The Memory Palace

Complete hands to fools. A good hand, a complete flush. No! Nonsense. He was dozing when there was work to do. He skimmed the short introduction, noting the facts: Lèni’s lover, Father Paon (absurd name! – but how it characterized him) was the nutter, a slave to every vice and luxury and deeply involved with other Satanists of the time, in particular Olivia des Mousseaux and a second priest, Henri Renard. They were famous at the time: the decadent novelist, Huysmans, had interviewed them and it was said that their erotic practices had inspired both the Marquis de Guaita and Aleister Crowley. Paon took Lèni to live with him and abused her – yet she remained with him, loyal as a spaniel, and more, she watched him bloodily murder the girls they lured to his Black Masses. Petites rosses insaissisables, Elusive little nags: that was what she had written about the girls! Guilt and revulsion kept Guy fascinated: that this obscure Lyon seamstress whose diary he had held … But the place to which they were brought, that had not sounded like a maniac’s lair. It had another, haunting, name, un paradis inconnu.

An unknown Paradise. Death, he supposed, and the Otherworld: Heaven, Hades, Hell, Avalon, Elysium and the Land of Youth. The Isles of the Blessed. It had many names, as many as man’s fears. He read the denouement of the extraordinary tale:

‘Their own over-confidence betrays Lèni and Paon. They kidnap the daughter of a consul, a dark Mexican lovely. Respectable Lyon and the demi-monde are equally horrified but, even so, it is necessary for the arresting civil guard officers to bribe the militant Canuts or silk workers and to have their protection in order to enter the district, find and arrest the couple, and discover the horrors they have perpetrated. This is what they found:

‘The door of the apartment wide open and Paon, dressed like a dandy in silks, reclining on his ornate bed of shame, his new telephone receiver in his hand and the noise from a disconnected call the only sound. He wore a blank look and offered no resistance. In the kitchen, Paloma Diaz del Castillo lay in a welter of blood on the scrubbed deal table, horribly maimed and quite dead.

‘Paon was guillotined in Lyon in 1884 but his mistress, the beautiful devil Lèni la Soie, was never brought to justice. Helped by her silk worker friends, she had fled into her native territory, the local warren of alleyways or traboules, and there disappeared.’

He wondered how Paon had defended himself at his trial. Historic Lyon was a depository of hatred, a place in which many had been brought to book. He had visited it three years ago with his wife: for a day and a night, time enough for Jilly to spend an afternoon in the Silk Museum, for him to find and choose the best restaurant. They had left the children in England with Thérèse and were trying hard to live harmoniously together. It wasn’t a second honeymoon but they had a good holiday and went on to the Alps. In Fourvière he had explored some of the alleys or traboules with a sense of trespass, for many were gated, others obscure and damp and all along them stairways and doors led to inhabited apartments. He had found a likely restaurant and was standing contentedly in the warm afternoon sun reading the menu when, further down the narrow street, there was a flurry of cars and heavy motorbikes ridden by helmeted men.

A wide façade, cramped up against the pavement, was the back of the Palais de Justice. He had witnessed the departure from it of Klaus Barbie whom the Lyonnais were trying for his crimes against Jews and gypsies in the War. They had even found a lawyer who would defend him.

Who would, or could, defend Lèni? He began to read the narrative which was couched in her words and taken from her journal intime:

‘You, man or woman of the future time, you my Reader and my Judge, will observe that my spirit, like the traboules of the Croix Rousse, goes in as many directions as the compass needle. As for my heart, that too has its yearnings, for my father, for my lover, but most of all for the unknown paradise. I liken it to the hills beyond Fourvière in whose long shadows we lived happily before these centuries of revolution

And I am in Arcadia, he thought suddenly. What have I to do with this miserable stuff? He looked at the girl asleep beside him. Et in Arcadia ego – where, in a perfect, sylvan paradise, Death intrudes. He would wake her and comfort himself with her body.

The black ribbon was tight. He wondered, fingering its soft surface, how she could bear such tightness and he felt under her hair for a fastening. There was a bow, which he untied, and the ribbon slipped off and fell upon the bed while he, recoiling, saw the mark it had concealed, a dark ring of blemishes about her neck. Ghostly Alice wore such an ineradicable necklace, her hangman’s keepsake.

