The Revolt of Aphrodite (22 page)

It was still early for the muezzin. The frail figure appeared at last at the balustrade, raising small fern-like hands as in an invocation to the darkening world about the tower. It was indeed an invocation, but a frail and incoherent one; the sense of the words hardly penetrated the heavy layers of the damp night air. I thought I heard something like “will find fulfilment in the firm. Give it your best and it will be returned an hundredfold.” One could not be absolutely sure, of course, but among the wavering incantations I thought I heard so much. Then I jumped to my feet for the frail figure had started to lean forward and topple. Mr. Sacrapant started to fall out of the night sky in a slow swoop towards the dark ground. A crash of a palm tree, and then a thud of unmistakable finality, followed by the splintering jingle of broken glass and small change. I was transfixed by the suddenness of it all. I stood there speechless. But already there were running feet everywhere and voices; a crowd gathered in no time, as flies will do about an open artery. “My God” I said. Benedicta sat quite still with bowed head. I turned to her and whispered her name; but she did not move.

I shook her gently by the shoulders as one might shake a clock that had stopped and she looked up at me with an intense unwavering sadness. “Come away quick” she said, and grabbed my hand. Away among the trees the sounds had become more purposeful—they were gathering up the loaves and fishes. Blood on marble. I
shuddered
. Crossing the dark garden hand in hand we moved towards the
lighted terraces and public rooms of the hotel. Benedicta said: “Jocas must have given him the sack. O why must people go to
extremes
?” Why, indeed! I thought of the pale humble face of
Sacrapant
shining up there in the evening sky. Of course such an
explanation
would meet the case, yet…. The evening lay in ruins about us. The silent dinner, the packing away of the luggage into the office car which had appeared—these operations we performed automatically, numbed by the sadness of this sudden death. My mind reverted
continually
to the memory of that pale face leaning down from the tower; Sacrapant had looked like someone who had been carefully deprived of an individual psychology by some experiment with knife or drug. For one brief moment his coat tails had flattened out with the wind of his fall giving him the shape of a dart—like a falling mallard. But he had fallen, so to speak, slap into the middle of our emotions; the widening rings of his death spread through our minds now, alienating us from each other.

We embraced, we parted, almost with disgust. The hideous station with its milling tortoise-faced mob of Turks mercifully precluded speeches of farewell. I stood holding her hands while the carriage was found and the luggage stored in it by the chauffeur. “Or else” she said gravely, in the tones of one continuing an inner
monologue
“he suddenly learned that he had cancer, or that his wife had a lover, or that his favourite child….” I realised that any explanation would do, and that all would forever remain merely provisional. Was this perhaps true for all of us, for all our actions? Yes, yes. I studied her face again with care, with an almost panic-stricken intentness, realising at last how useless it was to be loving her; she had climbed into the carriage and stood looking down at me from the open
window
with a hesitant sorrowfulness. We could not have been further apart at this instant; a cloud of anxiety had overshadowed all emotion. I felt my heavy despairs dragging at their moorings. Tomorrow I should return to Athens—I should be free from everyone, free even from Benedicta. My God, the only four letter word that matters! The train had begun to move. I walked beside it for a few paces. She too was looking almost relieved, elated. Or so it seemed to me. Perhaps because she felt sure of me—of her hold over me? She wound up the glass window and then, with a sudden impulse, breathed upon it in
order to write the word “Soon” on the little patch of condensation. At once the pain of separation came back.

I turned away to let my thoughts disperse among those sullen crowds of featureless faces. The car waited to take me back to the hotel. That night I slept alone and for the first time experienced the suffocating sense of loneliness which came over me with the
conviction
that I should never see Benedicta again. This whole episode would remain in my memory, carefully framed and hung, quite
self-subsisting
: and quite without relevance or continuity to anything else I had ever done or experienced. An anecdote of Istanbul!

Nor did this feeling completely leave me even when, from the windy deck-head, I saw the white spars of Sunion come up over the waters. The season had turned, autumn was here, the marbles looked blue with cold: and I had turned a corner in my supposed life. It was baffling, the sense of indecision which beset me; I supposed that the novelty of this new life was what had numbed me—simply that. Simply that.

