams and I was slung across the saddle before him. Near dawn, barely conscious, I too climaxed with a slight shuddering that woke Philippe and caused him to curse and punch me in the ribs.

Before he roused himself I got up, dressed, and left the stinking room.

I went down into the City valley, to the river, coiled like a sliding serpent in the mists of earliest day. The buildings rose like crags from the mist, like hills weathered into oblongs. Birds flew for miles, back and forth.

I thought of casting the ring into the river, but might not some fish swallow it? And then I, cutting into the prize sturgeon of some dinner at Philippe’s house, find the ring again, glowing up at me from the fish’s backbone?

I had searched the journals, I had asked everyone, but there had been no mention of a particular body found in the yards of The Sacrifice, or of a phantom hunter accompanied by black dogs.

I turned from the river and wandered up towards the tall libraries of the Scholars’ Quarter. Philippe would lie in wait for me at my lodging a while, and, as usual, I felt myself done with him for ever, until the next occasion of our meeting.

Two days later, he called on me, at his smartest and most exquisitely dressed. It was mid-afternoon.

“Come to my house.”

“As you see, I am working.”

“Let me look.”

“No.”

“Oh you,” he said, “like some country girl with her lower parts. Very well. Give me a copy when printed. One more slender volume … Till then, come to my house.”

“Go away, Philippe.”

“It is tonight,” he said.

He had odd eyes, one much lighter than the other. It enhanced his looks, though as a child, he had been disturbed by it. The nurse his dead mamma had got for him had said it was a mark of evil. She urged him on. At thirteen he raped her.

“
What
is tonight?”

“She opens her salon, like a rose.”

“Who?”

“That lovely woman I spoke of. The wonder of the City.”It was hot today and hard to work now concentration had been shattered. I laid my pen aside and put my head in my hands. Philippe trailed a flower across my hands, my neck. Presently I got up and followed him out.

Philippe’s house stood up against the old City Wall, near the Obelisk, where they had burned the dead in millions during a plague named “the Death.” Now a variety of trees rooted out of the stones, casting a wet feverish shade. The elderly house was shuttered, an old thing itself, despising the human lizards who flickered through its lofty rooms: they lasted only a moment, better let them do as they wished.

“How I hate this house,” Philippe had said, a hundred times, cheerfully. Now his father was dead, he did everything he wanted there. It was the scandal of the district, but he was rich.

In one of the marble baths I lay soaking, like a piece of statuary dug up from the muck and taken to be cleaned, while one of Philippe’s domestics stropped the shaving razor behind the screen. When I vacated the bath-chamber, drugged and stupefied by hot water and balsams, a valet put me into a suit of Philippe’s clothes. We were almost of the same fitting, and everything of his might be worn with loose ease by me.

“Oh what a beauty,” he said, flitting round me, most malign of the lizards – one better caged.

The light was growing heavier, more solid, slabs of it in the pillared windows and fallen across the road outside.

“Do you want to dine?” he said.

“I want nothing. I want to go to sleep.”

“Bloody slug. Come on. Where is that ring – you do have it?”

I had stopped wearing it. It had been in my pocket,
his
pocket now, and I took it out and offered it to him. He skipped away. “No, no, Andre. But you must show it to her.”

“Her. This woman. She had better be worth all your trouble.”We went out, and along the street together, two young princes in a democratic Paradys that no longer recognised such beings. But who would know me, anyway. A scribbler. A few had seen my plays, and read my essays and miniature novels in their closets. But I was not in the mode, unlike my hair, and now my clothes. I said things that cut too near, or not near enough their candy bones. (Or maybe only I was no good at my trade.) Three pamphlets of mine had even criticised the City Senate, but they took it in good part.
There
was shame. Probably I would rather have been hauled off to jail, unless I had been.

“Philippe,” I muttered, “if I die –”

“Here it is again,” he said.

“If I die, see to it – make that wretch of a printer take it all and print it all. Every word. Anything unfinished even, and all the pieces he has refused.”