Alice Tyler opened her eyes, blinked pale lids across the blue and put both hands up to her throat.

‘You beast,’ she said.

He was not able to respond. Alice sat up. She switched on the bedside light and retrieved the ribbon. With electric light to illuminate it, the mark diminished. It was not very big.

Alice tied the ribbon and covered the mark.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘What does it look like?’

‘Horrible – I’m sorry. It reminds me –’

‘Of something nasty in one of your books – in your imagination! It’s a birthmark, stupid. Usually I cover it with make-up, but sometimes I wear the choker instead.’

‘I see.’

The girl switched off the light and lay down.

‘Go to sleep,’ she said and then, more kindly, ‘Save your energy till I wake – properly.’

A blighted angel, child of Hell scarred by the woodcarver’s chisel – but he was asleep and dreaming, miraculously able to walk on air amid the wooden seraphim which held up the roof of St Edward’s Cathedral.

Guy stood at the mirror in the curtained enclosure which held the washbasin. He lathered his face. They had ‘made love’ again though it had felt like war. Alice had clawed and bitten him, arousing him to a brutal response. He had not tried to please her, only himself. When he had finished he had looked down at her and found her gritting her teeth.

‘Hell,’ she’d said.

He had apologized and found then that he had opened a door, the way which led to her. She had wriggled and twined herself about him. More sex followed and now it was eleven o’clock. He was exhausted. He was too old.

He looked into the reflection of his own blue eyes. There were shadows there, a dark cast in each eye; his eyelids had a cynical and oriental droop. The white lather made a substantial beard and the gloom behind the curtain had taken the English pallor from his face and replaced it with darkness. Christ, he almost looked like Satwinder staring balefully across the bridge table. He blinked rapidly and shaved away stubble and the foam. The familiar wide-open eyes gazed steadily back at him.

‘Aren’t you ready yet?’ Alice, beyond the curtain, asked.

‘Almost.’ He dried his face, came out.

‘You’ve read some of the Malthassa books,’ he said. ‘What does Koschei look like – the Mage, the chief male character?’

‘Well, if you don’t know –’ she began.

‘I do. I just want you to describe him for me.’

‘OK. Um – he is very dark, hair I mean and skin. A bit Arabian, I suppose. His eyelids droop, to make him look really sinister – and he has a big scratchy beard. Yuck!’

‘You wouldn’t like to be in bed with him?’

‘No way! He’s a nasty piece of work.’

‘Is he? Is that how you read him? He began as a noble man, although a questioner. At first, he was a simple adventurer.’

Pleased by the manner in which my adventure away from the route between Tanter and the battle at Myrah Pits had ended, I sat beside the horse-butcher on his flat cart. It was our raft of oblivion and good will, both conditions induced by our astonishing sojourn in the village and by the stupendous quantities of alcohol administered to us at the end of the midsummer fest.

The cart belonged to the butcher. It had been commandeered by the villagers and used to transport the summer brides in their procession about the fields. An arch of withies had been nailed to it and this, still hung with wilted grasses and small field flowers, remained. The butcher said he might fix a tarpaulin to it, to keep off the sun. He was a slack fellow. He had promised to buy me a meal, but we never stopped at an inn.

In addition to the withered garlands and we two men, the cart carried two dead horses. These, a red and a red roan, lay quiet but nodded their heads – which hung over the tail of the cart – to the jolt of the ruts. The live horse which pulled them snorted and tossed his head to keep the flies in motion.

‘You’re a good horse,’ the butcher said and wrenched on the reins. When the cart stopped he leaped from it through the gathering cloud of flies and into the ditch, where he pissed copiously and plucked a large bunch of herbs. These, he carried to the horse’s head where, standing with legs akimbo and shirt and breeches gaping, he tucked the leafy stems into and under the straps of the bridle. He made a noise, Waahorhorhor! to the horse or in relief, scratched his belly, fastened his buttons and mounted to the driver’s seat.

‘Perhaps they would also like to be decorated,’ I dryly said.

‘Naw.’ The butcher was emphatic. ‘One bunch should do for the lot of us, dead and alive. Strong stuff.’

