“Make no fuss on my account,” I said.
Frau Helga, however, was stoking the firebox with crackling yellow wood. Her face was very red.
Herr Sumper’s countenance, in contrast, was cool. He nodded that I should be seated next to him.
“How long will it take?” I asked.
He placed his considerable hand upon my own as if that sign could be an answer.
I told him: “In England we would say, time is of the essence.”
“You are, as they also say in England, ‘in good hands.’ ”
“Indeed, but surely you have some idea how long those hands will take to do their job.”
“I have a very definite idea,” he said, accepting a dripping green wine bottle from the child. He boxed the boy gently across the head and the latter squeaked happily and ducked away. “I have a very definite idea that you will achieve your heart’s desire.”
“Vaucanson’s duck.”
“Your heart’s desire,” he said.
He was slippery, of course. I watched as he shared the wine, giving the boy a thimbleful before emptying a good half bottle into his stein.
“And what is my heart’s desire?”
“Why, the same as mine,” he said and poured for me.
“Spargelzeit,” said he.
“Spargelzeit,” I said, and raised my glass.
“In English,” said the precise little Arnaud, who had been left to fill his own glass, “you might translate Spargel as edible ivory.”
“Königsgemüse,” said the musical boy, and happily suffered being squashed against the clockmaker’s massive chest.
“It is the King’s vegetable,” announced Frau Helga placing in front of me a plate of white asparagus and small unpeeled potatoes.
So Spargelzeit was not a toast. Far from it—a curse—I cannot swallow egg whites, liver, brains, cod, eel, anything soft and slimy. If they had given me a plate of maggots it would have been the same.
My companions at Furtwangen were hogging in, sighing and making very personal noises. Frau Helga, in particular, was so emotionally affected by this spectral Spargel that she made me quite embarrassed.
I selected a small unskinned potato and scraped the sauce away.
“Eat up,” instructed Herr Sumper, picking up the long white vegetable, the secret organ of a ghost which he sucked into the maw beneath the bush of upper lip. “We have yet to agree on what you will pay for board. But at this meal you are our honoured guest.”
The potato tasted of wet jute. The asparagus lay before me naked. I cut its tip off and washed it down with wine.
Sumper narrowed his eyes.
“You like it?”
“Immensely.”
He considered me closely.
“You don’t know how to taste it,” said Herr Sumper. “I can read your thoughts.”
I did not comment. He winked at the boy, who squealed with laughter. I was not sorry when Frau Helga slapped his leg. I thrust my plate away from me.
“The more for us,” he said, dividing my meal between the other diners. When the gluttons had eaten my meal, Sumper wiped his mouth and spoke to Carl behind the napkin.
Immediately the boy sprang from his chair and up the stairs. To work, I thought. I put aside my pride and followed him.
There is nothing better to soothe the stomach acids than the company of an artisan when he is at his careful labour. When my wife’s first “portrait” had commenced, I would often walk into the village to the workshop of my widowed friend George Binns, whose father had been the clockmaker to Her Majesty the Queen. There amidst all the quiet ticking I found some peace. So I expected it would be in Furtwangen. The child slipped through the workshop door but a large hand restrained my shoulder.
“You are the patron,” said Herr Sumper, dancing me around then blocking my path through his doorway. “I am the artist.”
Well, of course this was preposterous. He was not an artist, he was a clockmaker. I had already endured a surfeit of Artist in the place from which I had been sent away. I thought, you damned rascal. It would serve you right if I was sick all over you.
“I cannot work with you at my shoulder.”
So I must eat insults too.
“I wish to assist,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “I have brought you this.”
He placed in my hand the sort of ruined book you find in barrow carts, its pages freckled brown, its boards bowed.
“It is The Life of Benvenuto Cellini. In English. This book will teach you how artists suffer from their patrons and will instruct you on how to play the important role you have chosen for yourself. By the time you have read it, I will be able to tell you when the work will be complete.”
Thus did I abase myself to achieve my end and I, Henry Brandling, not only permitted a foreign tradesman to pretend he was an artist, but allowed myself to be sent to bed without a decent meal.
NO SLEEP, MY MIND a carousel of memory. For instance: the night before my departure from home I informed Percy that I might not return until Christmas. “How lovely, Papa,” he said. “What a Christmas we will have.”
Round and round I saw it once again, our conversation then, the following morning when I bade my brave red-eyed boy goodbye. I should never have mentioned Christmas. I had been too whimsical. But I could not say to him: your True Friend’s heart is bursting. I did not know the terms wherein I might be permitted to return.
“Goodbye, silly Papa,” he had said.
I thought, who told you that? I kissed him twice. I could not be certain I would see him in this world again.
In Furtwangen my allotted room was filled with the roar of water, endless torrent, the drowned squealing of a silly turning wheel.
Hour after horrid hour I thought of the nights when his mother and I were first married, till death us do part, I never doubted it, round and round, and how she shuddered beneath my human weight. Hard heavy man, she called me recklessly, round and round.
I was a god for really quite a while. Only at the end did she say that cruel thing about my breasts. I had been foolish enough to think aloud, wondering could it be that wet nurse who sickened first our girl and then our little boy.
“So you blame me,” she hissed. “How dare you.”
“No,” I cried, “a thousand times no.”
I was the one with the breasts, she told me. I should have been the mother, which I clearly wished to be. My breasts were disgusting and hairy like a dog. How could I continue to be alive? she wished to know.
Only in the heat of battle did I blame her for her famous breasts, those false promises which would never touch her Percy’s hungry mouth.
In Furtwangen I slept while imagining myself awake. I woke inside a realm of gold, first light, floor, an effect of light. In truth, the dawn in Furtwangen was so much less a wonder than my True Friend’s own white room in Low Hall where the plain and decent Irish nurse would presently arrive with a cup of beef tea. Then they would sit together and wait for dear George Binns to bring the mail in through the garden gate.
Oh dear, I was hungry as a tank of acid, but Percy must know exactly where I was. I found my pencil and wrote my letter in the form of directions to my present home. If he followed these instructions he would find Furtwangen on a map and then he would know exactly where the duck was being made, for him alone. No other child in England would own such a thing, no child in all the world. I promised I would describe the manufacture in its fullest detail so he would imagine he was at my side, or perched up in the rafters like a clever bird, looking down on the miracles performed.
Then, I addressed the envelope to dear old Binns. With no innkeeper to entrust my letter to, I must now discover how the Germans sent their mail.