Vermilion Sands (15 page)

I noticed a few coloured streamers trailing through the curtains by the window, and glanced around to see where she kept her VT set, helping myself to a cocktail off the low table between us.

‘Do you read a lot of poetry?’ I asked, indicating the volumes around her.

She nodded. ‘As much as I can bear to.’

I laughed. ‘I know what you mean. I have to read rather more than I want.’ I took a copy of
Wave IX
from my pocket and passed it to her. ‘Have you come across this one?’

She glanced at the title page, her manner moody and autocratic. I wondered why she had bothered to ask me over. ‘Yes, I have. Appalling, isn’t it? “Paul Ransom” ’, she noted. ‘Is that you? You’re the editor? How interesting.’

She said it with a peculiar inflection, apparently considering some possible course of action. For a moment she watched me reflectively. Her personality seemed totally dissociated, her awareness of me varying abruptly from one level to another, like light-changes in a bad motion picture. However, although her mask-like face remained motionless, I none the less detected a quickening of interest.

‘Well, tell me about your work. You must know so much about what is wrong with modern poetry. Why is it all so bad?’

I shrugged. ‘I suppose its principally a matter of inspiration. I used to write a fair amount myself years ago, but the impulse faded as soon as I could afford a VT set. In the old days a poet had to sacrifice himself in order to master his medium. Now that technical mastery is simply a question of pushing a button, selecting metre, rhyme, assonance on a dial, there’s no need for sacrifice, no ideal to invent to make the sacrifice worthwhile –’

I broke off. She was watching me in a remarkably alert way, almost as if she were going to swallow me.

Changing the tempo, I said: ‘I’ve read quite a lot of your poetry, too. Forgive me mentioning it, but I think there’s something wrong with your Verse-Transcriber.’

Her face snapped and she looked away from me irritably. ‘I haven’t got one of those dreadful machines. Heavens above, you don’t think
I
would use one?’

‘Then where do the tapes come from?’ I asked. The streamers that drift across every evening. They’re covered with fragments of verse.’

Off-handedly, she said: ‘Are they? Oh, I didn’t know.’ She looked down at the volumes scattered about on the floor. ‘Although I should be the last person to write verse, I have been forced to recently. Through sheer necessity, you see, to preserve a dying art.’

She had baffled me completely. As far as I could remember, most of the poems on the tapes had already been written.

She glanced up and gave me a vivid smile.

‘I’ll send you some.’

The first ones arrived the next morning. They were delivered by the chauffeur in the pink Cadillac, neatly printed on quarto vellum and sealed by a floral ribbon. Most of the poems submitted to me come through the post on computer punch-tape, rolled up like automat tickets, and it was certainly a pleasure to receive such elegant manuscripts.

The poems, however, were impossibly bad. There were six in all, two Petrarchan sonnets, an ode and three free-form longer pieces. All were written in the same hectoring tone, at once minatory and obscure, like the oracular deliriums of an insane witch. Their overall import was strangely disturbing, not so much for the content of the poems as for the deranged mind behind them. Aurora Day was obviously living in a private world which she took very seriously indeed. I decided that she was a wealthy neurotic able to over-indulge her private fantasies.

I flipped through the sheets, smelling the musk-like scent that misted up from them. Where had she unearthed this curious style, these archaic mannerisms, the ‘arise, earthly seers, and to thy ancient courses pen now thy truest vows’? Mixed up in some of the metaphors were odd echoes of Milton and Virgil. In fact, the whole tone reminded me of the archpriestess in the Aeneid who lets off blistering tirades whenever Aeneas sits down for a moment to relax.

I was still wondering what exactly to do with the poems – promptly on nine the next morning the chauffeur had delivered a second batch – when Tony Sapphire called to help me with the make-up of the next issue. Most of the time he spent at his beach-chalet at Lagoon West, programming an automatic novel, but he put in a day or two each week on
Wave IX
.

I was checking the internal rhyme chains in an IBM sonnet sequence of Xero Paris’s as he arrived. While I held the code chart over the sonnets, checking the rhyme lattices, he picked up the sheets of pink quarto on which Aurora’s poems were printed.

