The Revolt of Aphrodite (23 page)

He started to walk down the winding street and then, on a sudden impulse, ran after me and caught my sleeve. He said in a humble, beseeching tone “Charlock, can I leave my notebooks with you if I decide to go?” His manner touched me. “Of course.” And that evening when I got back to my new hotel, rather aware that my shabby wardrobe would have to be replaced if I were ever to match the splendour of such surroundings, I saw the familiar pile of school exercise books on the mantelpiece. A rubber band held them
together
. But there was no word with them; I must presume that Koepgen had fallen in with the wishes of the firm, perhaps he was already on his way north. I rather envied him the journey in a queer sort of way. My dinner had been left in the alcove to await me. I could not help touching the smooth expensive napery which
enveloped
it. In Athens such costly and beautiful ironed covers and napkins were quite a rarity. I had decided to work that evening on my crystals, and had set out my white china trays in the bathroom. But the telephone rang and when I picked it up Benedicta stood before me, so to speak; her voice was so clear that I thought she must be calling me from the floor below. But no, she was in Switzerland.
“Darling”, the endearment made my heart suddenly turn over in its grave. Every doubt, every hesitation, was puffed away on the instant and I realised with a reviving pang how much I wanted her here, right here. The enormous inadequacy of words belaboured me. “Never have I missed anyone so much. It confirms everything.” So it seemed to me also as I sat, gripping the black telephone, grimacing into it. “We will be married in April. Julian has arranged everything. In London. Do you agree?”

“Why wait so long, Benedicta?”

“I have to. I am under orders. I won’t be free to move until then. O how much I miss you, miss you.” The clear magnetic voice took on a note of familiar despair. “Julian is arranging the terms of the settlement, the marriage contract.”

“What settlement?” I said in perplexity.

“Well, about my share in the firm. We must have perfect equality in love, my darling.” All of a sudden the line went dead and a
thousand
other voices came up, trying to restore the broken
communication
. “Benedicta” I cried, and I could still hear her voice, though what she was saying was indistinct. An operator squashed her out and promised to call me back. I went and lay on my bed in a confused frame of mind—a mixture of rage and euphoria.

Gentlemen of the jury, now I can tell you that I have loved a woman who sat on numberless committees for the emancipation of other women, never speaking, and with the bitten nails of her left hand sheathed in a glove. Actually what women need is to be beaten almost to death, enslaved, raped, and forced to cook meals when they are heavy with child. Bite through the nape of the neck, Wilkinson, stick her with a bayonet, and she’s yours forever. A bottomless masochism is all they seek to indulge; the penis is too kind a weapon by far. No, the emancipation of this creature is a joke. (Benedicta, look into my eyes.) They are waveborn, slaveborn; and yet
somewhere
among them may be one, just
one,
who is different, who fills the bill. But what bill, Felix? Love! We never had before nor never since, seen it, I mean. Burp! Pardon my parahelion.

Perfect equality in love, I thought. God! Tomorrow I would go out and buy the most expensive microscope in the world and a Stradivarius and some strawberries and a car…. But in love there
is never enough equality to go round. We will have to settle for equity among men and women—a humbler target. Benedicta ached on. After half an hour of futile suspense I tried to restore the broken communication from my own end, but this proved impossible. They could not trace the number from which she had called me. The hall porter brought me a bottle of whisky and a siphon. I tried to resume the precious train of thought about crystals—the fragile line of reasoning which, after so many years, has given Merlin’s a near monopoly in the field of lasers. Benedicta kept intruding among my scribbles. (“The ordering of their atoms is never quite perfect or they would not be able to form, to grow.”)

Then the phone did ring again and I leaped at it. But it was only Caradoc, rather drunk and indistinct, calling me from the Nube, his gruff voice framed in a background of mandolin music. “Charlock,” he said in his usual growling vein “we are waiting for you down here. Why don’t you come?” But Benedicta had covered me in a sheath, a caul of discontent. I could not think of the sweaty Nube, the dust-filled curtains, without distaste. “I am waiting for a
phone-call
, and doing some work” I said, fearful lest our own conversation might be holding up a long-distance contact. Caradoc growled on reproachfully. “Ah you scientists in love! Soon you will be accusing nature of a moral order. Push!”

