The other uncles disliked him; my sisters regarded him with contempt, claiming that when they were younger he had tried to put his hands up the back of their pinafores; but to me he was a continual delight, because he was so often used as an example of what I would become if I didn’t pay attention, and because he had once given me a book which began:
I was in Viriconium once. I was a much younger woman then. What a place that is for lovers! The Locust Winter carpets its streets with broken insects; at the corners they sweep them into strange-smelling drifts which glow for the space of a morning like heaps of gold before they fade away…
Imagine the glee with which I discovered that Uncle Prinsep had written this himself! I could not wait to fail my mother and go there.
One afternoon a little after the spring thaw, when I was eighteen or nineteen, he arrived unexpectedly and stood on the doorstep shaking his coat under a sky the colour of zinc. He seemed distracted, but at the tea table his tongue was loosened at last. He talked about his journey, the weather, his rooms in the city which he said were untenable through burst pipes and draughts: my mother couldn’t stop him talking. If there was a silence he would suddenly say, “I was in mourning for six people last May,” causing us to look at our plates in embarrassment; or, “Do you think that souls fly around and choose bodies to be born into?” My sisters covered their mouths and spluttered, but I was mortified.
He couldn’t hear enough, he said, about the family, and he interrogated my mother, who had by now begun to look down at her own plate in some confusion, mercilessly about each of the other uncles in turn. Did Dando Seferis still go fishing when he had the chance? How was-he snapped his fingers, he had forgotten her name- Pernel, his wife? How old would the daughter be this year? When he could pursue this no further he looked round and sighed happily. “What wonderful cake this is!” he exclaimed; and, on being informed that it was a quite ordinary kuchen: “I can’t think why I’ve never eaten it before. Did we always have it? How nice it is to be home!” He nudged me, to my horror, and said, “You don’t get cake like this in Viriconium, young man!”
Later he played the piano and sang.
He made my sisters dance with him, but only the old country dances. To see this great fat man, face shining with perspiration, shamble like a bear to the strains of “The Earl of Rone” or “The Hunting of the Jolly Wren” moved them to even greater contempt. He told us ghost stories before we went up to bed. He managed to corner me on the stairs after I had studiously avoided his gaze all evening, to give me a green country waistcoat with some money wrapped in tissue paper in one pocket; I sat in my room looking at it and wept with fury at his lack of understanding. After we were asleep he kept my mother up, talking about their father and his political ambitions, until the small hours.
We had him for two days, during which my mother watched him anxiously. Was he drunk? Was he ill? She could not decide. Whatever it was he went back to Viriconium on the morning of the third day, and died there a week later. In keeping with her evasive yet practical nature she told us nothing about the circumstances. “It happened in someone’s house,” she said with a movement of her shoulders which we recognised as both protective and censorious; and she would admit nothing more.
He was brought home to be buried. The funeral was as miserable as most winter occasions. Rain fell at intervals from a low, greyish-white sky, to bedraggle the artificial flowers on the cortege and the black plumes of the funeral horses. Some of the other uncles came and stood with their hats off by the grave, while rooks wheeled and cawed overhead in the rain as if they were part of the ceremony. The cemetery was frozen hard in places, already thawing in others; and the flat meadows beyond were under a single shining sheet of water, up out of which stuck a few black hedges and trees. My sisters wept because their dresses were soaked, and after all they had not meant to be horrible to anyone; my mother was quite white, and leaned heavily on my arm. I wore with defiance a pair of yellow shoes.
“Poor Prinsep!” said my mother, hugging us all on the way home. “He deserves your prayers.” But it wasn’t until much later that I learned the sad facts of his death or the sadder ones of his life.
By then I could be found in the pavement cafes of Sour Bridge, with a set of my own. We favoured the Red Hart Estaminet, not just for its cheap suppers and boldly coloured art posters but because it was the haunt of visiting painters, writers, and music-hall artistes who had come from Viriconium to take the Wasserkur in sheds outside the town. When they weren’t being hosed down with ice-cold water for their bowel disorders and gonorrhoeas, I suppose, it amused them to make fun of our scrubbed young faces, provincial romances, and ill-fitting suits.
It was at the Red Hart that I first met Madame de Maupassant, the famous contralto, by then a creature bent and diminished by some disease of the throat, with a voice so ravaged it was painful and frightening at the same moment to hear her speak. I could not imagine her on the stage-I didn’t know then that to maintain her popularity in the city she still sang with deadly effort every night at the Prospekt Theatre. I thought of her as a menacing but rather vapid old woman obsessed with certain colours, who would lean over the table and say confidentially, “When I was in church as a girl I observed that flies would not pass through the lilac rays from a stained-glass window. Again, it would appear that all internal parasites die if exposed to the various shades of lavender; the doctor is disposed to try a similar remedy in my case.” Or: “An honest man will admit that his most thrilling dreams are accompanied by a violet haze… Do you know the dreams I mean?”
I did.
One day she said, to my surprise, “So you’re Baladine Prinsep’s nephew. I knew him quite well, but he never spoke of a family. Don’t you follow in his footsteps: all those years at a woman’s feet, and never more than a smile! There’s a patient man for you.”
And she gave her characteristic croak of a laugh.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What woman?”
Which made Madame de Maupassant laugh all the more. Eventually, I suppose, I persuaded her to tell me what my mother had kept from us, what Viriconium had always known.
“When your uncle came to the city,” she said, “twenty years ago, he found the dancer Vera Ghillera at the height of her success, appearing twice nightly at the Prospekt in a ballet called The Little Humpbacked Horse choreographed for her by Chevigne.
“After every performance she held court in a dressing room done out with reds and golds like a stick of sealing wax. There was a tiger-skin rug on the floor. You never saw such dim yellow lamps, brass trays, and three-legged tables decorated with every vulgar little onyx box you could mention! Here they all came to invite her to supper, and she made them sit on the tiger skin and talk about art or politics instead: Paulinus Rack the impresario, ailing and thin now, like a white ghost; Caranthides, whose poems had been printed that year for the first time in a volume called Yellow Clouds and whose success was hardly less spectacular than her own; even Ashlyme the portrait painter came, stared at her face with a kind of irritable wonder, and went away again-his marriage to Audsley King put an end to anything like that before it could begin.