The Memory Palace. Gill Alderman
voice had deepened a little, against his memory.
‘Come in,’ she said, and opened the doors. He stepped up into the van. The interior was dim and heavily perfumed. Her crystal ball and tarot cards lay on the folding table and her lucky chank shell stood on the shelf above the bed; the paperbacks were there as well and, incredibly, a soft leather-covered manuscript book which looked very like the diary of Lèni la Soie. He admired the turned and carved woodwork, the shiny stove and the patterned china; the lace edgings on the sheets and the crocheted bedspread.
‘It’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘It looks the same –’
‘It is the same.’ She gave no explanation but seated herself on the bed and waved a hand toward her chair. He sat down.
‘Now, welcome, Guy. The years between us have vanished today. Our son has brought us both here.’
‘He is a fine young man.’
‘He was born of a sorceress and fathered by a story-teller. Would he be ordinary?’
‘I suppose not.’
Helen stood up to light the oil lamp upon the cupboard. She lifted the lit lamp down and held it by its heavy base; the yellow light illuminated her dark skin and made it glow like burnished bronze. Guy could not see a mark or a line upon her face. Her lips were as softly full as they had been when she was only twenty-two.
‘I am thirty-nine, Guy. Am I still beautiful?’ she asked him.
He breathed in and held the breath a long moment.
‘Yes,’ he said, eventually, when he had studied her as if she were the Mona Lisa or one of Titian’s heavenly nudes. ‘Yes. The only thing which has changed is your voice. It has become melodious, a contralto holding your every experience.’
‘Good. Do you love me, Guy?’
He could not find a ready answer to this question, and hesitated. She intervened.
‘Oh, I know you have “loved” a lot of women.’
He still could not find an answer but, groping in his mind for words, found one he thought might do.
‘I certainly love my memory of you – but when the vardo was burned: at first, I thought you had died in it.’
‘The police did not discover my remains!’
‘But you had gone. I had to reconstruct my life. There was a void in it.’
‘I am glad you no longer love me, Guy, for I have lived with Georges Dinard for nearly ten years and it seems like eternity.’
‘You brought me all the way to France to tell me that?’
‘As you said, you have come to visit Dominic.’
Helen set the lamp on the table and sat close by him on the locker top. He stared at her face, and its shadow which the lamplight threw high up the wall. Her beauty was supernatural; he had never seen another woman close on forty with a face like that. There was no artifice about it, no cutting or stretching, no clever making-up. It was the face of a young woman, and as such puzzled him. She divined his thoughts.
‘If you had come to the house ten minutes earlier, you would have surprised me lying naked in the sun,’ she said, ‘and you would have seen that nothing has changed. You would also have embarrassed me. As you know, Romany women are modest and do not show themselves to strangers.’
‘Helen! You are cruel.’
‘And you are an old philanderer; but you are the father of my son. We will drink a toast to the past at dinner this evening. You’ll stay in the house.’
‘I must fetch my car from the square and I have a – er – companion.’
‘Of course you have. Think of the old days, Guy. You were an adulterer then. I made you one.’
He closed his eyes to avoid her, but could not avoid the things she spoke of and roamed the gallery of his mind, pausing now and then before portraits and pastoral scenes. He saw the dished summit of Karemarn Hill, the craggy circle of hawthorns extending their ragged shadows under the stars; snow, and himself cold, alone. He saw the same trees bright with blossom and a full Spring moon, the twelve naked witch-women dancing round him, backs turned, legs leaping, buttocks muscular, flat, rounded, heavy –
Helen spoke into his echoing mind. ‘Those were the days – of youthful adventures!’ she said. ‘But now you see clearer visions than I do. Why not show me your power? Tell me a story!’
‘Very well.’
His eyes remained closed. It was easier thus to invent, and it prevented him from seeing her burning beauty. He began to tell her a story:
‘Once upon a time, as they say in Malthassa and other unmapped countries of the mind – once, then, upon a fine midsummer’s evening, Koschei came upon Brother Fox perambulating the cloister. He was young and still without discipline and the Brother, whose profession was to instil self- and other disciplines in the novices, was of middle age; but both men felt the lightness and cheer which the warm evening induced. Brother Fox paused so that Koschei could come up with him.
‘“Look, Corbillion,” he said. “Even the moths are hungry – see the fat moon moth feeding on the honesty flowers in the garth, and the night-hawk on the woodbine.”
‘“I,” Koschei responded dreamily, “Do not hunger in that way. Neither marchpane nor sugar, not tender veal nor a bloody beefsteak would satisfy me. I am in love.”
‘The sly Brother held his long sleeve up against his mouth and laughed quietly into it. At length, recovering, he said,
‘“With whom, my Cavalier Corbillion – or am I bold to ask?”
‘“With Woman, with every She, with the Female and the Feminine – the Sex itself,” answered Koschei.
‘“And none of these in particular?”
‘“There is –” Koschei began and, stifling the sentence and the thought that provoked it before they were fully born, began again,
‘“Any,” he said, “would satisfy me tonight – young, old, fair or foul, in her prime or past it.”
‘Brother Fox looked sideways at the young novice and admired the white teeth which gently bit into the fleshy, lower lip, the dark, jutting nose and the black curling hair which, against every rule of the Order, had been teased into ringlets and dressed with perfumed oil. Indeed, the heavy perfume dizzied the monk.
‘“You are an agreeable sight yourself,” he murmured and, speaking more loudly, said,
‘“I know where to find a pretty something which will quench your fire and satisfy your pride. Return secretly to your cell and wait there. When I return with the prize, she shall knock three times.”
‘The newly risen moon shone into the cloister garth and Koschei marvelled as he looked at its unwavering light and at the pallor it lent the bright flowers. Everything, the stones, the plants, the arches of the cloister and their two faces, his and Brother Fox’s, had been turned silver or black. Brother Fox winked lewdly at him, half dispelling the magical mood, and padded off in the direction of the town. Koschei returned silently to his cell.
‘In Espmoss, at the sign of the Rampant Lion in Grope Lane, Brother Fox concluded his negotiations. The midsummer madness was full on him and the moon shone bright in the street outside; or else why did he spend his own coin and risk his reputation for sternness and severity to please his favourite Novice? He had chosen the woman as one might a peach, for colour and ripeness and for the complex odours which assailed his keen nose when he bent his head and applied that huge organ to her silk-shrouded bosom. He pinched Ysera carefully on the buttocks, paid over his silver to the bawd, and brought the wench home to the cloister.
‘Koschei sat quietly on his mattress of straw and thought about Woman, soft where he was hard,