“Push to you” I said. “Now for godsake hang up and leave me alone will you?”

He did so, but with evident reluctance. “Well, hard cheese” he said as a parting shot, and I had the sudden vivid image of Mr. Sacrapant leaning over a desk looking gravely at me and saying “You are right to be precautionate, Mr. Charlock.” And what was the other expression? Yes, “I have inaccurised the document, sir.” Presumably he meant that he had been through it for inaccuracies. Ah, pale Sacrapant, falling out of the air like these autumn leaves tumbling into the parks. Again the phone rang and this time
Hippolyta’s
clear youthful voice sprang from the mouthpiece as if from the ear of a goddess. “Charlock, I heard you’d moved. How does it feel to be really loved?”

“O leave me alone” I cried in anguish, much to her surprise. “Hang up. I’m waiting for a call.”

But Benedicta did not ring again.

Indeed I had no word from her throughout the months which lay ahead. However, filled with the
gai
savoir
I buckled down to my plans for the little Merlin subsidiary which I should virtually run single handed from London. Or so I thought. Two members of its hypothetical board flew out to meet me, Denison and Broad, and I was glad to find them both accomplished and experienced men. Needless to say I knew nothing about company law, patent claims, and similar esoteric subjects, and was glad to delegate this side of things to them; when everything was ready I should transfer myself to London with a basketful of preliminary ideas. This little respite was useful; it enabled me to map out my own objectives more clearly and to get them down on paper. Moreover I had nothing to fear from the Athens winter while I was lodged in such warm and comfortable quarters.

I sorted not only my papers but also the vast collection of tapes, fragments, dialects, etc. and transcribed them on to matrices; many were the felicities I had culled from the conversations of my friends. (The voice of Sipple saying, gravely: “You might say that I belong to the Purple People. In the case of Mrs. Sipple now—although I didn’t know this till later—she used to come up every Wednesday from Broadstairs where she had been playing with the mighty organ of a DSO with Bar.”)

I saw a good deal of Caradoc who was marking time before being sent off on a new assignment. As I’ve said, he had invented what he called the mnemon which he insisted was a literary form—“an
art-form
in which free Freud and solipsism marry and make merry. You might say it was a soft cotton pun dressed up in the form of a
Times
personal.” They were indeed
Times
Personals of a slightly surrealist tinge, and I had the pleasure of helping him father a few. To my surprise he actually had them printed in the newspaper where they doubtless passed completely unnoticed or were supposed to be an obscure code, a love-call for some religious sect.

No poet ever derived greater pleasure from seeing his work printed, and Caradoc spent a good deal of money on these confections. Then came his sixtieth birthday and he woke up to find himself knee deep in telegrams of congratulations and press cuttings. There were long articles on his work everywhere, photographs of the Hoarah Bridge, the University of Tobago, and other masterpieces of his implausible genius. To my surprise all this backslapping made him sad and plaintive, and once more he began to talk about leaving the firm. “About twice in your life you get a chance to change everything, to jump over the side; but a moment’s hesitation and the chance slips away. It’s late in the day for me but who knows? I might get another yet. I’m keeping my eyes skinned.” Meanwhile the firm had found him a new assignment with which he could hardly quarrel: a new university and senate in the Cook Islands. He would be entirely his own master. Already his fingers itched when they were near a pencil and he spent much of his time, absorbed as any child, modelling in plasticine. “The game of volumes, my boy, the most intoxicating of them all. They’ve promised me aerial pictures of the site, I can’t wait to get my hands on them. And think of new settings, palms, volcanoes, surf.”

“When will you leave?”

“As soon as I can. There’s nothing more to be done here.”