The flies which had made a sortie to examine the effect of the herbs rejoined their companions and helped them annoy me. But the butcher seemed impervious and soon began to sing in time with the jolting of the cart,

When I _____ was a lad

I __________ loved a lass

But she loved another

MAN

Oh

When I ______

I took off my hat and beat the air with it. The flies rose up like a whirlwind, and descended again. I, too, sang.

In this manner, we travelled some eight or ten miles. The Plains and their mean margins were behind us and I was cheered; but the forest lay before and this knowledge was death to the brief springtime of my heart. I looked at the butcher, whose flushed face was covered in beads of sweat and flies.

‘Do you not fear the forest?’ I said.

‘It is but trees. I have trees in my garden. In the forest there are many more, but they are the same things of trunks and branches.’

‘Then, do you not fear the Beautiful Ones?’

‘I have never seen a puvush.’

‘Hush! There may be one nearby. I think you are a city man who knows the stone street better then the forest track.’

‘All but a few leagues of the forest is trackless, so I have heard. But you are correct. I am a man of Pargur.’

‘Pargur!’

‘It is not quite as marvellous as they say; perhaps only half as much – perhaps half equal to your wildest dreams.’

The forest closed in as we talked. It seemed to me that puvushi might well be hiding under the forest’s canopy, green and brown as the shadows and, beside, that each rill and boggy place was the home of a nivasha. As well as these spirits, I feared the Om Ren, the Wild Man, which might lie in ambush awaiting unwary travellers; and the Duschma, she of plague and agony. I had seen her twice, once in a sleepy village where she watched our column pass and smiled horribly and, again, stalking the battlefield in search of fresh young men to feed on. My sword was blunt against such and, from past and recent experience, I knew I would not be proof against the allure (false though it is) of the earth and water spirits. Soon, I must leave this gross but, nevertheless, human horse-butcher. Ahead, the dwarf Erchon had told me, the ways parted in a wide Y and the left-hand fork went towards the town of Myrah, while the right-hand veered across a tract of forest fringe. Somewhere beyond this, the battle raged. A mighty chestnut tree grew in the cleft of the Y and under this Erchon had promised me he would wait. I should not be alone in the forest; but a dwarf is not a man. They keep their own customs. Erchon, disregarding the duty Nemione had impressed upon him, had left me for three weeks to meet his fellows at one of these arbitrary gatherings.

The chestnut trailed its leafy skirt upon the ground. Erchon was nowhere to be seen; in hiding, no doubt. He fears the forest folk as much as I, despite his boast that the nivashi cannot scent dwarves, I thought. I said goodbye to the butcher, his raggedy, weed-bedizened cart, his dead horses and the flies.

‘Goodbye, Master Wolf,’ he replied, screwing one of his eyes into a hideous wink and confounding me with his words. I had been careful to reveal neither identity nor allegiances; I wore an old shirt and jacket over my cuirass and, further, had tied a dirty length of cloth I’d bought for a farthing in Tanter slantwise about my body to suggest to any bold jack that I was a brigand. My beard was growing fast.

‘I see it in your eyes,’ the butcher explained. ‘A look of confidence – nay, arrogance – under the dirt.’

‘I suppose it’s useless to ask you to hold your tongue,’ I said.

‘I’m not such a gossip as you suppose, not even in my cups. I leave that to my wife.’

I gave him more than he deserved, a silver threepenny bit, and wondered what kind of woman would allow him to bed her. The butcher tested the coin on his teeth.

‘A good one,’ he said. ‘Thank ye. I’ll keep it in case I meet a werewolf.’

I watched him drive off, watched him till he was out of sight. Then I called softly,

‘Erchon, Master Scantling.’ He liked his nickname and usually answered it at once; but there was no response. I called again and, pushing the pendant branches of the chestnut tree aside, crept into its shadow. All I found was a dappled green shade, empty. I circumnavigated the tree. Nothing.

I cursed Erchon. The universal reputation dwarves have for carousing is fully justified. I supposed the wretch lay drunk in some alley or fleet. I wished he would awake with the father and mother of sore heads and a sick stomach as well.

I did not know what to do. Soon, it would be dusk; then, dark. I had planned to set up temporary home with his help, a camp where we might rest safe by the light of a good fire with one to watch while the other slept. The track looked quiet enough, striking off amongst the trees, a band of late sunlight illuminating it and picking out the colours of the summer flowers which grew beside it. I resolved to walk along it until the sunlight gave out, or I reached a corner.

