Viriconium

STRANGE GREAT SINS

“This mite’s sins are nothing to some I’ve had to swallow,” boasted the sin-eater. He was a dark, energetic man of middle height and years, always nodding his head, rubbing his hands, or shifting his weight from one foot to the other, anxious to put the family at their ease. “They’ll taste of vanilla and honey compared to some.”

No one answered him, and he seemed to accept this readily enoughhe had, after all, been privy in his life to a great deal of grief. He looked out of the window. The tide was ebbing, and the air was full of fog which had blown in from the sea. All along Henrietta Street, out of courtesy to the bereaved family, the doors and windows were open, the mirrors covered and the fires extinguished. Frost and fog, and the smell of the distant shore: not much to occupy him. The sin-eater breathed into his cupped hands, coughed suddenly, yawned.

“I like a wind that blows off the land myself,” he said.

He went and looked down at the little girl. They had laid her out two hours ago, on a bed with a spotless blue and white cover, and placed on her narrow chest a dish of salt. Gently he tapped with an outstretched finger the rim of this dish, tilting his head to hear the clear small ringing noise which was produced.

“I’ve been in places where they make linen garlands,” he said, “and decorate them with white paper roses. Then they hang white gloves from them, one glove for each year of the kiddy’s age, and keep them in the church until they fall to pieces.” He nodded his head. “That’s how I think of children’s sins,” he said. “White gloves hanging in a church.”

Imagining instead perhaps the narrow cemetery behind the dunes, entered through its curious gateway formed of two huge curved whalebones, imagining perhaps the sea holly, the gulls, and the blowing sand which covers everything, the girl’s mother began to cry. The rest of the family stared helplessly at her. There was another, idiot, daughter who banged her hands on the table and threw a knife into the empty grate. The father, an oldish man who delivered mackerel in a cart along the Fish Road to Eame, Child’s Ercall, and sometimes as far as Sour Bridge, said dully: “She were running about yesterday as happy as you please. She were always running, happy as you please.” He had repeated this every half hour or so since the sin-eater’s arrival, shaking his head as if in his simple pleasure at her happiness he had somehow missed a vital clue which would have enabled him to prevent her death (or at least comprehend it). His wife touched his sleeve, rubbing her eyes and trying to smile.

It was a long vigil, as they always are. Towards morning the sin-eater heard a sound of muffled revelry in the street outside: stifled laughter, the rattle of a tambourine quickly stilled, the scrape of clogs on the damp cobbles. When he looked out he could see several dim figures moving backwards and forwards in the sea fog. He blinked. He narrowed his eyes and cleaned the windowpane with the flat of his hand. Behind him he heard the child’s father get to his feet with a deep sigh. Turning back into the room he said, “They’ve brought the horse over from Shifnal, I think. Unless you’ve got one in the village.”

The old man stared at him, at first without seeming to understand, then with growing anger, while outside they began to sing:

Mari Lwyd

Horse of frost amp; fire

Horse which is not a horse

Look kindly on our celebration.

The pallid skull of the Mari could now be seen, bobbing up and down on its pole, clacking its lower jaw energetically as the wind opened the fog up into streaming ribbons and tatters, then closed it again, white and seamless like a sheet.

“Let us in and give us some beer,” called a muffled but derisive voice. The idiot daughter gave a smile of delight and stared round the room as if she had heard a cupboard or a table speak; she tilted her head and whispered. There was a clatter of hooves or clogs, or perhaps it was simply the clapping of hands. The Mari’s followers were dressed in rags. They danced in the fog and frost, their breath itself a fog. The masks they wore were meant to represent the long strange lugubrious head of the wasteland locust, that enormous insect which lives in the blowing sand and clinging mud of the Great Brown Desert.

“I’ll give you more than beer!” shouted the old man, his face congested with his powerful frustration and grief. “I’ll give you something you won’t like!” He pulled the sleeves of his shirt up above his elbows, and before his wife could stop him he had rushed out among the Mari-boys, kicking and punching. They evaded him with deft hops and skips, and ran away laughing into the mist; the idiot daughter murmured and bit her nails; the door banged emptily back and forth in the wind. The old man had to come back into the house, shamefaced and defeated.