The season was shifting, our little group was dispersing slowly; Hippo moved back into Paris with her sails spread and only occasionally sent us a postcard. Banubula went to the New Year’s Eve ball dressed up in a quaint oldfashioned stock of Edwardian provenance with a twinkling pin, looking very much like a vampire on his evening off. “He is dark umber, the bloody Count” said Caradoc who enjoyed parodying his friend’s exquisite and lapidary English. “I’m sure he would subscribe himself as ‘Your Umber Servant’.” The poor Count made no allusion to his Turkish excesses, and nor did I. He had resumed his Athenian persona. The Countess still sat alone for the greater part of the day in a dressing-gown and slippers, her hair caught up in a purple scarf: playing patience, and writing letters to Gurdjieff. “Horatio has been so strange this winter” she might say stretching out long phthisical fingers towards her coffee cup. “So strange.” Did she see him as we did who were not
privy to his innermost secrets? I mean dark brown voice, cotton gloves, silver-capped stick with heavy rubber ferrule, one ring-seal, iodine-locket, rebus…. It was hard to say. Benedicta wrote
disturbingly
“I have been ill, I have had a small absence”: in French this time.

Then Caradoc was summoned to London to establish his team of draughtsmen for the new project, and I realised that I was going to be very lonely without him. Worse, I did not realise that we should never meet again—though in retrospect I cannot see the logic of such a sentiment. We had a farewell party in the Nube where I
successfully
masqueraded as sufficiently unwell to spare myself the
culminating
pleasures of the bed. An idiocy, I suppose—but what is one among so many? Here Sipple intervened, or rather the memory of him for Caradoc entertained a fantastically high opinion of his friend’s gifts and much regretted not to see him before he left. I questioned him about the incident of the dead boy, but found that he knew little more than I did. It may have been something to do with blackmail. “I think Sipple must have been working for someone, perhaps Graphos, who knows?” “The Purple People no doubt” I said.

“On the other hand Banubula thinks it was purely and simply a family affair—an affair of honour. The boy’s father had said he would punish him for soiling the family honour. This
is
the Balkans after all.”

“What does Hippo think?”

Caradoc drained his glass and said oracularly “It’s like everything else in life—those who know can’t tell.”

And at this moment Mrs. Henniker came into the room whinnying like a polo pony and waving a tattered magazine which the girls had been reading; it was a magazine devoted to film. “Look” cried Mrs. Henniker with a triumphant flourish, waving it under my nose. “One of my girls.” To my surprise there she was, Iolanthe, all sepia and deckle edged, staring out at the world with a kind of forlorn lascivious grin. She was tricked out as some sort of Eastern houri and appeared to be bearing the head of the Baptist upon a trencher. The letterpress concerned a new film made by a Frenchman in Egypt. Apparently she had lobbied herself a small part in it. I was delighted and amused,
unaware that we were witnessing the beginnings of so formidable a career. Mrs. Henniker was beside herself with pleasure. “One of my girls” she kept repeating in a dazed sort of way. I was obscurely touched as I looked at the gruesome inexperienced face of young Samiou. Why “inexperienced” though? Caradoc set the paper aside with a grunt of surprise. “Well, may they all prosper” he said at last. “The little dumplings.”

Pulley came in with a huge watch dangling. It was time to be going home. It was freezing in the car, the Attic plain was all glittering under hoarfrost; the sewers steamed up through the manholes all the way along Stadium Street like so many geysers. Caradoc pressed my hand and declined a parting drink, showing unwonted resolution, “Just time to pack my traps” he said “and then hey for the Virgin Isles. Think of me basking out there, eh? And remember that all perfected cultures have depended upon a high infant mortality.” No, he wasn’t drunk: he was full of the sadness of farewell. “As for you, Charlock, everything is moving in your direction now. You have only to spread your sails a bit. You are going to be very happy. O yes. Very happy indeed. A future full of sperm my boy.”

I could see nothing illogical in the proposition, and yet I was filled with a sudden nagging nostalgia for the days of solitary poverty, the days before the firm took me up. But then the memory of Benedicta swept over me like a landslide; she was worth everything. I did not feel as if I had a separate existence any more.

“Caradoc bless you.”

“Goodbye.”