“This ego,” he said. “Who will care? If you’re dead. Do you think you will?”

“No. But I care now, I care this moment. Promise me.”

“Very well. As before. I promise you.”

“You. I can’t trust you. You never read a line I ever wrote.”

“Many lines. Now, how does it go – ‘Light leaving a window like blood in a faint’ – what was that?”

“Something I can’t remember. A dream I think I had.”

“Like that other dream. I could make you once. You used to yell louder than I did. I used to listen in amazement.”

“You see,” I said, “but you don’t listen to the
words
.”

“When you die,” he said, he swung towards me and took me by the neck, by the snowy linen of his own wardrobe, “when I
kill
you, Andre, I will make sure every line of your fretful
oeuvre
is published. Shall I bite through a wrist vein and swear it in blood?”

I pushed him and he drew off.

“This woman,” I said, “who is she?”

“I have told you.”

“Her name.” (Give me your name, the running man had said.)

“Wait, and see.”

We walked on, through the thick, tree-interrupted light, as the bells of the City sounded seven o’clock. We were moving west towards the Quarter of the Clockmakers.

“Where does she live?”

“On Clock-Tower Hill.”

“Tell me about her.”

He said, “Bloodless skin, ebony hair. A pale mouth that seems drawn on to her face, but is not. Eyes like all-blackness.”

He had been an artist at one time. It informed his speech, if no longer anything else.

“No eye is ever black. You go close and look into it, the eye is some other shade.”

“Not hers, Andre. Ah, such a blow in store: you won’t be disappointed.”

“And the husband?”

“If he is. Monsieur Baron von Aaron.”

“A name after all.”

“A foreign name. He’s antique. A marriage of convenience.”

“Oh,” I said. “You have had her, then.”

“Not yet. Never, I should think. She isn’t to be
had
.”

Fashionable strollers patrolled the lower walks of the Wall Quarter, from the Obelisk Gardens to the Observatory. Some greeted Philippe, with flippancy or caution, and whispered when he had gone by. On the Observatory Terrace the tables were out, the gossips, gamblers and drinkers, cards fluttering like red and black pigeons, and the resinous clink of glasses of black coffee and liqueurs. From here, by means of an architectural gorge running through the City of Paradys, you saw the masonry precipices drop down, through coins of roofs and flutes of steps like folded paper, into shadow depths veiled in parks, with little bright sugar churches appliquéd on to a mellow sunset, which shed a glamour now like the lambency of some old priceless painting.

We crossed the Terrace, and went up Clock-Tower Hill, where, thirty metres in the air, the gilded white face stares four ways at time.

The house which the Baron von Aaron was renting was one of the stuccoed piles along the inner shoulder of the hill. A lamp hung over the wrought-iron gate, alight. The gate itself stood wide. We went through, up some steps to the porch, and rang the bell. The house was mildly pulsating with its occupancy, and in the dimming atmosphere, the windows of the second floor were quietly burning up.

A domestic opened the door. Philippe handed him at once a card. That was all. The man, an absolute blank, moved back to allow us to come in, and next, having shut the door, solemnly walked ahead of us. We carried our gloves, and would have carried our hats too, had we been wearing any, straight up the curving stair and to the salon.

The card was given over to another blank at the entrance, and borne away across the room. There was nothing unusual in the salon, but for the strange
soft candlelight at odds with the softer deepening radiance of the sunset windows, an exciting, expectant light, that would, as ever, lead you fiercely on to nothing. The house itself all around seemed blind, and echoed. Though fresh flowers had peered from the vases by the stair, the building was not exactly alive. The salon, painted and upholstered in the way of such rich men’s rentables, was a pastel, and already filled by smoke. There were groups of men, and a handful of women. Some of either gender I knew, others by sight. No one to be interested in; rather, to be avoided. The cadence of talk was low but ceaseless. Now and then a breaker burst, laughter or an exclamation. Somewhere someone was playing a guitar.

“Be patient, wait,” Philippe said to me.