It was a pleasant walk. The birds sang and the shade under the trees tempered the heat. I could see a herd of deer a little way off, all of them lying calmly at rest. A family of rabbits grazed; I walked so softly I did not disturb them. I walked with such unwary joy, and a deeper feeling of peace, that I did not notice the corner till I had rounded it, nor that the light had fled and given the forest back to Night. I must hasten back to the chestnut tree. That stood by the road, at least. I might even chance upon a late-travelling waggoner who would carry me to Myrah. I turned in my tracks and was confronted by the terrible marriage of oncoming night and the forest’s own shadows. The tranquil animals were gone with the sun.

Soon I came to a parting of ways, one I did not remember. Surely I had walked along the only track? I took the left fork, certain that it led in the direction of the tree at the Y. I walked fast and held my head high. I did not look behind me nor to right or left. The track led me on but I never found the chestnut tree, only another division of roads. This time, in near-panic, I took the right-hand fork. And so continued, faster, left then right, alternately cursing myself for a fool and praying for my own safety

because soon there must be a junction at which the girl could safely be set down to continue her journey. Then, free of her, he would also be released from his unlovely desires. Men found themselves in court for less.

The road was sunlit and empty. It wound below steep vineyards and above a little stream buried in dusty summer boskage: he should be enjoying this, not behaving like a guilty fugitive. But she – he glanced – looked happy enough.

The morning, which was almost afternoon, had continued difficult. Leaving behind them the shabby hotel and the simpleton taking the air on its steps, he had explored Avallon with Alice. They came to a busy café, sat at a pavement table and ordered pastries and lemon tisanes. He did his duty, and bought a picture postcard of Avallon to send his wife.

‘What’s the date?’ he asked Alice.

‘June 25th – Wednesday, all day.’

‘Of course. Yesterday went on for ever.’

A red currant from the barquette she had eaten was stuck to Alice’s upper lip. It looked like a glistening drop of blood. He leaned across the table and wiped it away with his handkerchief.

‘I’ll go and ‘phone Dad.’

‘Do you know how – in French?’

‘I do, Guy. Yes,’ she said confidently. She left him and went into the café. In her absence he contemplated her, the little he knew: When he’d asked her the date a faint frown had appeared, and quickly cleared from her brow. He could imagine that frown in class as she worked at her lessons; he could visualize inky fingers, the rows of girls, the uniforms.

Quickly, untidily, he wrote bland platitudes on the postcard and addressed it.

He was startled from a second reverie when Alice swung out of the café. The first thing he noticed was the length of her legs, brown in the daylight against the white of her shorts. Perhaps she wore these briefest of coverings on the tennis courts at school?

She sat down opposite him and played with the packets of sugar in the bowl.

‘Have you finished your postcard?’

‘Yes – I’ll post it now, before I forget.’

‘Poor old man!’

‘Alice?’ Now he would ask the question. ‘Alice, how old, exactly, are you?’

She smiled, not innocently.

‘Fifteen,’ she said.

‘Come on! You must be seventeen – at least. Don’t tease.’

‘I was born on April the first, nineteen seventy-five.’

‘Come on!’ he’d said again, angrily.

So now they were driving, nearly parallel with the auto-route it was true, but seemingly deeper and further into the French countryside.

‘Where does this road go?’ he asked. ‘Look at the map.’

‘Yes, Mr Parados.’

It took her moments. She was very quick – both to start a hare or follow one up.

‘It goes to your village, the one you’re looking for – Coeurville.’

‘But I was going to drop you somewhere – where you could get another lift!’

‘It’s OK. It’s only Wednesday.’

‘I am going to visit an old friend.’

‘It’s OK, I said. I’ll stay in the car.’

‘Fuck!’

‘Yes, Mr Parados.’

He ignored her.

‘Fuck, my bloody hands are hurting like buggery.’

They were there, had arrived in Coeurville. Automatically, he had slowed the car when they passed the sign. He drove sedately into the square. His sudden blast of irritation was gone with the bad language, though the tendons still ached. He was purged and limp.

‘I’m sorry, Alice.’

‘’S all right. Temperamental writer!’

