The Memory Palace. Gill Alderman
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off the light. At once, the context dissolved, the absurd conversation, the prevarication. Night was a better landscape for an amorous conjunction. There must be a moon. Her garments were luminous in the pallid light: her body would have the same lucent quality. He began to be excited: no more words. He approached her swiftly, conscious of the sweat and grime on him, the wine on his breath.
This was not what he’d imagined – champagne, a better room. Beside her he was a rampant giant and for an instant wondered: will she protest? The texture of her unshent skin made him delirious. He bent to take her offered kisses and, as he felt her warm, dry hands upon him, it occurred to him – a new horizon, a fresh Darien – that
the white beer I had consumed, following on the three ritual glasses of kumiz, was doubtless to blame – but there was no time to think further, blaming mere beverages. I had chosen carefully, deliberately; had won the only girl of the year to bear faint resemblance to Nemione Baldwin, a scrawny witch of a creature with a sweep of hair as yellow as the sheaved corn. The contest, to a renegade Wolf, had been simplicity, a matter of judgement rather than ability, some skill in aiming at the narrow target.
I waited, the corn stalks pricking my bare thighs. That I should sit here at all was accident. Tired of my journey and the prospect of more fighting, I had remained on the itinerant smith’s wagon; so, arrived in this village, a poor rat-haunted place on the very hem of the Plains, where a rash of small cornfields competed for bare unattractiveness with scorched pastures where grazed a few horses the Ima had outworn. I had known nothing of the summer festival I walked into, combined propitiation and celebration. Strangers were scarce. The old women had pounced on me and, in truth, they were like corn rats themselves, bright eyed and chattering, nipping at my arms and shoulders with little snatches and tugs. The young women had been driven (mirthful though they were) into a ruinous barn on the edge of the field. I contested with the village youths and one other unfortunate stray, a fat itinerant horse-butcher, upon a shooting-ground which resembled the Green Wolves’ butts as little as my prize did the fair novice-turned-thaumaturge.
Here she came, walking delicately in bare feet across the stubble, veiled in dirty white. As she drew nearer I saw that her bridal veil was an old flour sack.
Well, I had got myself into these curious circumstances.
It was a long time since I had had a woman.
I felt pity rather than desire; also an absurd shame which quickened when I thought that these ignoble deeds must, when they had become memories, be kept with the jewels in the memory palace. I moved the sacking aside and looked into her thin face, averting my eyes from the rest of her wasted body.
‘You need not, mistress, if I do not please you,’ I said. It was a poor attempt at the courtesies I had been taught in boyhood. But that, too, was past.
‘I must,’ she whispered. I had difficulty in understanding her dialect: ‘I want,’ was what she seemed to say.
‘Then where is our bed?’
‘Here, on the dry ground,’ she said; or was it: ‘On the fruitful earth’? – and, without more ado, she flung the sack from her and eagerly knelt upon it where it fell. I hastened to kneel with her; but I wondered, were we about to pray?
‘One thing,’ she said. ‘Before – why me?’
This, I understood, looking askance on my lower body which, independent of my intellect, had begun to prepare itself for the lovers’ contest. Was I to be kind, or cruel?
‘You remind me of the woman I love,’ I said.
‘That is a good omen,’ the girl said.
‘Is she a good woman?’ the girl said.
I lay down in a confusion of body and mind, the myriad facets of my existence dancing in the air and crowding close about me on the rough sacking. The girl also lay down. For ten beats of my heart nothing happened, but the sun beat down; then she was there, covering me, and I thought that Famine rode till she kissed me and I remembered the unsurpassed smoothness of the beer they had given me. After this, her breasts might make milk as sweet as the thick, fermented kumiz.
That was the meaning of it all: a harvest, a child.
Or a simple adventure.
Was this the real meaning behind my voluntary diversion from the journey?
Of course! A simple – and delightful – adventure of a common kind, Guy assured himself. The quarry and reward of men down the centuries. If unlike his affairs with Helen, Susan, Diana, Sandy –
Alice Naylor, her character uncovered by his researches and by her final, unremitting presence in his house, had ingenuity and invention, most alive and most alluring in his dreams where her miserable expression was transformed to laughter; where she always refused him, closed and cold at the last moment even as he tried in vain to enter her.
This other Alice had known very well what she did, where to touch and how, so that, at last expiring in her he came to the summit of the highest pass, the zenith of his ambition; after which her involuted, tender succulence was his.
He watched her sleeping with no sense of guilt. The warm night enfolded him. France herself cradled him. He hardly knew her either: a few jaunts here and there, some holidays in various situations – there was a vastness, and also an unpredictability, about her which England did not have. In a bed, in a house, in a street, in a town, in a green province, in a wide country, lies my love – He grinned to himself in the dark.
In all the building, no sound. He thought of the weary proprietor and his family; wondered where they slept. Close by? In a separate wing?
He lay and sweated, cooling as the fluids dried. A door banged. Someone passed the door – perhaps. A car, long way away. Suddenly he was in the car, driving furiously; and instantly awake. Christ, how his body ached; hard to know which bit to stretch. Must remember – more petrol, postcards, pay the bills – no, on holiday. Now he was wide awake. He stretched out and switched on the lamp beside the bed; rolled slowly back to look again at the marvellous girl.
She lay on her right side, facing away, all white, the blonde hair like straw in a sunny field or the thin filaments of flax Rumplestiltskin span into gold for the king’s daughter. Her legs and arms were graceful, long; everything, breasts, belly, buttocks, neat and under-used. He looked again at those small breasts with their pale pink nipples, touched her shoulder gently, lifted her hair. Her face in repose was delicate; did have, indeed, the features of one of Sassetta’s angels. She still wore her ribbon. The black band tight around so long and white a neck disturbed him; he was not sure if his unease was spiritual or sexual; but ‘I’m quite godless,’ she had said. Curse the inaccuracies of the English vernacular! Did she mean ‘moderately’ or ‘totally’?
He touched the velvet ribbon gently, noticing how its silken edge bit into her neck.
The curious book she’d been reading on the ferry lay there, with her bits and pieces on the chair. He got up softly to fetch it; lay down and opened its lurid cover.
‘The Evil Life of Lèni la Soie.’ Inside was a frontispiece taken from a contemporary sketch; it showed a dishevelled beauty kneeling in prayer before a crucifix. Curious, he thought, how ready we are to accuse every whore and make of her a repentant Magdalen at once attractive and repellent. He turned the pages and found a short introduction.
‘France,’ it began, ‘called La Belle. Imagine two wide rivers and a city of tall stone houses, great squares where people walk, art galleries, churches, gardens, a ruined Gallo-Roman theatre high above the city. This is Lyon today.
‘Now let us imagine another scene. It is the latter half of the nineteenth century and the houses which cover the hilly quarter of Fourvière are falling down. This is the oldest quarter and those who live here, above the city but below the site of the new basilica, are also decaying from the harshness of life, from drink, from hunger. There is so little that even the rats have moved out, away to the Croix Rousse with the whores. Some of these evil-living women are thin, some fat; some even, to cater for all tastes, very old, wrinkled,