The Pool of Mnemosyne, page 2
“That it’s just a matter of convenience? Or wayward lust?”
Now there was challenge in her tone. I couldn’t help remembering that the last time I had seen Hecate Rain, she had not only predicted that I would seduce Mariette, but that it would be like spearing fish in a barrel—except that she was uncertain as to whether I would be the spear-wielder or the fish. Since then, Madame had suggested to me that the passions that sometimes sprang from my painting might be regarded as supernatural impositions over which I had no control—but that was not an excuse I could have offered to Elise, on my own behalf or Mariette’s, even if I had believed it.
“Even if it were as simple as the convenience of the situation or a whim of lust,” I said, softly, “it would be no reason to judge her harshly.”
“And innocent as I am,” she retorted, “I already know that it’s more complicated than that. I’m not judging anyone...but perhaps it’s as well that you’re…not at your best.” She looked at the painting again, which was looking worse by the minute.
“What do you mean?” I asked, guardedly.
“That if you make me as beautiful as you made her, she’ll be biting her knuckles over me as well as Helen and Madame.”
I grimaced. I didn’t know what to say. When I had started the affair with Mariette it had been clearly understood between us that it couldn’t be permanent and might not be exclusive, but understanding a contract isn’t the same thing as liking its terms. In the decades I’d spent on Mnemosyne I’d grown used to summer visitors who never wanted anything more than a temporary fling, and artists who often thought it a essential part of their vocation to feel the same way, but Mariette, for various reasons, was an exception to the latter rule, no matter how much she strove to pay lip service to it. She had apparently monopolized Charles Parenot’s fidelity effortlessly, with an iron grip, perhaps not for the reasons she would have preferred—and perhaps, too, it had diminished him in her eyes and helped paved the way for her desertion—but there had been a security in that monopoly whose value she might only now be beginning to realize.
“But you can hardly stop painting, can you” Elise said, in a softer and more thoughtful voice. “And you can’t stop looking for the beauty in the people you paint, can you?”
“I hope not,” I muttered, almost reflexively.
That surprised her. “You’re really worried?” she queried, glancing at the painting again. Her initial disappointment had worn off, and she seemed to have accepted my judgment that it was just a temporary hitch.
I shrugged. “I can’t help it,” I said. “No matter how many times I’ve recovered from bad spells, I can never entirely convince myself that the next might not be the last, any more than I can convince myself that the morning will never come when I look in the mirror and see my hair beginning to turn white. This time…well, as I say, I’ve been out of sorts for weeks.”
“But that…,” she began, and then stopped, in a fashion that was most unlike her. I took the inference that the advice she had said she wanted wasn’t just a matter of her adoptive mother’s seemingly-uncontrollable jealousy. A nasty suspicion that must have been lurking in the back of my mind for some time, deliberately suppressed, began to make itself manifest—and became ominous.
I had to make an effort to collect myself. I looked out of the large bay window at the long hill that climbed up from the headland on which the house stood, all the way to the wooded slopes of the upper mountain, displaying cultivated fields, orchards and meadows of every sort.
Normally, it was a relaxing sight, especially now that I was completely used to the sight of patient Sileni working in the fields. This time, I took no comfort from it. That, too, intensified the lurking feeling that something was wrong—that somewhere in this improvised Eden, or in the depths of my own being, there was a dangerous presence lurking.
“I’ve been…out of sorts myself,” she murmured. “I’ve been trying as hard as I can to fight it with the music, but…well, this time, I know it can’t be the house that’s haunted, and since the viola da gamba played that strange chord just before my grandfather was stabbed, it no longer seems to have a life of its own. So it must be me, mustn’t it?”
Suddenly, I had a flashback to the night I had taken Sister Ursule back to the Convent of Shalimar. That child is a visionary, she had said, after seeing Elise for a mere matter of minutes. And I had believed her. But since the night Dellacrusca had been killed, that impression had faded. In the months we’d been on the Island of Dionysus, and her true age had been revealed, she had seemed less precocious, less uncanny…but perhaps the shocks she had received had simply made her more cautious and more prudent.
When Sister Ursule had made her observation she had made it sadly, as if being a visionary was more of a curse than a blessing—and I had believed that too.
II. The Costs of Magic
“I need some air,” I said to Elise, because I needed time to process the thought that had just occurred to me, and to find some sort of helpful reaction to it, if I could. “The light’s beginning to go, so there wouldn’t be any possibility of my doing any more work today, even if I weren’t disgusted with myself. Would you like to take a walk along the cliffs, when I’ve cleaned my palette and brushes?”
“Yes,” she said.
She didn’t say anything more while I tidied my apparatus away, but it was obvious from the way her gaze followed me that she too was mulling over what she’s said, perhaps deciding what else she could say to me about it—and how honest she ought to be. I gathered that it was something that she must have been holding back, not merely during the long sitting, which had built up pressure in the interim, but for days, perhaps weeks.
I felt guilty about that. Why hadn’t I seen it? How had I not seen it? What had happened to my artist’s eye? Had I really been so preoccupied with my own malaise that I had become blind to hers, when she obviously needed attention, and her mother’s attention had been deflected even more manifestly than mine?
