M Harrison - Viriconium

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.

“Your uncle knew nothing about the ballet then. He saw the ballerina by chance one day, as he was looking out of his window into the street.

“He was young and lonely. He had taken rooms near the asylum at Wegs, where she went in secret once a month, wrapped in a dove-grey cloak. He soon became her most ardent admirer, waiting on the stairs outside the dressing-room door, fourteen white lilies under his arm in green tissue paper. Eventually she let him in and he had a favoured seat on one of the gilt paws of the tiger. He could be seen any night after that (though what he did in the day remained a mystery), staring up at her with a melancholy expression, taking no part in the conversation of the great men around him. She never gave him any further encouragement; she had her own affairs. In the end he died there, as uselessly as he had lived-much older then of course.”

I was profoundly shocked by this, and stung, though I tried not to show it. “Perhaps the arrangement suited him,” I said bravely, trying to invest the word arrangement with a significance it plainly did not have; and when the famous contralto had received this with the blank stare it deserved: “Anyway, he wrote a book about the city, The Constant Imago. He gave me a copy of it.” I raised my voice and looked round at my friends. “It is my opinion that he was a great artist, genuinely in love with art.”

Madame de Maupassant shrugged.

“I know nothing about books,” she said with a sigh. “But it was your uncle’s idea of conversation to sidle into a room along the wall like a servant, and when recognised say in a querulous voice, like this, ‘I have never found it necessary to have such a high opinion of God…’ Then he would regard his audience with that watery, fish-like stare he had, having struck them dumb with incomprehension. He was the most futile man I ever knew.”

I never saw her again. She soon grew tired of her cure and went back to Viriconium, but I couldn’t forget this final judgement of my uncle. If I thought of him at all after that it was with a kind of puzzled sympathy-I saw him walking at night with his head bowed, along the rainy streets near the asylum, two or three sentences of his book his only company, with the shouts of the lunatics coming to his ears like the cries of distant exotic animals; or looking dully out of his window into the orange glare of the lamps, hoping that the ballerina would pass-although he knew it was the wrong time of the month. I remembered the provincial waistcoat he had given me; somehow that completed my disappointment. Then another winter closed the pavement cafes in Sour Bridge and I forgot the author of The Constant Imago until the death of my mother some years later.

My mother loved cut flowers, especially those she had grown herself, and often kept them long after they were withered and brown because, she said, they had given her so much pleasure. When I think of her now she is always in a room full of flowers, watering them from a blue and white jug. All through her last illness she fought the nurse over a vase of great white marguerite daisies. The nurse said she would rather be dismissed than allow them to remain by the bed at night; it was unhealthy. My mother promptly dismissed her. When I went into the long, quiet room one afternoon to remonstrate with her over this, I found her prepared.

“We must get rid of that woman,” she said darkly. “She’s trying to poison me!” And then, coolly anticipating the nurse’s own arguments: “You know I can’t get my breath without a few flowers near me.”

She knew she was wrong. She stared with a kind of musing delight at the daisies, and at me. Then she sighed suddenly.

“Your uncle Prinsep was a silly, weak man.” She clutched my arm. “Promise me you’ll have your own home, and not live like that on the verge of someone else’s life.”

I promised.

“It was his mother’s fault,” she went on in a more practical voice. “She was a woman of personality. And then, you see, they lived in that huge house at the back of nowhere. She attacked the servants physically if they didn’t bow to her; she had her porridge fetched every morning from another village, because there it was made more nearly to her taste. This behaviour made her sons leave her one by one. Prinsep was the youngest, and the last to go-he was painstaking in his efforts to placate her, but in the end even he found it easier not to remain.”

She sighed again.

“I always had a horror that I would do the same to my own children.”

Before I went to take her apologies to the nurse, she said, “You had better have this. It is the key to your uncle Prinsep’s rooms. You are old enough to live in Viriconium now; and if you must, you must.” She held my wrist and put the key in the palm of my hand, a little brass thing, not very shiny. “One day when you were young,” she said, “the wind broke the stems of the hollyhocks. They lay across the wall with all their beautiful flowers intact. While they could be of use like that the insects still flew in and out of them busily: I thought it a shame.”

She hung on all that summer in the cool room, making our lives painful but unable to relax and let us go. During that time I often looked at the key she had given me. But I didn’t use it until she died in the autumn: I was sure she wouldn’t have wanted to know that I had gone to the city and turned it in its lock.

It turned easily enough after so many years, and I stood there confused for a moment on the threshold of Uncle Prinsep’s life and my own, not daring to go in. I had lost my way by the Aqualate Pond with its curious echoes and fogs; like most people who come there I had not until then realised the extent of Viriconium, or its emptiness. But the rooms, when at last I went into them, were ordinary enough-bare grey boards with feathers of dust, a few books on the shelves, a few pictures on the whitewashed walls. In the little kitchen there was a cupboard, with some things for making tea. I was tired. There was another room, but I left it unopened and dropped my belongings on the iron bed, my boxes and cases wet with salt from passage of the Yser.

Underneath the bed with the pot for nightsoil I found two or three copies of The Constant Imago.

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…