‘Delicious scent,’ he commented, fanning the sheets through the air. ‘One way to get round an editor.’ He started to read the first of the poems, then frowned and put it down.

‘Extraordinary. What are they?’

‘I’m not altogether sure,’ I admitted. ‘Echoes in a stone garden.’

Tony read the signature at the bottom of the sheets. ‘“Aurora Day.” A new subscriber, I suppose. She probably thinks
Wave IX
is the
VT Times
. But what is all this – “nor psalms, nor canticles, nor hollow register to praise the queen of night –”?’ He shook his head. ‘What are they supposed to be?’

I smiled at him. Like most other writers and poets, he had spent so long sitting in front of his VT set that he had forgotten the period when poetry was actually handspun.

‘They’re poems, of a sort, obviously.’

‘Do you mean she wrote these herself?’

I nodded. ‘It has been done that way. In fact the method enjoyed quite a vogue for twenty or thirty centuries. Shakespeare tried it, Milton, Keats and Shelley – it worked reasonably well then.’

‘But not now,’ Tony said. ‘Not since the VT set. How can you compete with an IBM heavy-duty logomatic analogue? Look at this one, for heaven’s sake. It sounds like T. S. Eliot. She can’t be serious.’

‘You may be right. Perhaps the girl’s pulling my leg.’

‘Girl. She’s probably sixty and tipples her eau de cologne. Sad. In some insane way they may mean something.’

‘Hold on,’ I told him. I was pasting down one of the Xero’s satirical pastiches of Rupert Brooke and was six lines short. I handed Tony the master tape and he played it into the IBM, set the metre, rhyme scheme, verbal pairs, and then switched on, waited for the tape to chunter out of the delivery head, tore off six lines and passed them back to me. I didn’t even need to read them.

For the next two hours we worked hard. At dusk we had completed over one thousand lines and broke off for a well-earned drink. We moved on to the terrace and sat in the cool evening light, watching the colours melting across the desert, listening to the sand-rays cry in the darkness by Aurora’s villa.

‘What are all these streamers lying around under here?’ Tony asked. He pulled one towards him, caught the strands as they broke in his hand and steered them on to the glass-topped table.

‘“– nor canticles, nor hollow register –” ’ He read the line out, then released the tissue and let it blow away on the wind.

He peered across the shadow-covered dunes at Studio 5. As usual a single light was burning in one of the upper rooms, illuminating the threads unravelling in the sand as they moved towards us.

Tony nodded. ‘So that’s where she lives.’ He picked up another of the streamers that had coiled itself through the railing and was fluttering instantly at his elbow.

‘You know, old sport, you’re quite literally under siege.’

I was. During the next days a ceaseless bombardment of ever more obscure and bizarre poems reached me, always in two instalments, the first brought by the chauffeur promptly at nine o’clock each morning, the second that evening when the streamers began to blow across the dusk to me. The fragments of Shakespeare and Pound had gone now, and the streamers carried fragmented versions of the poems delivered earlier in the day, almost as if they represented her working drafts. Examining the tapes carefully I realized that, as Aurora Day had said, they were not produced by a VT set. The strands were too delicate to have passed through the spools and highspeed cams of a computer mechanism, and the lettering along them had not been printed but embossed by some process I was unable to identify.

Each day I read the latest offerings, carefully filed them away in the centre drawer of my desk. Finally, when I had a week’s production stacked together, I placed them in a return envelope, addressed it ‘Aurora Day, Studio 5, The Stars, Vermilion Sands,’ and penned a tactful rejection note, suggesting that she would feel ultimately more satisfied if her work appeared in another of the wide range of poetry reviews.

That night I had the first of what was to be a series of highly unpleasant dreams.

Making myself some strong coffee the next morning, I waited blearily for my mind to clear. I went on to the terrace, wondering what had prompted the savage nightmare that had plagued me through the night. The dream had been the first of any kind I had had for several years – one of the pleasant features of beach fatigue is a heavy dreamless sleep, and the sudden irruption of a dream-filled night made me wonder whether Aurora Day, and more particularly her insane poems, were beginning to prey on my mind more than I realized.

