The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [28]
I asked a child for the house of the scholar, Illaeus, and she pointed to a stone hut like the others.
“He’ll eat you,” she said.
I had seen her appraising my woollen clothes and knew I should toss her a coin, but I had come out with nothing but the pouch my father had given me for the scholar.
“Cunt,” she said when I turned away from her. She might have been five.
I rapped my knuckles on the wooden door jamb, pushed aside the heavy curtain, and stepped in. It was dark but for a single oil lamp on a table in the far corner (and that not so far, really, only a few paces away). A man sat there. I could see the outline of him but no details, nor of the room. My eyes had not yet adjusted to the dark.
“Here is star bright,” the man said.
I asked where I would find the scholar Illaeus.
“Now, isn’t that interesting. You know you’ve found him but you ask anyway. Is that a good way to start relations?”
I realized my father had never met this man, or I would not be here. I wondered who had been the go-between. Was that person playing a joke on my father, on me? I saw now the table in front of him was empty. He was drinking unwatered wine from a cup he coddled in his groin and never put down. The room was warm enough. The walls were heavily swathed in cloth to keep the heat in, and the bed and chairs were lapped with more cloth and bolsters. Dim warmth and softness on every surface: a drinker’s cocoon. A corner hearth, which I had taken for dead, glowed faintly, a spidery heat outlining the embers in white.
“Will you stay, star bright?” he asked. “Or have I emptied my piss-pot for nothing?”
I could see now that he was not as old as my father, though his face was sternly lined, especially around the mouth, like a shirring, and his hair was a bristle-brush of white. It was the skin of his cheeks that gave him away; my father had taught me to look for that; smooth, pink. In a woman of his age it would be a last remaining vanity. His voice was deep, not loud. I sat on a chair.
“Does he talk?” he asked his cup, and drank again.
“My father might have misled you. I’m not writing a play.”
“That’s a relief.”
“What is your work?”
“Chatty,” he remarked to his wine cup. “He’s chatty now. He likes the idea of work, I think.”
I nodded.
“Wants his own work. A problem to solve?”
“Maybe. Not exactly. I’m not sure.”
“Why did you think you were writing a play?”
I told him I had trouble sleeping because my mind was so full, and I had thought it might relieve me to write something down, get it out of my head.
“But there are other things to write,” he said. “Not just plays.”
I told him I thought maybe it would be better for me to write one of those other things.
“Excellent. And did you bring something to write on?”
I pulled my tablet from under my clothes.
“Describe this room, everything in it. Me, if you’re ready for that. Don’t leave anything out.”
“Why?”
“No one will read it but you. You’re still nervous. I want you to calm down. We’ll start properly next time. We’ll get some of the busyness out of your head so that next time you’re here you can concentrate. Some of what keeps you awake, yes? Maybe you’re thirsty?” He half-offered me the wine cup.
“No.”
“Fine young man.” He nestled the cup back in his groin. “We begin.”
I wrote for a long time, until, even in the windowless hut, I could tell it was getting dark. My stomach growled.
“Tomorrow you might even take off your cloak.” He had lit one or two more lamps and woken the fire, and there was a simmering pot now, beans from the smell, hanging from a peg above the flames. I had been oblivious to everything.
On my way out, he handed me a coin from the pouch I had given him. “If there’s a boy in the street out there, give him this and tell him Illaeus is hungry. A young one, mind you. Not if the voice has broken, like yours.”
In the