“Leave them be,” said his wife. “They’re not worth it, that lot from up at Shifnal.”

Distantly the voices still sang,

Mari Lwyd

Falls between the day and the hour

Horse which is not a horse

Look kindly on our feast.

The sin-eater made himself comfortable by the window again. He scratched his head. Something in the foggy street had stirred his memory. “The horse which is not a horse,” he whispered dreamily.

He smiled.

“Oh, no,” he said to the old man and his wife, “your little girl’s sins will be like the coloured butterflies-compared to some I’ve tasted.” And then again: “The horse which is not a horse. I never hear those words without a shudder. Have you ever been to Viriconium? Packed your belongings aboard some barge at the ruined wharfs of the Yser Canal? Watched two clouds close a slot of blue in the winter sky, so that you felt as if something had been taken from you forever?”

Seeing that he had puzzled them, he laughed.

“I suppose not. Still… The horse which is not a horse…”

To recall the momentous events of your life (he went on) is to pull up nettles with the flowers. When I think of my uncle Prinsep I remember my mother first, and only then his watery blue eyes. When I think of him I can see the high brick walls of the lunatic asylum at Wergs, and hear the echoing shouts from the abandoned almshouses round the Aqualate Pond.

I was not born in this trade. When I was a boy we lived in the broad ploughlands around Sour Bridge. We were well enough off at my father’s death to have moved to the city, but my mother was content where she was. I suppose she relied on the society she knew, and on her brothers, who were numerous and for the most part lived close. I can see her now, giving tea to these red-faced yeomen in their gaiters and rusty coats who filled our drawing room like their own placid great farm horses, bringing with them whatever the season the whole feel of a November dawn-mist in the cut-and-laid hedges, rooks cawing from the tall elms, a huge sun rising behind the bare wet lace of hawthorn. She was a woman like a china ornament, always wary of their feet.

Uncle Prinsep was her step-brother, a very silent man who came to us for long visits without ever speaking. Many years before, after a quarrel with his own mother, he had let the family down and gone to live in Viriconium. I can see now how much my mother must have disapproved of his dress and manner (he wore a pale blue velvet suit and yellow shoes, much out of date in the city, I suspect, but always a source of amazement to us); but despite this, and although she often pretended to despise the Prinsep clan as a whole, she was unfailingly kind to him. There he sat, at the tea table, a man with a weak mouth and large skull upholstered with fat, who gave the impression of being constantly in a dream. He was filled, his silence informed us, with a melancholy beyond communication, or even comprehension, which sometimes stood in the corner of his eye like a tear. You could hear him sighing on the stairs in the morning after his bath. He patted himself dry with a soft towel.

The other uncles disliked him; my sisters regarded him with contempt, claiming that when they were younger he had tried to put his hands up the back of their pinafores; but to me he was a continual delight, because he was so often used as an example of what I would become if I didn’t pay attention, and because he had once given me a book which began:

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…

Imagine the glee with which I discovered that Uncle Prinsep had written this himself! I could not wait to fail my mother and go there.

One afternoon a little after the spring thaw, when I was eighteen or nineteen, he arrived unexpectedly and stood on the doorstep shaking his coat under a sky the colour of zinc. He seemed distracted, but at the tea table his tongue was loosened at last. He talked about his journey, the weather, his rooms in the city which he said were untenable through burst pipes and draughts: my mother couldn’t stop him talking. If there was a silence he would suddenly say, “I was in mourning for six people last May,” causing us to look at our plates in embarrassment; or, “Do you think that souls fly around and choose bodies to be born into?” My sisters covered their mouths and spluttered, but I was mortified.