He parked. The place was deserted, the shops and the café shut, though a battered table, under which an old dog slept at full stretch, seemed to await visitors. Guy got out of the car and prowled the square, conscious that he was the anomaly; he and the red machine. Alice too had got out of it and was wandering on the far side of the square, peering into dark windows and the openings of shady passage-ways. She looked as though she belonged, a composed French girl dreaming out the heat. He sighed. Her hair shone in the sun, all the long length of it. She needs a boy, he thought, one of those tawny young lions one sees prowling at the sea-side, someone who won’t be irritated by her silliness.

In the centre of the square, a war memorial rose out of a bright bed of magenta and scarlet petunias. He went closer to it. It was unusual. Three figures, Victory, Hope and Liberty lay one upon the other, and Victory, who flourished a sword, pressed Hope (to death it seemed) beneath him, while the figure of Liberty, far from being the usual resplendent Marianne, lay at the bottom of the heap and was angular and distressed. He glanced again at Alice, paused now outside the shuttered café. He saw a blind fly up, and the glass door opening. Alice disappeared inside.

Then he was alone in the silent square. He looked around him once more and willed the village to awake, but nothing stirred except the dog which got to its feet and also disappeared inside the café. The shop next to it was a general ironmonger’s and then came the bakery and patisserie. That was all, except for the butcher’s shop on his left, where a small horse’s head sign indicated that this particular butcher killed and cut up horses. He went to find Alice.

She was speaking in French to a woman, something about a gypsy, ‘la romanicelle’, the Romany woman: she was asking the way to Helen’s house. In Avallon, apart from one hesitant ‘Merci’, she had let him do all the talking and to hear her now, with laughter and complicity in her voice, fluently conversing, shocked him more than had her precocious sexuality. Of course she would, with a father resident in the country. A cup of black coffee stood on the counter in front of her and, as he came in, she turned to him and smiled and the French woman began to prepare another coffee.

‘You haven’t far to go,’ said Alice in English. ‘It’s the old presbytery and it’s just by the church.’

‘Helen’s house?’

‘Yes. The fortune-teller’s house. She is well-known here – ask Madame.’

He spoke to the woman: ‘Good day, Madame,’ he said in French. ‘She tells me you know Helen Lacey – la voyante?’

The woman, who had a broad, strong face, turned and looked him in the eye. ‘Hélène, Mme Dinard, yes,’ she said. ‘The girl is correct. Yes, the fortune-teller. A suitable profession for a gypsy, but – she owes everything to that man.’ She put his cup of coffee on the counter.

He lifted the cup and drank gratefully, feeling the warmth of the liquid flowing through him and the ache ebbing from his hands.

‘She is married?’

‘You can call it marriage.’

‘To Georges Dinard?’

‘Yes. The butcher, there – the horse butcher.’

Alice gently touched him. ‘You go,’ she said, ‘and I’ll wait here. It will be better.’

‘Wait in the car if you have to. It isn’t locked. Here –’ He gave her a two hundred franc note. She suddenly hugged him and kissed him on the lips.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And, by the way, I am seventeen – last April.’

He left her in the café and walked swiftly across the square and along the dappled street, where lime trees grew in dry beds between the pavement and the road, until he came to the church. That ‘Thank you’ of hers – it had been like a farewell, a kind of ‘Thanks for everything’. He had no idea if she were now telling the truth about her age.

The church looked abandoned. It was neglected and weeds grew on the roof. There was absolutely no sound, no notices, no indication that it was ever used. The door was shut and locked. He’d forgotten this was usual. The key would be lodged in some obscure house miles away. He thought of entering the church. Not to pray, God no, but as an interval, a break in the journey between Alice and Helen.

Beyond the church, a pair of scarred stone pillars marked the entrance to the Old Presbytery. He wondered where the priest lived now; perhaps, as in his own village, in a new house.

The gates were open; sagged, in fact, on lax hinges against dark evergreens. He walked up the short pathway to the front door and lifted his hand to the bell, noticing as he rang it how the paint lay flaked and twisted on the wood, weathered into many shades of green. He felt a hot quietude swell and billow towards him from inside the house, a silence made absolute by the noise of the bell. If, after all this, there was no one at home! He listened. He waited; glanced to right and left. Like those in the square, these tall windows were closely shuttered.