XXXII

FLAPPING EAGLE SAW her first; and an eerie shape she made, half-woman, half-quadruped, coming at them through the circling mist. As she drew nearer, it struck him that she was one of the most palely beautiful women he had ever seen.

Elfrida Gribb suffered, albeit infrequently, from insomnia. When it struck, leaving her dry-eyed and awake in the midnight hours, she would get up, don her warmest shawl and ride through K on a small velvet donkey. Wrapped up well to spite the mist and damp, she found it a soothing thing to do. One had to keep oneself occupied, after all.

Elfrida: the name suited her, and she abhorred all diminutives. —A name is a name, she said. Elfin-faced and elf-boned, there could have been no other name for Mrs Gribb. She was delicately roseate skin fitting perfectly over soft rises and falls of flesh; her mouth small and softly-pursed and her eyes like sparkling water. Her clothes were old lace, her shawl embroidered with lilies, her hats as wide-brimmed as her wide green eyes, drooping across her face like long quiet lashes. Often she wore a veil. Mostly she was happy, her lightness of spirit infecting all around her; and when she was sad she kept it to herself. Other people had their own worries to fret at, she told herself stoically. She could cope with herself perfectly well.

Thanks to Ignatius. Ignatius Gribb provided her with a secure, immovable centre for her being. Her entire life and all her delight revolved around him. I thank whatever brought us together, she would tell him. If marriages are made in the heavens, then ours was made in the seventh. And he would grunt and nod and she would sniff his reassuring new-socks smell and be comforted and whole. A woman needed a love like this in a place like K. It kept away the darkness.

Shored up by the strength of this love, she felt it her duty to do her level best to impart something of her strength to the weak. To nurse the halt and feed the hungry was to her a privilege and a debt paid. This zeal made her as many enemies as friends. Not everyone likes to be helped; not everyone in K responded to her cosy goodwill. And the obverse of her sunny life was that Elfrida Gribb was something of a prig.

She was, however, beautiful, even through a veil; and Flapping Eagle stood entranced for a moment at the entrance to the Elbaroom, framed with Virgil in the filtering yellow light of the doorway and the flicker of the lamp above their heads, silhouettes watching the pale, lovely ghost on its night ride.

An instant when their eyes met; and at that instant, the universe went out for an instant, freezing the inhabitants of the town in a series of characteristic positions, a tableau fixed in the aspic of a blink in time.

The most unlikely duo in the Elbaroom sat at a low round table about halfway down the long, narrow hostelry. One of them was enormous, a bear of a man, an impression he heightened by wearing a bearskin coat practically all the time, for all that it was rarely very cold in K. Perhaps it was the coat that gave his face its bright red colouring. It was a face like a craggy tomato. Beads of sweat stood excitedly on its brow. Its eyebrows beetled inwards and downwards towards the rough peak of his nose, spilling over gleaming eyes on their way. He spoke rapidly; his hands swung in huge, dangerous, clawing arcs.

His companion was as slim as he was wide, as slight and elegant as he was cumbersome; a dainty man with a young face and Calf Island’s traditional ancient eyes. At present, these eyes held a look of infinite boredom—held it, moreover as though accustomed to doing so. They were discreetly downcast, watching his tapered hands pulling the legs off a spider, sharply, cleanly.

The dainty man was called Hunter. His full name was Anthony St Clair Peyrefitte Hunter, but his companion called him The Two-Time Kid. The name had stuck, not particularly because of the insult latent in it, but thanks to Hunter’s frequent avowal that he would ‘try anything twice’. The bear-like man, with his unerring gift for the obvious, had asked, why twice? and Mr Hunter had replied, with the slight disdain of centuries of good inbreeding:

—Once to see if one likes it; twice to see if one was right.

—Wal, guffawed the bear, you little two-timer! His bellow had effectively overpowered Hunter’s dainty sneer.

The bear was called Peckenpaw. K knew him as ‘One-Track’ Peckenpaw. He told stories no man questioned; he was too big to be accused of telling tall tales. His stories were full of the legends of the Old West; the time he stood up against old Wild Bill and stared him down; the time he bent William Bonney’s rifle into a knot with his bare hands; gold rush tales of mining towns where men were men and women were grateful. But at the time of the blink he was boring Mr Hunter with his favourite story, told a thousand times before, that was one reason for the title of ‘One-Track’. His repetitive, compulsive tale-telling was the other.

One-Track Peckenpaw had once spent centuries of his life hunting the North American counterpart of the Yeti: Big-foot. He had never caught him. His tales were full of the aggressive melancholia of failure, sterile inventions about how the big one got away. It was to catch Bigfoot that he had accepted the burden of immortality; it was the grudging certainty that he never would which eventually made him a Candidate for Calf Mountain.