He began to move through the groves of men, the trailing willows of women, accepting as he went a quip, a cigar, muttering, “Oh God, is
she
here?” over some woman he was not pleased to see. White shoulders flashed and white pipes puffed up at a ceiling of plaster acanthus.

Near the long windows was a piano, and leaning on it, the guitar-player himself, strumming away. An oil-lamp of dense crystal rested on a low glass table, and cast its bloom upward. It caught her hand as she took Philippe’s card from the attendant, and her face as she bent her eyes on it to glance. Then, it caught her little, little smile, as she set the card down by the lamp, into a petal-fall of other similar cards.

“Madame,” said Philippe. He bowed over her and took her hand up again and pressed his lips to it. “I am so glad you allowed me to return.”

“It is my husband you must thank.”

“Then, I thank him, with all my heart. Madame, may I present my friend.”

“Of course,” she said. Her lips stretched once more in the little, little smile.

“The writer, Andre St Jean,” said Philippe.

“Of whom you won’t have heard,” I said.

She raised her eyes and looked at me directly, for one entire and timeless second.

“I am afraid that is true.”

“Don’t be afraid, madame. If it is to frighten you, most of the City would have to share your terror.”

But her eyes were already gone. They seemed to gaze down into the lamp, so I might go on looking at them, but not into them. They were perfectly black, as Philippe had assured me. So black the charcoal shadow of the lashes, cast upward by the glow across the heavy lids, was ghostly in comparison, and the black brows also seemed pale. These brows were long, and unplucked, and the lashes long and very thick. In the bloodless face, the mouth was a pale ivory pink, the line of the lips’ parting or joining accentuated by the lamp, as if carefully drawn with pencil … Black hyacinth hair, the
kind that thickly and loosely curls; the sheerest shoulders, slender and boneless, above a dark dress. Not a jewel, except the marriage rings which I would diligently search out when her hands came up again.

“You see, Madame von Aaron,” I said, “I don’t hanker for fame at all. But it is at moments like these I wish I had it. If I were known, then you might look at me with some attention. As it is, what in the world can I hope for?”

I felt Philippe’s whole body shoot into lines of overjoyed and spiteful satisfaction. She raised her face and gave me one more look, a cold look, of surprised indifference. She did now know what to do about me, or my arrogant sally, and so would do nothing at all.

And I? Having bowed to her, I walked away to a table where the valets were pouring out white wine. As I drank it, I imagined her say to Philippe, “Really, my friend, might I ask you, in future, to spare me such acquaintances?”But she would not say that. He was no friend of hers.

It was the truth, what I had said, so naturally I confronted her with it. The others would fawn and keep their place. She did not care for anything original, it seemed.

I thought of the sort of women who liked me, some of them even aristocratic. But she was not of their type. She would be tall when she stood, almost my own height, perhaps equal to it. Neither did I care for her, she was so cold. Her hands (beautiful probably, it had seemed so) would be cold as ice to touch. Splendid hair, and eyes. Otherwise, nothing much. She might give the illusion of great beauty but in fact was not beautiful. Though a voice like the music of the night.

I remembered that ring, then, the gem of hot syrup in the pocket of Philippe’s brocaded waistcoat, and slipped in two fingers to find it. At that moment someone else entered the salon, and there were loud, acclaiming calls.

Who was this? Who could it be but the husband, the ostensible lord of her court. The groves were parting to let him by, the men were shaking his hand, or clapping his shoulder. He was tall himself, but stooped and grey – his artificially-curled hair, his expensive coat. He paused to sample someone’s tobacco, then shook his old head sadly. The foreign look was exotic in her, and not quite palpable, but he surely had it, in all of his massive face hanging forward off its skull. A cunning, just, ineloquent face.

He passed me, not seeing me, of course, for who was I?, and went on to the window and the piano and the lamp. The guitar-player instantly rose to greet him, and Philippe, who had stayed at her side with four or five others, hung about there, looking glad and expectant, awaiting the man’s notice. Stalest of all tricks; it was the husband he had come to see, the woman only a pleasurable diversion encountered on the path.