Om

K
onx.
Ah! the brave new chrysadiamantine world of Charlock’s nuptial London! O world of delegated sympathies, of mysteries, of great achievements. The expensive cars that soothed away the roads moving like ointments; the clothes that fitted like second skins. And in the midst of it all the white wand, the blind man’s dowsing-rod, Benedicta. It is not I who speak, Lord: it is my culture speaking through me. It is hard to disentangle this first time from the others—for she was always going away, always coming back. In the Paulhaus everything has been catered for—chapels for six denominations. People are never too ill to pray. Either she appeared at airports clad in mourning; or else delivered in a white ambulance, laughing, cured, joking with the driver: to run up the steep steps into my arms. Try as you will, there is no explanation for madness, happiness or death. At first it would have been silly to speak of souls darkened by troubling presentiments, of dialogues bathed in strange lights. Later of course, one has all the time in the world to study the fatal metastases of the idea of love.

I counted upon her for very much, I discovered, sorting through my emotions with a new, a rather disgusting humility bordering on self-abasement. She would develop me like some backyard province perhaps, promulgate a charter. I did not even know her husband’s name: whom could I ask? And then, where should we meet at last but under the backward clock at Victoria. Yet at once the Turkish image, brilliant as a postage stamp, gave place to another; she had become very thin now, very tense. She vibrated in my arms like a high-tension wire; her eyes were over made-up which increased her pallor, deeped the dimple in her cheek. But with such relief, such passion, after so long an absence. “And all this time you never wrote, Benedicta.” “I Know.” (But afterwards she would write every day
for weeks on end in her mirror hand: things like “It is snowing again. They have tied me to the same chair.”) But here she only gave a small sweet groan as we broke apart to plunge our eyes into one another. “Felix!” She had managed to capture my very name and make it her own; it emerged newly printed. I had never liked it very much: now I hoped she might go on repeating it. “At last it is over.” At last it had begun.

I had already been here alone for nearly a month, living at the beautiful house in Mount Street among the sumptuous impersonal furniture. There had been no signal of her arrival. I contemplated with superstitious awe the huge wardrobe which filled the glass
cupboards
in our room—my own new wardrobe. The devil! I recalled that one day long ago Jocas had asked me, as a personal favour, to allow his tailor to take my measurements: and though puzzled, I had complied. As one among so many ambiguous happenings this small trifle had hardly seemed worth troubling about. Now I understood. I stood, biting my lip, and contemplating myself in the mirror both ashamed and delighted at my own splendour. The silver-backed brushes were good to the scalp; the bathroom was crowded with expensive toilet waters and monumental soaps. It was perfectly understandable, I told myself, that I should dress appropriately, to match my new, my enormous new salary, and in general my new role in affairs. For Benedicta’s sake, as well as the firm’s …
nevertheless
. Nor was it too soon, for I had already taken possession of my new suite of offices at Merlin House in the City; I had already met everyone—except of course Julian who was away. Things had begun to move forward with irresistible momentum. Yes, I had even seen the fangled Shadbolt and initialled the preposterous marriage
settlement
. And now all these scattered elements were knitted together and resolved by her phone-call from Victoria. “I’m here at last. Please come to me at once.” It was a familiar creature of course, her perfume was the same. All the signals of recognition the same. Yet a difference lay perhaps in the fact that so much time had passed and circumstances had subtly altered—this foggy soot-bellowing
grime-tank
of a station. And then her tremendous assortment of luggage which followed in a second taxi with her maids and manservant. Some lines of Koepgen drifted idly across the back of my mind like
these mushrooming winter clouds. Something like “the human face upon its stalk perpetuates only the type of a determined response; there are so few elations and so few dismays to wrinkle between a laughing or a crying death, between a truthful or a lying breath.” Benedicta sat gripping my manicured hand and staring unseeingly out of the window watching London lumber by, keeping its viscous slow coil. “You have seen Shadbolt, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“He explained and you agreed. Now we are really one.” It was only the context that made the phrase sound extraordinary.