He couldn’t hear enough, he said, about the family, and he interrogated my mother, who had by now begun to look down at her own plate in some confusion, mercilessly about each of the other uncles in turn. Did Dando Seferis still go fishing when he had the chance? How was-he snapped his fingers, he had forgotten her name- Pernel, his wife? How old would the daughter be this year? When he could pursue this no further he looked round and sighed happily. “What wonderful cake this is!” he exclaimed; and, on being informed that it was a quite ordinary kuchen: “I can’t think why I’ve never eaten it before. Did we always have it? How nice it is to be home!” He nudged me, to my horror, and said, “You don’t get cake like this in Viriconium, young man!”

Later he played the piano and sang.

He made my sisters dance with him, but only the old country dances. To see this great fat man, face shining with perspiration, shamble like a bear to the strains of “The Earl of Rone” or “The Hunting of the Jolly Wren” moved them to even greater contempt. He told us ghost stories before we went up to bed. He managed to corner me on the stairs after I had studiously avoided his gaze all evening, to give me a green country waistcoat with some money wrapped in tissue paper in one pocket; I sat in my room looking at it and wept with fury at his lack of understanding. After we were asleep he kept my mother up, talking about their father and his political ambitions, until the small hours.

We had him for two days, during which my mother watched him anxiously. Was he drunk? Was he ill? She could not decide. Whatever it was he went back to Viriconium on the morning of the third day, and died there a week later. In keeping with her evasive yet practical nature she told us nothing about the circumstances. “It happened in someone’s house,” she said with a movement of her shoulders which we recognised as both protective and censorious; and she would admit nothing more.

He was brought home to be buried. The funeral was as miserable as most winter occasions. Rain fell at intervals from a low, greyish-white sky, to bedraggle the artificial flowers on the cortege and the black plumes of the funeral horses. Some of the other uncles came and stood with their hats off by the grave, while rooks wheeled and cawed overhead in the rain as if they were part of the ceremony. The cemetery was frozen hard in places, already thawing in others; and the flat meadows beyond were under a single shining sheet of water, up out of which stuck a few black hedges and trees. My sisters wept because their dresses were soaked, and after all they had not meant to be horrible to anyone; my mother was quite white, and leaned heavily on my arm. I wore with defiance a pair of yellow shoes.

“Poor Prinsep!” said my mother, hugging us all on the way home. “He deserves your prayers.” But it wasn’t until much later that I learned the sad facts of his death or the sadder ones of his life.

By then I could be found in the pavement cafes of Sour Bridge, with a set of my own. We favoured the Red Hart Estaminet, not just for its cheap suppers and boldly coloured art posters but because it was the haunt of visiting painters, writers, and music-hall artistes who had come from Viriconium to take the Wasserkur in sheds outside the town. When they weren’t being hosed down with ice-cold water for their bowel disorders and gonorrhoeas, I suppose, it amused them to make fun of our scrubbed young faces, provincial romances, and ill-fitting suits.

It was at the Red Hart that I first met Madame de Maupassant, the famous contralto, by then a creature bent and diminished by some disease of the throat, with a voice so ravaged it was painful and frightening at the same moment to hear her speak. I could not imagine her on the stage-I didn’t know then that to maintain her popularity in the city she still sang with deadly effort every night at the Prospekt Theatre. I thought of her as a menacing but rather vapid old woman obsessed with certain colours, who would lean over the table and say confidentially, “When I was in church as a girl I observed that flies would not pass through the lilac rays from a stained-glass window. Again, it would appear that all internal parasites die if exposed to the various shades of lavender; the doctor is disposed to try a similar remedy in my case.” Or: “An honest man will admit that his most thrilling dreams are accompanied by a violet haze… Do you know the dreams I mean?”

I did.

One day she said, to my surprise, “So you’re Baladine Prinsep’s nephew. I knew him quite well, but he never spoke of a family. Don’t you follow in his footsteps: all those years at a woman’s feet, and never more than a smile! There’s a patient man for you.”

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…

After I have looked in the other room, I thought, and found somewhere to put my things, I will go to sleep, and perhaps wake up happier in the morning. After all, I am here now. So I put the book aside and turned the key again in the lock.