—There was this time, he was saying, I got sure he was a woman. It was the cunning of him, the way he played me along, the bastard. I got to thinking, if he’d been a human-been he’d’ve been a woman for sure and a cockteaser to boot. It was a fool idea, him being a female, but it climbed in my head and wouldn’t get out. Once I dreamed I fucked him … her. Jesus that was a wrestling match. Woulda broken you in two at the least, Mister Two-Time.

—I’ll try anything … began Hunter mildly.

—Twice, bellowed One-Track Peckenpaw, drowning his audience’s voice. Yeah. Anyway. It was a pleasure to track him. Like being on the heels of a wilful woman needing taming. I’d think how a woman would behave when I saw his footprint near a stream. Was it a bluff or a double-bluff? Which way was he really going? I’ve always trusted to instinct. You get a feel of your quarry stronger than any scent. If the signs don’t add up with the feel you ignore the signs. That’s the difference between a lousy tracker and a great one.

—You never caught it, though, interposed Two-Time sweetly.

—Saw him twice, said Peckenpaw from a distance. This shape, huge like a mountain, going through thick forest growth like it wasn’t there. When I got to the spot it was like a tank had gone through. It gives a man respect seeing a thing like that.

He was silent for a moment.

—The second time, he went on, was the time he came to visit me. Sleeping’s a risky business in Bigfoot land. I used to put an alarm system round my campfire—tripwires everywhere to ring bells and clatter my pans. One night I wake up and there he is, just standing there, looking down at me. Walked through all the alarms as neat as you please just to take a good look. That’s when I stopped thinking he was a woman. I lay there still as the grave and he nodded and walked away so then I turn to grab my rifle, IT WASN’T THERE. He moved it to the other side of the fire. O he was clever all right. And I’ll tell you something else, Mr sophisticated Hunter. I may not have caught the motherfucker but he made me more of a man than You’ll ever be. COME AND GET ME, he meant when he gave me that stare, CATCH AS CATCH CAN. YOU see: he showed me a point of no return. didn’t matter that I was the best tracker that ever lived with ten lifetimes’ experience. He had a million years’ practice at running away. So now? Now I respect his privacy.

One-Track Peckenpaw leapt to his feet suddenly, his arms windmilling as he shouted: —COME AND GET ME, YOU BASTARD! CATCH AS CATCH CAN I and burst into convulsive laughter, great gulping laughs that shook his eyebrows; while Two-Time Hunter pulled the last leg off his spider, leaving it a round, wriggling, dying core.

Blink.

Elfrida Gribb had always thought the trouble with Flann O’Toole had to do with two things: his preoccupation with being such a disgustingly uproarious broth of a boy, and the fact that his middle name was Napoleon. An Irish Napoleon was a concept so grotesque it had to end up like O’Toole.

O’Toole made potato whisky in a back room and seduction attempts upon the person of every female who entered the Elbaroom; he swore oaths regularly and broke promises unfeelingly; he was prone to fits of violent temper, but thought himself a reasonable man; he was likely at any moment of the day or night to keel over in an alcoholic stupor, but he considered himself a man of power; he was carried to his bed every night in a haze of obscenity and vomit, but was convinced he was a leader in the community; he quoted poetry as he did ugly things. To Elfrida, his presence darkened a room and denied the beauty of life; to himself, he was a lightning-rod, conductor of electricity, Prometheus unchained, raw, carnal man in his prime, the very vitality of life. There was, too, a strong religious streak left in him; on mornings-after he could be seen mortifying his flesh with a cane, or heard crying in agony through the door of Mlle de Sade’s chambers at the House of the Rising Son. It was one of the reasons Dolores had left him; those who undergo physical suffering or mutilation involuntarily naturally loathe those who inflict it upon themselves in the name of God. Her only possible reaction had been flight.

—Holy Mary, cried O’Toole to a farmer’s wife, who had shrunk away in fear, you look about ready for it, me darlin. What wouldn’t you say now to a large dose of O’Toole’s hot cock, eh? There, don’t shrink away. ’Tis the Organ O’Toole I offer, you Protestant whore. And that’s no mean gift I can tell you surely with the stops pulled out and all.

The farmer sat bridling by his wife, but made no attempt to defend her; a bellyful of potato whisky makes a mean fighter.

—There now, observe your husband, lurched O’Toole, if he isn’t being more sensible than yourself, then I don’t know what. Compliance is a virtue; resistance is an act o’ violence and me I’m a hater of all that. Come now, up with your skirts, down with your underwear and Napoleon O’Toole will give you an evening to remember him by. ’Twould be an act of true pacifism. For which I believe the Sanskrit word is Ahimsa. Mr Gandy himself’d be proud of you.

The woman shook her head imploringly at her husband.

—Now then, he said, half-rising from his seat. O’Toole shoved him back.