“I signed the document, though really I remained unconvinced inside. It’s too generous, my dear. Why should I share everything so completely?”

“O God” she cried vehemently “I was afraid you wouldn’t see.”

“It was too generous; after all I’m earning my own way now. Why shouldn’t you keep your fortune? We could have had a
separation
des
biens
arrangement.”

“No. Never. Besides didn’t he tell you that I have no personal fortune outside the firm? It’s all I have, the firm. Darling, I want to possess you utterly, without reserves of any kind. I can’t believe in myself in any other way.” Well, so did I, so did I. “But I also wanted you to feel a little independent. Room to breathe.”

She began to mutter under her breath, as if she were swearing
sotto
voce.
Her knuckles grew white as she gripped my hand. A strange, rather ominous sense of impending misunderstanding cast its shadow over us. It might be possible to embrace it away, to exorcise it. As I kissed her I thought of Shadbolt. He was one of the five solicitors who dealt with the firm’s affairs; he had presented for my perusal a thick handbook listing all the firm’s holdings and all its subsidiaries. A heavy-breathing slothful little man with plum-coloured
countenance
, whose spectacles were attached to his lapel by a heavy black ribbon. When he put them on he did so reverently, as if he were in mourning. Voice of an old bugle full of spit. The marriage contract was an elaborate document couched in the sort of phraseology which made the trained mind swim. I was too intimidated by his air of being a papal emissary to prevail upon him to explain in too great detail. His grinding humourless voice grated upon me. “Everyone in
Merlin’s seems to be obsessed by contractual obligations” I said somewhat peevishly. Shadbolt removed his spectacles and stared at me reproachfully. “How else shall one do business?” he asked with surprise, almost tenderly.

“But this isn’t business” I said.

“Frankly,” said the little man rising with infinite slowness to gaze out of the window “I would have hesitated had I been in Miss Benedicta’s place. You will allow me to be frank? But she insisted. From your point of view Mr. Charlock, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose by it. It’s a most generous gesture, a gesture of faith and trust and if I may use the word without immodesty, love. It fully incorporates you in all her fortunes. But if you wish we can tear the document up.”

He crossed the room cumbrously with his penguin-like gait. I hesitated for a long moment, feeling very much out of my depth. “I somehow don’t like to think about relationships, our marriage, in these terms.” Yes, that was really the full extent of my reservations. The lawyer gave a bleak smile. “The sentiment does you much credit. I understand your feeling as you do. On the other hand there is nothing so very strange about making a marriage contract. Many people do. I was rather more concerned about her position than yours. All this” he tapped the white papers against his knee “would not be easily revoked if ever there were need. She is, in a sense, putting herself entirely at your mercy and the firm as well.”

“That is what worries me; there isn’t any need.”

But, after all, since the whole thing was merely a whim on her part … I took up my new gold fountain pen and signed the
document
. Shadbolt sighed slowly as he pressed the blotter down upon the wet ink. “You are a lucky man,” he said “a very lucky young man.”

Now it seemed to me, as I sat beside her with her slender arm through mine, that the phrase might qualify as the nadir of
understatement
. Those nervous, tender blue eyes turning to grey in this pallid cloudlight met mine with such burning candour that I felt ashamed ever to have felt doubts or reservations about these paper conventions.

“What is it, Benedicta?” But still staring at me she only shook her
head as she continued to explore her own inmost feelings—
preoccupied
, like someone trying to locate a hollow in a tooth. It was in this euphoric trance that we drew up at last in Mount Street. Baynes opened for us and ran down the steps to greet her; but she hardly acknowledged his presence, stalking past him into the hall with what might have seemed an insolent air, had her preoccupation not been so evident.

She threw her gloves on to the table and consulted her appearance in the tall mirror with a careful disdainful air. There was a big bowl of flowers on the side table by the wall, near the silver salver which held some engraved visiting cards and tradesmen’s bills. “I told you I did not like the smell of flowers in the house” she said icily to the butler. “Take them out at once.” As a matter of fact it was I who had ordered the flowers; but the kindly Baynes, after a glance at me, simply swallowed and decided to take the blame. “Yes, Madam.”