Hippolyta met me at the dock with her car, bursting with
excitement
and jubilation. “We’re saved” she cried as I clambered down the gangway with my suitcase. “O come along do, Charlock; we must celebrate, and it’s all due to you. Graphos! He has swept all the provinces. My darling, he’s changed completely. He is certain to get back into power.” Apparently something had been averted by the resuscitation of the great man’s party and its electoral successes. Well, I sat by her side, letting her babble on to her heart’s content. We headed for the country directly because they were all “waiting to congratulate” me. I was returning like a conquering hero to the hospitable country house. “Moreover” she said, taking my hand and pressing it to her cheek “you have joined the firm. You are one of us now.” In the back of my mind I had a sudden snapshot of Benedicta walking alone in some remote corner of an untended garden, among rare shrubs and flowers which discharged their pollen on her clothes at every step, like silent pistol-shots. In the house great fires blazed and champagne-glasses winked. Caradoc was there and Pulley; and the immaculate spatted form of Banubula. Everyone burst into a torrent of congratulatory rhetoric. I drank away the feelings of the past weeks, lapped around by all this human glow. It was only when,
as an afterthought, I said: “By the way, I am going to marry
Benedicta
Merlin” that the great silence fell. It was the half second of silence at the end of some marvellously executed symphony, the mesmerised rapture which precedes the thunder of applause. Yes. That sort of silence, and lasting only half a second; then the applause, or rather the storm of congratulation in which, to my surprise, I strove suspiciously to detect a false note. But no. It rang out in the most genuine manner; Caradoc indeed seemed rather moved by the news, his bear-hugs hurt. I surrendered myself to my self-
congratulation
invaded by a new sense of confidence. It was late when at last I gathered my kit and borrowed the car to return to Athens; I was curious to see Number Seven again, to riffle my notebooks. Yet I noted with some curiosity that all of a sudden the absence, not of Benedicta but of Iolanthe, weighed. Some obscure law of association must be at work; I had not give her a thought in Istanbul, she was not appropriate to the place. Nor would Benedicta ever be to Athens. I looked up from under the shaded light and imagined her entering the room as she always did, punctual as a heartbeat. These
sentimental
polarities of feeling were new to me; I disapproved of them thoroughly. Frowning I returned to my scribbles. I roughed out a schema as a basis for my work for the firm when at last I should be summoned. Then I noticed a letter on the mantelpiece, a letter addressed to me. It was from Julian, written in an exquisite italic hand; it congratulated me most gracefully on the excellent news and told me that I need not move from Athens for the time being; but I should map out a work-scheme and submit it. Did I wish to start with the mechanical end of my research? A limited company called Merlin Devices would be set up as part of a light-engineering
subsidiary
of the firm. I would find the technicians and the tools ready to hand for whatever I dreamed up. It was a marvellous prospect, and I fell asleep happily that night in the stuffy little room, with my counterpane littered with notes and formulae and diagrams.

At seven, when the porter brought me my coffee I found that dapper Koepgen had followed hard on his heels and had taken up his usual watchful position in the armchair. Koepgen of the elf-lock and the lustrous eye. For the time of day he looked unnaturally spruce and self-possessed. “Go on” he said with ill-concealed
excitement
.
“Tell me what it is.” For a moment I had forgotten. “Jocas cabled me that he would give you a message for me.” Then I remembered. Sleepily I repeated the message to him. He drew a long hissing breath, his face at once rueful and amused. “What a cunning old dog, what a swine” he said admiringly, and struck his knee. “I only worked a few weeks for them but it was enough for the firm to find my weak point. They are incredible.” He chirped his loudest laugh.

“What’s it all about?” I asked; there was a small bottle of ouzo on the mantelpiece; Koepgen made a by-your-leave, drew the cork and tilted a dose into a toothmug. He drank it off quite slim and said: “He’s holding me to ransom, the old devil. He wants me to go back to Moscow and deal with some contracts for the firm; I refused, it doesn’t interest me. Now I see I will have to go if I’m ever to get my hands on the bloody thing.”