When he first fell in love with Vera Ghillera, my uncle had had the walls of this room painted a dull, heavy sealing-wax red; at the window there were thick velvet curtains of the same colour, pulled shut. Pictures of the ballerina were everywhere-on the walls, the tables, the mantelpiece- posing in costumes she had worn for La Chatte, The Fire Last Wednesday at Lowth, and The Little Humpbacked Horse -painted with her little chin on her hand, looking over a railing at the sea, smiling mysteriously from under a hat. The woman herself, or her effigy made in a kind of yellow wax, lay on a catafalque in the centre of the room, her strange, compact dancer’s body naked, the legs parted in sexual invitation, the arms raised imploringly, her head replaced by the stripped and polished brown skull of a horse.

In this room my Uncle Prinsep had hidden himself-from me, from my mother, from Madame de Maupassant and her set, and finally from Vera Ghillera the dancer herself, at whose feet he had sat all those years. I closed the door and went to the window. When I pulled back the curtains and looked out I could see the brick walls of the asylum, tall, and finished with spikes, washed in the orange glow of the lamplight, and hear the distant, ferocious cries of the madmen behind them.

It was dawn. The Mari-dancers were long gone, off to Shifnal with their horse; and light was creeping down Henrietta Street like spilled milk between the cobbles. The sin-eater coughed and cleared his throat, yawned.

His energy had left him in the night, draining his eyes to a chalky blue colour, the colour of a butterfly on the cliffs above the sea. He let his hands fall slackly in his lap and looked at the old man, who was asleep by the hearth with his mouth open. He looked at the surviving daughter, staring intently at the table then scratching patterns on it with a spoon, tongue in the corner of her mouth. He noticed the old man’s wife-laying the new fire in the grate, filling the kettle with water, making ready for the great meal of fish and potatoes which would be eaten later in the day-listening serenely to him as she went about the work, as if this were a story, not the bitter facts of his existence.

“I left Viriconium after that,” he told her, “for the deserts in the North; and I never went back there.” He moved his shoulders suddenly, irritated perhaps because he could no longer make these events clear enough to impress her, and he was impatient with himself for continuing to speak. “Do I miss it? No: nor Sour Bridge, with its dull farmers treading mud in the shuttered drawing rooms.”

Frost, fog, the smell of the distant shore; dawn creeping down Henrietta Street like milk. He could hear the people raking up their fires, uncovering the mirrors and birdcages. They rubbed their hands briskly as they looked out at the morning. “If the wind changes later we shall have a fine day.” At last they could shut the doors and get a bit of warmth! The little dead girl lay safely on the blue and white cover; it remained only for someone to eat the salt.

“One thing is odd, though,” he said. “When I sat in my uncle’s rooms and looked back over the decisions which had led me there, I saw clearly that at every turn they had been made by the dying and the dead; and I swore I would leave all that behind me.”

He stared for a moment almost pleadingly at the woman.

“As you see, I have not.”

She smiled: her child was safe; its soul was secure; she was content.

“That was where I first ate the salt,” he said bleakly. “It lay on her breast as surely as it lies now on your dead daughter’s. I don’t know why my uncle put it there for me to find.”

Later in the morning a wind from the land got up and blew light dashes of rain across the windows, but they were soon gone, and it was a fine day. Full of potatoes and fish, tired perhaps but comfortably settled in the stomach, the sin-eater picked up his bag and swung it over his shoulder. He had taken his money and put it in his pocket. Behind him at the trestle tables in the street he could hear laughter, the clatter of plates, the beginnings of music. He breathed deeply, shrugged, made a gesture with his hands, all at once, as if to convey to himself his own sense of freedom.

He was not after all that boy from Sour Bridge, or his Uncle Prinsep. A stocky, energetic man of middle height, he whistled off down Henrietta Street, ready to walk as far as he could. He looked inland, at the hills looming through squalls of rain. Soon he would climb up among them and let the wind blow those clean, childish little sins out of him and away.