“What time will the King come home?
One o’clock in the afternoon.
What will he have in his hand?
A bunch of ivy.”
Behind me someone said, “You’ve dropped your book, sir.”
“Let it lie.”
THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE
The city has always been full of little strips and triangles of unused land. A row of buildings falls down in Chenaniaguine-the ground is cleared for further use-elder and nettle spring up-nothing is ever built. Or else the New Men set aside some park for a municipal estate, then quarrel among themselves: a few shallow trenches and low brick courses are covered in a season by couch grass and “fat hen.” Allman’s Heath, bounded on two sides by empty warehouses, an abattoir, and a quarantine hospital, and on its third by a derelict reach of the canal, looks like any of them.
A few houses stare morosely at it from the city side of the canal. The people who live in them believe that insects the size of horses infest the heath. Nobody has ever seen one; nevertheless, once a year the large wax effigy of a locust, freshly varnished and with a knot of reed grasses in its mouth, is brought out from the houses and paraded up and down the towpath. In the background of this ceremony the heath seems to stretch away forever. It is the same if you go and look from the deserted pens of the cattle market, or one of the windows of the old hospital. To walk round it takes about an hour.
Every winter years ago, little girls would chalk the ground for “blind Michael” in a courtyard off the Plaza of Realised Time. (It was on the left as you came to the Plain Moon Cafe, where even in February the tables were arranged on the pavement, their planished copper tops gleaming in the weak sun. You turned down by an ornamental apple tree.) Generally they were the illegitimate children of midinettes, laundry women who worked in Minnet-Saba, or the tradesmen from the Rivelin market. They preserved a fierce independence and wore short stiff blouses which bared the hollow of their backs to the grimmest weather. If you approached them properly, one of them would always tuck her chalk down her white drawers, lick the snot off her upper lip, and lead you to Orves; it was hard work to keep up with her in the steep winding streets.
Most sightseers changed their minds as soon as they saw the shadow of the observatory falling across the houses, and went back to drink hot genever in the Plain Moon. Those who kept on under the black velvet banners of the New Men, which in those days hung heavily from every second-floor window, would find themselves on the bank of the canal at Allman’s Reach.
There was not much to see. The cottages were often boarded up at that time of year. A few withered dock plants lined the water’s edge where the towpath had collapsed. No one was in sight. The wind from the heath made your eyes water until you turned away and found the girl standing quite still next to you, her hands hanging at her sides. She would hardly look at you, or the heath; she might glance at her feet. If you offered her money she would scratch her behind, screech with laughter, and run off down the hill. Later you might see her kneeling on the pavement in some other part of the Quarter, the wet chalk in her mouth, staring with a devout expression at something she had drawn.
Vera Ghillera, Vriko’s immortal ballerina, had herself taken to Allman’s Reach the day she arrived in the city from Sour Bridge. She was still a provincial and not more than a child herself, as thin and fierce and naive as any of them in the courtyard off the plaza, but determined to succeed; long in the muscle for classical dance, perhaps, but with a control already formidable and a sharp technical sense. It was the end of a winter afternoon when she got there. She stood away from her guide and looked over the canal. After a minute her eyes narrowed as if she could see something moving a great distance away. “Wait,” she said. “Can you? No. It’s gone.” The sun was red across the ice. Long before the city knew her lyrical port de bras, she knew the city. Long, long before she crossed the canal she had seen Allman’s Heath and acknowledged it.
Everyone has read how Vera Ghillera, choreographed by Madame Chevigne, costumed by Audsley King, and dancing against sets designed by Paulinus Rack from sketches attributed to Ens Laurin Ashlyme, achieved overnight fame at the Prospekt Theatre as “Lucky Parminta” in The Little Humpbacked Horse; how she was courted by Rack and Ingo Lympany amongst others, but did not marry; and how she kept her place as principal dancer for forty years despite the incurable fugues which compelled her to attend regularly and in secret the asylum at Wergs.
Less of her early life is public. In her autobiography The Constant Imago, she is not frank about her illness or how it came about. And few of her contemporaries were ever aware of the helplessness of her infatuation with Egon Rhys, leader of the Blue Anemone Ontological Association.
Rhys was the son of a trader in fruit and vegetables at Rivelin-one of those big, equivocally natured women whose voice or temper dominate the Market Quarter for years on end, and whose absence leaves it muted and empty. He had been in and out of the market since her death, a man enclosed, not much used to the ordinary emotions, not interested in anything but his own life. He tended to act in good faith.
He was shorter than Vera Ghillera. As a boy, first selling crystallised flowers round the combat rings, then as the apprentice of Osgerby Practal, he had learned to walk with a shambling gait which diverted attention from his natural balance and energy. This he retained. (Later in life, though his limbs thickened, his energy seemed to increase rather than abate-at seventy, they said, he could hardly stand still to talk to you.) He had large hands and a habit of looking at them intently, with a kind of amused indulgence, as if he wanted to see what they would do next.
His heavy, pleasant face was already well-known about the rings when Vera came to the city. Under the aegis of the Blue Anemone he had killed forty men. As a result the other “mutual” associations often arranged a truce among themselves in order to bring about his death. The Feverfew Anschluss had a special interest in this, as did the Fourth of October and the Fish-Head Men from Austonley. At times even his relations with the Anemone were difficult. He took it calmly, affecting an air of amusement which-as in other notorious bravos-seems to have masked not anxiety but an indifference of which he was rather ashamed, and which in itself sometimes frightened him. He let himself be seen about the Quarter unaccompanied, and walked openly about in the High City, where Vera first observed him from an upper room.
The Little Humpbacked Horse was history by then: she had carried a lamp in Mariana Natesby, overcome with furious concentration the debilitating danse d’ecole work and formalism of Lympany’s The Ginger Boy. She had danced with de Cuevas, then past the height of his powers, and been his lover; she had had her portrait painted once a year for the oleo-graph trade, as “Delphine,” “Manalas,” and-looking over a parapet or smiling mysteriously under a hat-as the unnamed girl in The Fire Last Wednesday at Lowth. She had got her full growth. At work, though she was so tall, her body seemed compacted, pulled in on itself like the spring of a humane killer: but she looked exhausted when the makeup came off, and somehow underfed as she slumped awkwardly, legs apart, on a low chair in her sweat-stained practice clothes. She had forgotten how to sit. She was “all professional deformity in body and soul.” Her huge eyes gave you their attention until she thought you were looking at someone else, then became blank and tired.
She never lost her determination, but an unease had come over her.
In the morning before practice she could be seen in the workmen’s cafes down by the market, huddled and fragile-looking in an expensive woollen coat. She listened to the sad-sounding traders’ calls in the early fog, hearing them as remote, and as urgent as the cries of lookouts in the bows of a ship. “Two fathoms and shelving!” She watched the girls playing blind Michael in the courtyard off the Plaza of Realised Time, but as soon as they recognised her walked quickly away. “One fathom!”