“Later I understood the pointlessness of this dream, and of the people who pursued it through the smoke in the Bistro Californium, the Antwerp Estaminet. Oh, we were all going to be famous then-Kristodulos, Astrid Gerstl, ‘La Divinette.’ ” But my husband contracted a howling syphilis and hanged himself one stifling afternoon in the back parlour of a herbalist’s shop. He was twenty-three years old and had saved no money.
“I was too proud to go back to my mother. I was too determined. Your hair was not your own to cut, she had written to me. It was mine. I had cared for it since you were born. What right had you to betray such a trust? We spoke again only once before she died.”
Finally she said:
“I regret none of this. Do you understand?” and was silent again. She closed her eyes. “Will somebody build up the fire? I am cold.”
For a long time nothing happened in the garden. Afternoon crept toward evening; the fire burned down; the fortune-teller somnolently addressed her cards. Ashlyme sketched the strange long hands of Audsley King. (Later he was to use them as the basis of the equivocal sequence “Studies of some of my friends,” fifty small oils on wood which bemuse us by their repetition of a single image differentiated only by minute changes in the background light.) Occasionally he glanced at her face. Her eyes were half closed, mimicking the exhausted trance of the invalid, while from beneath the grey papery lids she judged his reaction to her little biographical fable. He had decided to hold his tongue. He would take the story away with him and hope its meaning eventually became clear.
“One July,” she said suddenly, “storms came up from Radiopolis nine days in succession, and always at the same time in the evening. We sat in the summer house, my sisters and I, watching the damp soak into the coloured wood which formed the dome of the roof.” She spoke quickly and fractiously, as if she had pulled this memory across like a screen to hide something else. “In drier weather we-”
She broke off distractedly.
“My life is like a letter torn up twenty years ago,” she said in a low, anguished voice. “I have thought about it so often that the original sense is lost.”
The unfinished portrait attracted her attention. She got unsteadily to her feet and stumbled through the edges of the fire, the hem of her coat scattering charcoal and ashes. She took the canvas off the easel and stared intently at it. “Who’s this?” she demanded. “What a travesty!” She laughed loudly and threw it in the fire. It lay there inertly in the middle of the flames, then, with a sudden dull whooshing sound, flared up white and orange. “Who is it, Ashlyme?” She whirled round and struck out at him; groaned with vertigo; fell against him, hot and fragile as a bird. He grasped her wrists. “None of it will work now,” she whispered. “How could you let me die here, Ashlyme?”
This was so unfair he could think of nothing to say. He blinked helplessly at the burning portrait.
Fat Mam Etteilla, accustomed to these brief and febrile rebellions, had got patiently to her feet: now she spread her great capable arms in an elephantine gesture of comfort and tried to sweep Audsley King up in them. Audsley King, choking and weeping, avoided her with a fish-like twist. “Go back to your damned gutter!” she said. She caught sight of the tarot pack, spread out on the fortune-teller’s table. “These cards will never save me now. They smell of candles. They smell of old lust.” She consigned them in handfuls to the flames, where they fluttered, blackened, and finally blazed like caged linnets in a house fire in the Rue Montdampierre.
“Where is the intercession you promised?” wept Audsley King. “Where is the remission you foresaw?” And she darted away across the garden to crouch coughing desperately at the base of the wall.
Four or five of the cards, though charred at the edges, had escaped worse damage. Without quite knowing why, Ashlyme pulled them out of the fire and gave them back to the fortune-teller. He watched himself doing this, rather surprised-licking his fingers, steeling himself briefly, plunging his hand into the fire before he could think about it further-and regretted the gesture almost immediately. Fat Mam Etteilla received the cards as her due, tucked them away without comment like a handkerchief in the sleeve of her grubby cotton dress. And as soon as he saw that he had burned himself, Ashlyme felt ill and resentful. Audsley King’s behaviour had caused him to act without thinking. He marched over to her.
“It was not fair to burn the portrait,” he said, “or the cards. We cannot make you immortal.”
She stared up at him until she had forced him to look away.
“You are only playing at this!” he shouted. “I thought you had rejected the poses of the High City.” He walked off angrily, waving his arms. “You must make up your mind what you really want, if you want me to help you at all.”
She coughed painfully.
“I am already dead as far as the High City is concerned,” she called after him. “Why should they have even a portrait of me? They are all up there, waiting to bid for it, just like vultures!”
He forced himself to ignore this, although he knew it was probably true. He got hold of a stick and poked about with it in the fire, trying to make out which of the tarry flakes of ash had been his canvas, which the unfortunate Fat Mam’s cards. Slowly his anger wore off and he stopped trembling. He blew on his smarting fingertips. When he was able to turn round again, he found the fortune-teller standing patiently behind him, supporting Audsley King in her arms like a tired child. She was too weak to cause them any further trouble. Silently they carried her inside. When Ashlyme looked down from the first landing, the fire had gone out and the corners of the garden had filled up with shadows. A small wind licked the embers, so that they blazed up briefly the colour of senna flowers, silhouetting his easel as it stood there like a small bony animal tethered and waiting for its owner.
Halfway up the stairs, a thin line of blood ran out of the corner of Audsley King’s mouth. Her eyes widened; brightened; dulled. “I have such bad dreams about fish,” she said drowsily. “Can’t we go up another way?”
What was Ashlyme to do?
Audsley King has changed her mind, he wrote optimistically in a note to his friend Buffo, though in fact he was far from sure that she had. “ I shall come and see you immediately.
Unsure of his reception-after all, he had not only abandoned the astronomer during the debacle in the Rue Serpolet, he had ignored him thereafter-he waited nervously for a reply. None came.
We must make new plans, he had written. And yet when it came to planning he found his brain full of contradictory considerations, or else as empty as a new canvas. Audsley King must have somewhere to live, for instance, if she is coming up here. She must have money. However distasteful it was to him, he should, he knew, go and see Paulinus Rack, with whom he could perhaps arrange such things. But the longer it took Buffo to reply to his note the less faith he had in Audsley King’s change of mind-and the longer he stayed in his studio, biting his pen, listening to the rain dripping in the attic, trying to conjure up in his mind’s eye a picture of the thin, intense provincial girl who had arrived in Viriconium twenty years ago to shock the artistic establishment of the day with the suppressed violence and frozen sexual somnambulism of her self-portraits.
During this period he saw very little of the Grand Cairo.
Messages more or less urgent still arrived at the studio, usually at night, and in them were named meeting places more or less remote. But the dwarf rarely turned up now at early evening by the Haunted Gate, or deep in the overgrown shadows of the cisPontine Quarter, where only owls now lived; so Ashlyme began to feel that he could ignore them safely. He did go to Montrouge one night-he was returning through the Haadenbosk from a dinner given by the Marchioness “L” for Mme. Chevigne, Vera Ghillera, and the cast of The Little Humpbacked Horse -hoping perhaps to rekindle the dwarf’s enthusiasm for Audsley King. But there were no lights behind the half-completed terra-cotta facades of the civic building programme. And when he reached the tower it was dark and preoccupied.