Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [149]
One Sophragette came up to him, the one he had seemed to know from before, and, red-cheeked with glittering eyes, introduced herself as Daria Norton, Lilian Lake’s protégée, and Douglas Norton’s daughter. Brentford smiled at the coincidence. He always liked it when things clicked together. As a young girl she had been in direct telepathic contact with the Polar Kangaroo, which was, if he had got it right, the very companion pet her father had offered to Isabella Nixon-Knox. Daria had fled to England after the Blue Wild and Lilian had found her there, a boarding-school rebel known as Lucy Lightning in the thriving suffragette scene, and had brought her home. He had no doubt that the Polar Kangaroo would be glad to have her back.
Daria handed him a little propaganda leaflet the girls wanted to distribute across the city. Brentford read it quickly, but his eyes stopped on one particular sentence that said: “This community aims to be rich, not in the metallic representative of wealth, but in the wealth itself, which money should represent; namely, LEISURE TO LIVE IN ALL THE FACULTIES OF THE SOUL.” He could not have phrased it better, he thought.
Lilian had joined them.
“Lake or Lenton?” he asked.
“People give different names to the same things, and the same name to different things. You will see plenty of that quite soon, I’m sure. I like being Lilian Lake today. It is a sort of homecoming.”
“What is gnostic in all this … display of military charm?” he asked her, pointing to her uniform.
She did not feel like telling him what had really happened on the embankment. When Helen had started to appear in her dreams, calling her back to New Venice, Brentford’s name had often surfaced, for reasons that were unclear, but that she now began to understand better. But she knew little of the nature of his own relationship with Helen. Men were fragile creatures, easily scared of what they could not grasp, and she did not want to scare this one, for the moment.
“Same answer as before,” she said, growing more serious with every sentence. “Not much to some people, I would say. Maybe it is just a way to recall that procreation is not always the supreme good, and that some women may dispense with it, if they deem it wiser. Maybe it is just a way to remind men that if my belt gets loose, it does not make me the great whore of Babylon, and that I still have a soul.”
Brentford was slightly in his cups from the celebration and felt a sudden masculine urge to show off in front of Lilian. “You’re the Harlot and the Holy one, then,” he said, quoting as casually as he could from Thunder, Perfect Mind, an ancient gnostic treatise Helen had often talked about.
She came closer to him and said softly, “Certainly, as any other woman, I am the one who is honoured, and who is praised, and who is despised scornfully. Or, if you prefer, in political terms, I am an alien and a citizen, I am the substance and the one who has no substance. But as to being the harlot and the holy one, I’m afraid I’m neither. Just a loyal and normally depraved girl.”
Suddenly she glued a kiss on his mouth while painfully squeezing his testicles. In a flash, Brentford understood in his flesh the paradoxes of Thunder, Perfect Mind.
“And of course,” she whispered in his ears as she released her grip, “like any suffragette, I carry a bomb in my muff.”
There were, Brentford reckoned, four or five levels of interpretation to this. But before he could sum them up, she had disappeared.
He felt, God knew why, like walking around a little.
He passed a crimson cabinet, where hung portraits of the Seven Sleepers. He took a long look at the one that depicted the tall, aquiline Louis d’Ussonville, just to notice with a jump that Myrtle, the Ghost Lady, was behind him, faintly reflected in the glass sheet that protected the painting of her grandfather.
“How can I thank you?” her voice said in Brentford’s head.
“By not appearing anymore,” Brentford thought quickly and