My headache took a long time to dissipate. I lay back, watching the Day villa, its windows closed and shuttered, awnings retracted, like a sealed crown. Who was she anyway, I asked myself, and what did she really want?

Five minutes later, I saw the Cadillac swing out of the drive and coast down the Stars towards me.

Not another delivery! The woman was tireless. I waited by the front door, met the driver half way down the steps and took from him a wax-sealed envelope.

‘Look,’ I said to him confidentially. ‘I’d hate to discourage an emerging talent, but I think you might well use any influence you have on your mistress and, you know, generally …’ I let the idea hang in front of him, and added: ‘By the way, all these streamers that keep blowing across here are getting to be a damn nuisance.’

The chauffeur regarded me out of his red-rimmed foxy eyes, his beaked face contorted in a monstrous grin. Shaking his head sadly, he hobbled back to the car.

As he drove off I opened the letter. Inside was a single sheet of paper.

The next selection of poems arrived when I was still in bed, trying to massage a little sanity back into my mind. I climbed out of bed and made myself a large Martini, ignoring the envelope jutting through the door like the blade of a paper spear.

When I had steadied myself I slit it open, and scanned the three short poems included.

They were dreadful. Dimly I wondered how to persuade Aurora that the requisite talent was missing. Holding the Martini in one hand and peering at the poems in the other, I ambled on to the terrace and slumped down in one of the chairs.

With a shout I sprang into the air, knocking the glass out of my hand. I had sat down on something large and spongy, the size of a cushion but with uneven bony contours.

Looking down, I saw an enormous dead sand-ray lying in the centre of the seat, its white-tipped sting, still viable, projecting a full inch from its sheath above the cranial crest.

Jaw clamped angrily, I went straight into my study, slapped the three poems into an envelope with a rejection slip and scrawled across it: ‘Sorry, entirely unsuitable. Please try other publications.’

Half an hour later I drove down to Vermilion Sands and mailed it myself. As I came back I felt quietly pleased with myself.

That afternoon a colossal boil developed on my right cheek.

Tony Sapphire and Raymond Mayo came round the next morning to commiserate. Both thought I was being pigheaded and pedantic.

‘Print one,’ Tony told me, sitting down on the foot of the bed.

‘I’m damned if I will,’ I said. I stared out across the desert at Studio 5. Occasionally a window moved and caught the sunlight but otherwise I had seen nothing of my neighbour.

Tony shrugged. ‘All you’ve got to do is accept one and she’ll be satisfied.’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked cynically. ‘This may be only the beginning. For all we know she may have a dozen epics in the bottom of her suitcase.’

Raymond Mayo wandered over to the window beside me, slipped on his dark glasses and scrutinized the villa. I noticed that he looked even more dapper than usual, dark hair smoothed back, profile adjusted for maximum impact.

‘I saw her at the “psycho i” last night,’ he mused. ‘She had a private balcony upon the mezzanine. Quite extroardinary. They had to stop the floor show twice.’ He nodded to himself. ‘There’s something formless and unstated there, reminded me of Dali’s “Cosmogonic Venus”. Made me realize how absolutely terrifying all women really are. If I were you I’d do whatever I was told.’

I set my jaw, as far as I could, and shook my head dogmatically. ‘Go away. You writers are always pouring scorn on editors, but when things get tough who’s the first to break? This is the sort of situation I’m prepared to handle, my whole training and discipline tell me instinctively what to do. That crazy neurotic over there is trying to bewitch me. She thinks she can call down a plague of dead rays, boils and nightmares and I’ll surrender my conscience.’

Shaking their heads sadly over my obduracy, Tony and Raymond left me to myself.

Two hours later the boil had subsided as mysteriously as it had appeared. I was beginning to wonder why when a pick-up from The Graphis Press in Vermilion Sands delivered the advance five-hundred of the next issue of
Wave IX
.

I carried the cartons into the lounge, then slit off the wrapping, thinking pleasurably of Aurora Day’s promise that she would have her poems published in the next issue. She had failed to realize that I had passed the final pages two days beforehand, and that I could hardly have printed her poems even if I had wanted to.