—Would you deny me my due, sir, would you? This place is my land and a seigneur on his land has droits. Do not cross me. Do not. In the morning no doubt I shall chastise meself as once I chastised meself for years upon years through a holy union with a broken hag of a wife. That was a religious thing to do if you like, to pleasure the crippled and suffer agonies in the doing. Have you ever screwed a hunchback, farmer? Then do not deny me my freedom. My time is served.

—I will not go with you, said the woman.

—Will you not? roared O’Toole. Will you not now? You come to the Elbaroom and will not go with its master? Is that manners, woman, to treat your host so? The name itself gives you fair warning, El Barooom! The blast of the rocket and the prick of Napoleon. Have you no wish to roll with emperors? I would give you children of genius. If I could.

—I will not go, insisted the woman tearfully.

—Then go to the devil, cried O’Toole, and raised the small table that sat between the peasant couple over his head, scattering glasses and drinks. He made to throw it across the room.

Blink.

(In O’Toole’s version of the breakdown of his marriage to Dolores, he held that when he had suffered long enough, been tortured long enough by her deformity and ungratefulness, he had thrown her out. The truth was a different matter. Dolores O’Toole had left her husband because he could not satisfy her. Flann Napoleon O’Toole had only half a testicle, having lost the rest in a fight with a dog; his limp penis was but an inch long and, owing to the depredations of the demon drink, he could only rarely stiffen it to twice that size. These circumstances are offered in extenuation of his behaviour.)

When Jocasta had replaced Liv as Madame of the town’s brothel, it was Virgil Jones who had suggested the ironic play on words that was now its name. But though she insisted on keeping a spotless house, it possessed none of the expansive, trellised, wrought-iron elegance of the city that New Orleans had once been; nor did the Madame resemble the tragic queen, wife and mother to the oedipal Rex, in any wise but their shared name. Thus both arms of the pun were somewhat truncated, and the House of the Rising Son forged its own style.

One of the first innovations she had made, once she felt strong enough to move out of the all-encompassing shadow of Liv, was to increase the specialization of her employées’ functions. Liv had thought it enough that they should all be dedicated exponents of the horizontal arts in general; Jocasta had always disagreed, perhaps because she was herself best at being an all-rounder, jack-of-all-trades, and had always felt a nagging dissatisfaction with herself. So she gave her employees new names on the same day as the brothel; and with the new names went extremely precise sexual functions. She believed the change had paid dividends; people said the House of the Rising Son was an altogether lighter, more open, less embarrassing, more rewarding place to visit than Liv’s ménage. (It is easier to ask for the services of a lady whom you know to be an expert in your favourite variations than to ask an anonymous whore to indulge your whims.) And Jocasta had the feeling that her girls took a greater pride in their work these days.

The one employee who gave her cause for concern was the single male whore, Gilles Priape. He was lazy for his size; she knew men needed longer rest-periods than women, but she suspected Monsieur Gilles of malingering. Specialization again, you see: he was the only one practising the male arts and was therefore forced into versatility. Still, his customers seemed content enough. Speciality of the House, they called him, much to the irritation of the girls. Especially when his customers were men.

Jocasta was walking the corridors of her empire. Behind closed doors, the staff were busy. Jocasta liked nothing better than these muffled sounds, the grunts of real ecstasy mingling with the far more expert sighs of simulation. She sometimes thought she preferred this aural stimulation to the act itself … but then she put the unprofessional thought firmly in its place.

Certainly she was a desirable woman; she knew that all right. Not, perhaps, in the same visual class as some of the girls, but definitely a class lady. Her features were as classically Grecian as her name; and if her breasts were a trifle too heavy, she had stopped worrying about them aeons ago. They looked well enough, swelling through her long, floor-length, white lace nightgown, shadowed by the light from the candle she held as she toured the building. She enjoyed dressing like this. It made her feel pure.

Whereas, as every one of her staff was fully aware, anything they could do, Madame Jocasta could perform twice as erotically. She was the best; and if she undervalued her all-round gifts, her cohorts did not. On the rare occasions when she performed herself, they would crowd to the observation-holes in the walls of her room, and learn.

The sound of the whip was unmistakable. It came from the door behind which “Boom-Boom” de Sade was in full cry. Her hungry voice drawled something about a red-hot poker and Jocasta moved on contentedly.

Boom-Boom was a great favourite of Flann O’Toole’s, since she made him positively enjoy his self-mortifications; but Flann O’Toole was no favourite of Jocasta’s. He was too liable to turn sadist himself and damage the staff.

The next door yielded only silence. This was Mile Florence Nightingale’s chamber. She exuded a comfortable, homely sexuality, so peaceful as she displayed an accidental nipple, so demure as she undressed. Florence always did it, never screwed or fucked or shafted or banged; did it with grace and in the dark. As Jocasta paused, a tuneful hum welled up from within. Florence was singing her client to sleep with a soft lullaby.