I felt that I had let her down—and there was no one in the world, including Mariette, that I didn’t want to let down as much as I didn’t want to let Elise down. If ever I had needed magical power, I thought, it was now, and not merely to restore my ability to paint…which seemed ironic, given that I had only just begun to believe, in recent weeks, after a century of denial, that I really did have something magical about me, as well as my strange longevity.
I was still exceedingly reluctant to believe that I was the sorcerer that many people believed me to be. I had always repeated to myself endlessly that I didn’t believe in magic, only in art, but that had always been quibbling—mere wordplay, as poor Tybalt Sphendon used to put it, in the days when he took it upon himself to disapprove of my flippancy. The mantra had usually worked before, even when I’d been confronted with blatantly supernatural events, but since my initiation into the cult of Dionysus, and the seeming magical intervention in which I had participated, across half the width of the Great Ocean, via the Orpheus triptych, my trust in its efficacy had been worn to wafer-thinness. I knew that my involvement in that magic operation had been that of an instrument, not an instigator, but that wasn’t a distinction in which I could take any comfort. Quite the reverse, in fact: I had never felt more in need of the elusive ability to take control of the wayward thrusts of the inexplicable.
When I had first begun writing the series of documents that this one will conclude, I had only been recording interest incidents, which had seemed intriguing and worth recording simply because they had something of the incomprehensible about them. Their supernatural aspects had seemed more intriguing than threatening, even on the fatal night when Eirene Magdelana had involved me—much as Madame had—in one of her own magical exploits. I had certainly been in danger earlier that night, and those surrounding me even more so, but Eirene’s magic, the only purposefully directed magic in which I had consciously participated prior to Madame’s evocation of Orpheus and Dionysus, had been a benign act of healing. In telling that story, and others, I had merely been relating marvels, in a detached and slightly cynical fashion
The events in which I had become entangled involving the fates of Claudius Jaseph, Conrad Othman and Lucien Sombre had all seemed separate, unconnected and carrying no particular implication with regard to myself or the nature of the world beyond the eternal conviction that I was a true artist, and that the world was mysterious. Even when I had begun to write the story of the Orpheus triptych, mere days after its completion, I had thought it another accident of happenstance of the same kind, and a closed incident. Writing the subsequent account of the aftermath of the triptych’s delivery and my abduction to the Island of Dionysus, however, had been a very different matter, as had the consequence of writing the story down and accommodating it to my consciousness.
That experience had altered my perspective. However skeptical I might remain regarding the nature and value of my initiation into the cult of Dionysus, there was nevertheless a sense in which I was now an initiate into mysteries. I could no longer regard the affair of the triptych, or the preceding events, as something isolated, a mere transient event in the ever-unfolding pattern of life.
I had certainly hoped, immediately thereafter, that it was a closed incident, that the completion of Madame’s Dionysiac rite would put an end to a distinct phase in my life that had necessarily be about to end anyway, and signal a new beginning, with a clean slate. That had been foolish optimism; the slate was far from clean, and there had been far too many loose ends dangling—so many, that I was beginning to fear that I might never be able to get free of them, no matter how long my extended Macrobian existence might last.
And in the weeks that had elapsed since the initiation, while I had written it down—and, to some extent, because I had written it down—I had become increasingly aware of the fact that my old pretences, the mental fortifications that had served me so well during their painstaking construction, had lost their resilience.
I had changed.
And Elise, I had to admit while I was conscious of her watching me tidy my apparatus away, in the shadow of the incompetent sketch that I already suspected would never become a true portrait, was one loose end that might turn out to be particularly entangling. I loved Mariette, but in the way that I had loved dozens of other women, in a fashion that would not make it unduly difficult for me to part with her when the time came. I had told the truth; I had no intention whatsoever of trying to seduce Elise...but that made matters between us more complicated, not less, just as my relationship with Hecate Rain had become more complicated rather than less once we were no longer sleeping together, inextricably bound by ties much subtler than brute passion.
When I had taken off my smock and washed my hands, Elise was still sitting patiently on the sofa, waiting for me…or waiting for something.
While we walked through the garden and out on to the headland she seemed to be gathering her thoughts. I glanced along the road to the port. Mariette had gone shopping in the town, and would be coming back very soon, but there was no sign of her yet. I couldn’t help feeling a slight unease because of her absence...and not only hers. I hadn’t seen Helen all day, and I hadn’t seen Madame for more than a week, in spite of her promises to continue my education in the true history of the empire and the authentic secret of magic. I had not been short of things to occupy my time but I was beginning to wonder whether, having served my immediate purpose, I had now became a matter of indifference to the island’s enigmatic monarch.
When we were two hundred paces away from the house, I began to feel a modest invigoration in the evening breeze. The headland along which we were walking bore very little resemblance to the headland on which my house on Mnemosyne was situated, in its topography or its vegetation, and the subtropical sea that extended away from it was very different in color and texture from the channel that separated Gaul from the Cassiterides, but there was something about the breeze, in spite of its comparative warmth and mildness, that seemed familiar, reminiscent of my island, of the idea of home.
