The first time she saw Egon Rhys she ran down into the street without thinking and found him face to face with two or three members of the Yellow Paper College. It was a fraught moment; razors were already out in the weird Minnet-Saba light, which lay across the paving stones the colour of mercury. Rhys had his back to some iron railings, and a line of blood ran vertically down his jaw from a nick under one eye.
“Leave that man alone!” she said. At ten years old in the depressed towns of the Midland Levels she had seen unemployed boys fighting quietly under the bridges, building fires on waste ground. “Can’t you find anything better to do?”
Rhys stared at her in astonishment and jumped over the railings.
“Don’t ask me who she was,” he said later in the Dryad’s Saddle. “I legged it out of there faster than you could say, right through someone’s front garden. They’re hard fuckers, those Yellow Paper Men.” He touched the cut they had given him. “I think they’ve chipped my cheekbone.”
He laughed.
“Don’t ask me anything!”
But after that, Vera seemed to be everywhere. He had quick glimpses of a white face with heavily made-up eyes among the crowds that filled the Market Quarter at the close of every short winter afternoon. He thought he saw her in the audience at the ring behind the Dryad’s Saddle. (She was blinking in the fumes from the naphtha lamps.) Later she followed him from venue to venue in the city and brought him great bunches of sol d’or whenever he won.
With the flowerboys she sent her name, and tickets to the Prospekt Theatre. There he was irritated by the orchestra, confused by the constant changes of scene, and embarrassed by the revealing costumes of the dancers. The smell of dust and sweat and the thud of their feet on the stage spoiled the illusion for him: he had always understood dancing to be graceful. When Vera had him brought up to her dressing room afterwards, he found her wearing an old silk practice top rotting away under the arms, and a pair of loose, threadbare woollen stockings out of which someone had cut the feet. “I have to keep my calves warm,” she explained when she caught him staring at them. He was horrified by the negligent way she sprawled, watching him intently in the mirrors, and he thought her face seemed as hard and tired as a man’s; he left as soon as he could.
Vera went home and stood irresolutely near her bed. The geranium on the windowsill was like an artificial flower on a curved stem, its white petals more or less transparent as the clouds covered and uncovered the moon. She imagined saying to him,
“You smell of geraniums.”
She began to buy him the latest novels. Just then, too, a new kind of music was being played everywhere, so she took him to concerts. She commissioned Ens Laurin Ashlyme to paint his portrait. He couldn’t be bothered to read, he said; he listened distractedly to the whine of the cor anglais, then stared over his shoulder all evening as if he had seen someone he knew; he frightened the artist by showing him how good an edge his palette knife would take. “Don’t send so many flowers,” he told her. Nothing she could offer seemed to interest him, not even his own notoriety.
Then he watched a cynical turn called Insects at the Allotrope Cabaret in Cheminor. One of the props used in this was a large yellow locust. When they first dragged it onto the cramped Allotrope stage it appeared to be a clever waxwork. But soon it moved, and even waved one of its hands, and the audience discovered among the trembling antennae and gauze wings a naked woman, painted with wax, lying on her back with her knees raised to stimulate the bent rear legs of the insect. She wore to represent its head a stylised, highly varnished mask. Fascinated, Rhys leaned forward to get a better view. Vera heard his breath go in with a hiss. He said loudly, “What’s that? What is that animal?” People began to laugh at his enthusiasm; they couldn’t see that the double entendre of the act meant nothing to him. “Does anyone know?” he asked them.
“Hush!” said Vera. “You’re spoiling it for everyone else.”
Poor lighting and a smell of stale food made the Allotrope a cheerless place to perform; it was cold. The woman in the insect mask, having first adjusted it on her shoulders so that it would face the audience when she did, stood up and made the best she could of an “expressive” dance, crossing and uncrossing her thick forearms in front of her while her breath steamed into the chilly air and her feet slapped one two three, one two three on the unchalked boards. But Rhys would not leave until the bitter end, when the mask came off and under it was revealed the triumphant smile, disarranged chestnut hair, and tired puffy face of some local artiste hardly sixteen years old, to whistles of delight.
Outside, their shadows fell huge and black on the wall that runs, covered with peeling political cartoons, the length of Endingall Street. “It doesn’t seem much to stand in front of an audience for,” said Vera, imitating the barren, oppressive little steps. “I would be frightened to go on.” She shuddered sympathetically. “Did you see her poor ankles?”
Rhys made an impatient gesture.
“I thought it was very artistic,” he said. Then: “That animal! Do things like that exist anymore?”
Vera laughed.
“Go on Allman’s Heath and see for yourself. Isn’t that where you’re supposed to go to see them? What would you do if you were face to face with it now? A thing as big as that?”
He caught her hands to stop her from dancing. “I’d kill it,” he said seriously. “I’d-” What he might do he had to think for a moment, staring into Vera’s face. She stood dead still. “Perhaps it would kill me,” he said wonderingly. “I never thought. I never thought things like that might really exist.” He was shivering with excitement: she could feel it through his hands. She looked down at him. He was as thick-necked and excitable as a little pony. All of a sudden she was sharply aware of his life, which had somehow assembled for itself like a lot of eccentric furniture the long perspective of Endingall Street, the open doors of the Allotrope Cabaret, that helpless danseuse with her overblocked shoes and ruined ankles, to what end he couldn’t see.
“Nothing could kill you,” she said shyly.
Rhys shrugged and turned away.
For a week or two after that she seemed to be able to forget him. The weather turned wet and mild; the ordinary vigour of their lives kept them apart.
His relations with the Blue Anemone had never been more equivocaclass="underline" factions were out for him in High City and Low. If Vera had known he was so hard put to it in the alleys and waste ground around Chenaniaguine and Lowth, who can say what she might have done. Luckily, while he ran for it with an open razor in one hand and a bunch of dirty bandages coming unravelled from the other, she was at the barre ten hours a day for her technique. Lympany had a new production, Whole Air: it would be a new kind of ballet, he believed. Everyone was excited by the idea, but it would mean technique, technique, technique. “The surface is dead!” he urged his dancers: “Surface is only the visible part of technique!”
Ever since she came up from the midlands, Vera had hated rest days. At the end of them she was left sleepless and irritated in her skin, and as she lay in bed the city sent granular smoky fingers in through her skylight, unsettling her and luring her out so that late at night she had to go to the arena and, hollow-eyed, watch the clowns. There while thinking about something else she remembered Rhys again, so completely and suddenly that he went across her-snap-like a crack in glass. Above the arena the air was purple with roman candles bursting, and by their urgent intermittent light she saw him quite clearly standing in Endingall Street, shivering in the grip of his own enthusiasm, driven yet balked by it like all nervous animals. She also remembered the locust of the Allotrope Cabaret. She thought,