From Gilles’ room came the sound of music. It could be that he was trying to conceal his lack of effort; but Madame Jocasta decided not to interfere tonight. She would, however, have to speak to Gilles soon.

The Indian girl, Kamala, was not in her room. Madame Jocasta remembered the presence next door, in the bed of the Chinese contortionist Lee Kok Fook, of a very special guest. Count Cherkassov had requested the company of his two favourite ladies, and while Madame the Countess Cherkassova slept unknowing in her bed, the two mistresses of the arts of the East were persuading the amiably stupid Count’s aristocratic blood to flow somewhat faster than usual. Lee Kok Fook and Kamala Sutra made a perfect team.

—Come in, Madame.

Media’s voice brought a glow of pleasure to Jocasta’s face. This one was her favourite; the only one who truly understood her. Media was the talent nearest Jocasta’s own. To avoid competing with her protégée, Jocasta had allotted her the task of pleasing only women; which she did with great zest. —I like women, she said. I get on well with them.

Jocasta entered her lieutenant’s room.

—It would appear we’re both free tonight, said Media. She was standing with her back to the window, naked, displaying herself to the night.

—Shut the window, Media. The mist. You’ll catch something.

Media obeyed unquestioningly. Madame knew best.

—Since we have this little time on our hands, she suggested, I was wondering if you felt like a little practice, Madame?

—That’s what I like, Media, said Madame Jocasta, letting her nightgown fall to the floor. Devotion.

—It’s a pleasure, Madame, replied Media, coming to her.

Blink.

Mr Norbert Page was a small man.

He wore small silver-rimmed bifocals.

He took small steps.

He drank small drinks.

His hands made small movements of nervousness as they discovered that the door to the shed was unlocked. Alex was getting far too good with his golden toothpick. He pushed the door open, and Alex grinned up at him, all innocence and childish charm.

—Alex, said Norbert Page, wagging as stern a finger as he could muster, you haven’t been out, have you? It was a forlorn question; Alex nodded the answer happily: —Yes.

—Did anyone see you?

Alex shook his head, still smiling beatifically.

—Alexy, said Mr Page in great relief, You’ll be the death of me, you will. If you’d been seen … if your mother had found out I went to have a little drinkie…

He gave up; Alex’s grin widened. —Play, he commanded. Play game.

Norbert Page loved indoor games; his armchair athleticism had earned him the title of “Sports” Page. This love made him Alex’s ideal guardian.

They played draughts on a chessboard, with chessmen. This enabled Mr Page to add a secret level of difficulty for himself. When the draughts reached the queening square, he would replace a pawn by a major chess piece. To Alex, these signified no more than a normal doubled draught; but Sports Page meticulously observed the seniority of Queen over Rook, Rook over Bishop and so forth, never permitting himself to take a great piece with a lesser. It made the game more interesting for him and gave Alex a chance of winning.

—Your move, said Mr Page.

Blink.

There were, of course, some who slept through the blink. Irina Cherkassova for instance lay unmoved in her large, if crude, four-poster, oblivious to this as she was to her husband’s nocturnal retreat.

If the Rising Son was the tallest house in K, the Cherkassov residence, somewhat distant from the main body of the town, was the most sprawling. It also had a fine, large garden. In fact, it was as near to an old dacha as they could make it; but since the family was not nearly large enough to fill it, they were obliged to share it with one P. S. Moonshy, about whom the standing joke was that he had been an afterthought on the part of his parents— hence his initials. P. S. Moonshy was the town quartermaster, and the continual battle that raged between him and the Cherkassovs was one of the wonders and hilarities of the town. —’Tis a happy irony, O’Toole had been heard to say in a sober moment, that that nest of gentility should be afflicted with so potent a viper of levelling.

P. S. Moonshy slept every night with Marx under the pillow. It was uncomfortable, but he did it, as a mark of respect. He was sleeping now. Badly.

So, in the neighbouring house, was that other possessor of meaningful initials, Ignatius Quasimodo Gribb.

Elfrida Gribb, being a prig, was filled with a faint nausea as she turned on to the Cobble-way and approached the Elbaroom. She could tolerate it no more than she could Madame Jocasta’s hell-hole; and if she had a complaint to level at her sleeping husband, it was that in his all-embracing love for the town where he had made his home, he could find no place for a condemnation of those two mansions of corruption.

It was, then, an ill-assorted quartet that found itself outside the Elbaroom … Virgil Jones, all of a shamble, slouching beside Flapping Eagle, squinting into the mist; the man called Stone crouching up the cobbled way; and the pale woman astride her pliant donkey.

Elfrida’s eyes met Flapping Eagle’s. She caught her breath.

Blink.