Benedicta turned with a dazzling smile and said: “Now let’s go through the house shall we? I love coming back here.” And so we went from room to room in order to greet the more choice of her possessions—the little statue of Niobe, for example, and the
wonderful
gallery of golden heads of Greek gods and Roman, modern work by
cire
perdue.
It was only when we were climbing the staircase that she said: “There’s no one else here is there?”

“Of course not. I’m quite alone.”

But now she walked with an air of quaint precaution, letting me enter each room ahead of her to draw the curtains. Nodded smiling, as if satisfied; so we perambulated the densely carpeted floors to come at last to the fine bedrooms where I had been sleeping. Here, at last, she experienced a sort of relief, clapped hands softly before my face and laughed as I trapped them. Well, then, whatever it was we had outwitted it. She walked about, opening cupboards,
bed-bouncing
, opening cupboards full of my gloatworthy clothing. Then abruptly she paused and said: “My God, I’m tired and dirty. I must have a bath.”

I locked the door and drew her one in my scarlet bathroom, tossing in bunches of salts; simple and swift she undressed and stepped into it, and all of a sudden I was carried back in a flash to the Benedicta
who had once walked into the foaming cistern of “The Copious Waters” in distant Turkey; her preoccupations were gone. I sat beside her, touching the pale shoulders with my fingers. Afterwards she rolled herself in the great towelling kaftan and lay on the bed, flushed rosy from the heat. “Tell me now.” And so I told her all about the thrilling activities of Charlock in London, unable to
disguise
the triumph and excitement in my voice. She listened nodding from time to time, but the nods were only part approval—she was like to doze off at any moment. Well, about the two small factories which had been set up near Slough to start production on two of my “devices”; about a study group which had been convened to test the more nebulous experimental stuff. Intoxicating stuff. I really could not blame her if her eyelids fluttered and drooped. “And as soon as Julian gets back I shall make contact and….” But she was suddenly snapped sharp awake. She looked at me curiously for a moment and then, yawning, ran her fingers through my hair with a queer little gesture—that of a mother, ever so faintly commiserating, who hears her small son boasting about matters he could not as yet understand. “Ah Julian” she said, and I thought of the empty chair in the board room faced by the little marble plaque and the virgin blotter. “He’s amazing really,” I said, “despite his absence in New York; you know, he gets the minutes of all our meetings, annotates them and bangs them back within twenty-four hours sometimes. He must be a glutton for work. One feels his presence very strongly despite the empty chair.”

Yawning, she went to the telephone, unlocking the door en route; Baynes answered hoarsely from the kitchen. She ordered him to bring some champagne in a bucket and to tell the office that she would use her box at the opera. “Do you agree?” over her shoulder. “It’s my first night in London for so long? And Baynes bring us
The
Times.
We must see what’s on; and a car, please.” A patrician
simplicity
, both authoritative and endearing. I consulted my watch. There was lots of time. She began her lingering toilet, slipping through the secret panel into her own mirrored rooms. Soon Baynes came, bringing all these trophies of a fashionable life, and I scanned the paper absently. “Ah!” I said. “An obvious mnemon by Caradoc! I wonder where he is now.” And I read out: “Continental type orgy
sought by plain living British family, Hornchurch area. No agents.”

“Ask the office; they’ll tell you” she said, and then in the same breath “You know they want to send us round the world for our honeymoon? Think, round the world.”

“Who do?”

“The firm. Julian. Everyone.” I reflected on this a moment. “Isn’t it a marvellous idea?” She eyed me.

“Yes” I said, but rather doubtfully, and my tone seemed to puzzle her, for she stopped in front of me as she combed out her hair. “Well, isn’t it?” she insisted. I lit a cigarette and said: “Yes, enormously kind of them. But, you know, I was rather hoping we’d sneak off all alone, by ourselves, like a couple of students. I know a dozen little places in Italy and Greece where we could be quite alone, quite out of touch—even with the firm. Besides, why put them to the expense? Think of the cost!”