Perhaps my stance or gait changed in consequence, because Elise suddenly rallied her own vivacity, and began to broach the subject that was really preying on her mind.
“I don’t want you to think I’m foolish,” she said, “but I hadn’t quite realized, even when I saw the work you’d done today, that you might be feeling something akin to what I’m feeling. You’d done such an expert job on Mariette’s portrait that…well, to get to the point, you must have noticed that my playing has been seriously deficient in the last few days, no matter what instrument I use.”
Subconsciously, perhaps I had. Consciously…I had had other things on my mind. “It’s not surprising,” I said, judiciously. “We’re in a strange place, far from anything we’ve known before. We both had an initial burst of enthusiasm simply because of getting off that damned steamer, where we’d been so horribly ill, and a further surge of elation after that bizarre rite of initiation. Since then, there’s inevitably been a let-down effect. It’s natural that we should be…a little out of sorts.”
“Perhaps,” she said, dubiously. “But…as I say, I don’t want to seem foolish, but I’ve been having bad dreams...”
I didn’t stop dead, but I certainly lost my stride for a moment, and she looked at me with a strange expression, which seemed to be hovering uncertainly between relief and ominous confirmation.
“You too,” she murmured. “I thought…I hardly dared say…but you can’t be haunted....”
“Neither can you,” I was quick to say.
She weighed the matter up, and then said: “Mariette must have told you, probably before we even left Mnemosyne, why we left Lutèce? And now I come to think about it, that blabbermouth agent of yours probably told you even before we set foot on the island.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “And Charles told me himself about not being able to shake off his absurd superstition about the viola being one of the devil’s instruments. But none of it was true, in any literal sense. Charles’s studio wasn’t really haunted; nor was the viola. Now we know that you’re older than you seemed, it’s possible that the first stirrings of puberty had something to do with your feelings, but I know that Mariette felt something too. I suspect that it had a good deal to do with developing tensions in the relationship between Charles and Mariette, which made all of you uneasy.”
She looked at me in rank disbelief. “The truth, Axel!” she demanded. “You know it was more than that.”
“I don’t know anything,” I said, feeling that it was cheating, even though it was the truth. “And the factors I cited probably did have something to do with it—perhaps a lot.”
“But we really were haunted,” she insisted, “and it was...well, not my fault, but I was the center of it, the…focal point. And now it’s back. And don’t tell me, please, that they’re just bad dreams, Axel, because I’m not stupid, and although I have no idea what’s going on, I know it’s something, and that’s why I’ve finally plucked up the courage to tell you about it, and ask for your advice.”
The pitch of her voice had risen somewhat, but it was far from hysterical, Elise didn’t suffer from hysteria.
She didn’t bother to spell out the nature of her dreams, because she thought she didn’t have to. The moment that I had reacted to her confession, she had leapt to the conclusion that I already knew. I had the same conviction myself, although I knew that there was no rational basis for the assumption.
“All dreams are just dreams,” I prevaricated. “It’s unwise to take them too seriously, or to allow them to disturb us unduly.” I wasn’t lying, just stretching the truth...too far.
She had no trouble guessing that. I hadn’t spent a great deal of time with her recently, and almost all of it in Mariette’s presence, but both of them had been curious about my life on Mnemosyne, and I had told them the story of Phelim and Candida Kracy, and the mysterious Lucien Sombre, because it was the most exciting sequence of events that had happened on Mnemosyne for years, and in order to do that, I had had to explain the art and dubious science of morpheomorphism, the shaping of dreams. In so doing, I had eliminated any possibility of persuading Elise now that her recent nightmares were mere accidents of circumstance that could simply be dismissed as irrelevancies and forgotten
“Please don’t treat me as a child, Axel,” she said, in a tone that cut straight to my heart, “no matter how much you want me to be one. Mariette can’t help it, and I understand why she’s denying that it’s happening, but she’s sharing your bed, so she can hardly conceal it from you...”
As soon as she said it, its truth became obvious, as well as the fact that my own attempts to conceal the fact from Mariette must have been equally futile. None of us had wanted to seem foolish to the others, and because of that, all three of us had been trying to fool ourselves. Perhaps it had always been inevitable that it would be Elise who would break through the web of deceit.
I licked my lips, and resumed walking again.
“How much do you… remember?” I asked her
Elise matched strides with me. “That is frustrating,” she said. “They seem to slip away when I wake up, dissolving in a matter of minutes…but they leave a kind of aftermath, a sticky residue of…not fear, exactly, but an aftertaste of fear…and not demonic, exactly, not…well, not like the sensation nightmares often have of being oppressed…violated…although that might be just a girl thing, or even a virgin thing that Marianne and you don’t have…but anyway, not a simple sensation of being held down or hurt.. more insidious than that, more penetrating, burrowing deeper…infecting, polluting, corrupting…you don’t know what I mean do you?” Her voice was suddenly plaintive.
“Actually” I said, “I do…only too well. And it’s my fault, not yours, for not having brought this out into the open, for not having admitted it. Being habituated to secrecy is no excuse. You’re right, I did know that Mariette was suffering, although she wouldn’t confess either, and it was idiotic of me not to guess that you were too. I’m sorry.”