“What bloody thing?”

“The ikon.”

“What next?” It sounded to me as if the firm were busy doing some elaborate trade in antiques; but no, said Koepgen, no such thing. What they were after were some contracts from the
Communist
Government for wheat and oil in exchange for machinery. Nothing could be more prosaic. And the ikon—where did that come in? Ah. He burst out laughing again and said with exasperation, “My dear Charlock, that is a piece of Russian folklore which will sound to you quite silly; but nevertheless it has cost me several years and hundreds of miles on foot.” He sat down suddenly with a bump in the chair.

“But wouldn’t it be dangerous, I mean Communists and all that?”

“No. One of my uncles is Minister of Trade. No, it isn’t that. I just didn’t want to work for the firm; but I made the mistake of
telling
them my fairy tale, and of course this is the result. You see, when I started this theological jag I chose one of the great mystics, a big bonze of Russia as a guide. As you know, absolute obedience is
required
, even if one is set a task that seems an idiocy. I was set a task which turned unwittingly into a pilgrimage on my poor flat feet. There was an ikon once in the private chapel of my mother; when the estate was confiscated it had vanished. I was told to find it or else.”

“Or else what?”

Koepgen grinned. “Or else no progress, see? I should be stuck in the lower ranks. Never get my stripes. Don’t laugh.”

“What fantasy.”

“Of course you’d think that; but there is more than one kind of truth, Charlock.”

“O crikey,” I said “don’t do the theological on me.”

“Well, anyway, hence this bloody long walk across Russia into Athos. I traced it there. After that I drew a blank for a while. It was a Saint Catherine of a rather special kind. And of course the woods are full of them—Saint Catherines. It might be somewhere in a
wayside
shrine on Olympus or stuck in some great monastery in Meteora. In spite of all the help I got I drew blank after blank. The Orthodox Church is an odd organisation or perhaps I should say disorganisation; what is the good for example of an encyclical when half the minor clergy are illiterates?”

“Offer a reward.”

“We did all that. I sorted through hundreds of them big and small; but I couldn’t get the one belonging to my mother. You see? Now the firm has stepped in found it and will tell me where it is on
condition
….”

“I have never heard such rubbish in my life” I said. Koepgen nearly burst into tears. “Nor have I,” he said “nor have I.”

“I should damn well refuse to go.”

“Perhaps I shall. I must see. On the other hand I suppose it isn’t such an arduous undertaking; it might cost me a month or two in Moscow, and then at least I would have found it and satisfied my
staretz
old Demetrius. O dear.” He took another swig from the bottle and fell into a heavy melancholy silence, turning over these weird contingencies in his mind. I drew a bath and lay in it awhile, leaving him to brood in the armchair. I had decided, on the strength of my new-found fortune, to move all my belongings today to the best hotel in the town—to take a comfortable suite. I did not need more space but I was most anxious to experiment with the notion of spending a lot of money. Yes, of course the grub would be much better. I was drying myself slowly when Koepgen appeared in the doorway. He was still sunk in a kind of abstraction, and gazed at me
with unfocused eye. “You know” he said slowly at last “I have a feeling that I shall have to obey Julian. After all sacrifices have to be made if one’s going to get anywhere in life, eh?”

“Hum” I said, feeling very sage and judicial, yet indifferent.

“You will see,” he said “you will see, my boy. Your turn will come. Have you ever met Julian?”

“No.” I dressed slowly; it was a lovely sunny day, and we walked across Athens on foot, stopping here and there in the shadow of a vine arbour to have a drink and a mézé. Koepgen made no further reference to his ikon and I was glad; the whole thing seemed to me to be a burdensome fairy tale. After all if a man of such sharp
intelligence
in his forties allowed the firm to play upon these infantile superstitions, well good luck to it. But such reflections filled me with shame when I glanced at his sorrowful and now rather haggard features. I had come to like him very much. As we parted, I to
reserve
my new quarters and organise the move, he to return to his seminary, he said under his breath: “I fear there is no help for it. I shall have to go. I’ll cable Jocas today.”