The Revolt of Aphrodite (26 page)

Of course there were interludes in all this uxorious sloth when my alter Charlock reproached me bitterly and pushed me into
involuntary
attempts to show a leg. At Monte, for example, I rallied
sufficiently
to consider playing the tables. I collected a mass of those long printed sheaves of paper which record the numbers thrown out by the wheels. They are of great interest to those unwary souls who wish to study form with a view to establishing a system and so breaking the bank. I was hardly less unwary and thought that a brief analysis might—I had been playing about with mathematical probability—ah wretched artificer! But when I suggested this Benedicta came back with a very decisive “Ah dear no. Have you forgotten that the firm owns nearly all the shares in the Casino? Do you think they would let me lose on my honeymoon? We’d win a fortune Felix—
what would be the point of it?” Indeed! I let the long sheaves float away in the wind and settle in the pale waters.

The firm was omnipresent, though in a queer tactful sort of way; nor do I mean simply that the captain and crew of the vessel knew who we were, and had received instructions to take specially good care of us. It went a bit deeper than that. At every point of
disembarkation
we were discreetly met by the resident agent and taken on a conducted tour of the place, much in the manner of visiting minor royalty. This was most welcome in countries where we did not know the language and habits of the natives—Cambodia, India for
example
. Nevertheless I could well understand this unobtrusive tutelage becoming oppressive in the long run. There were a number of state occasions to be observed as well which made me sigh for the anonymity of a hotel-room in Florence; a Governor here and there bade us to his table: those huge mournful Government houses full of sighing chintz and mammoth billiard tables, full of bad pictures and unpalatable cooking. Well, I sighed—we both sighed—but there was nothing to be done but accept and attend. This of course was more marked east of Suez: we were familiars of the Mediterranean, needing no help in Athens or in Jocasland of the tumbled minarets. But Athens was strangely hushed—everyone was away it seemed, either abroad or in the islands. Nor could I get any news of Banubula or Koepgen, try as I would. I had a small fugitive inclination to visit the Plaka and perhaps Number Seven as well, but I dismissed it, telling myself that time was short. But at Stamboul it was no surprise to see a little white pinnace scuttling across the sea to meet us with Jocas steering her—this long before the mists divided to reveal the ancient city trembling among the tulip-topped bastions. I saw the great confiding hand of Jocas come sliding up the gangplank rope like a deepsea squid; then he was before us, with his shy dancing eye. There was nothing equivocal in the tenderness with which he greeted us, pressed us to his heart. He had brought some small presents like newspapers, Black Sea caviar, Turkish cigarettes and some rare pieces of jewellery for B. So we spent the day a-gossip under a white awning, watching the city swim up from the deeps. Our lunch was served on deck and Jocas drank his champagne to us, uttering the familiar druidic toasts to bless our union. Benedicta
looked ravishing in her new brown skin; the fine hairs shading from temple to cheek had already turned silkworm golden. “I have never seen her look so calm, so well” said Jocas softly in an aside, and
indeed
it seemed to me to be so. He was full of news of the property and of course the birds and their form. Benedicta questioned him eagerly. Indeed at one point she wanted to stay a week, but the itinerary was already so charged…. Omar the master falconer was dead, but Said had taken over and was doing very well. He had
invented
a new kind of lure. And so on. But mixed also in this animated exchange of fact were scraps of news about other friends and
acquaintances
—Caradoc in New York, for example, preparing to fly out to his new venture. Graphos was going from strength to strength, after having nearly ruined his career because of an infatuation with a streetwalker. And Koepgen? “He is doing well in Moscow; he will have a year or two yet. I know you have his notebooks.” As a matter of fact I had one with me on the voyage. “And then what?” Jocas twinkled the gold smile and rubbed his hands. “He will get a large bonus and be free to pursue his studies.”

“And that ikon?”

“Yes, we have found the one he wants; it is quite safe, waiting for him. But the firm comes first.” Jocas giggled. “It’s a lure, eh?”

The liner was scheduled to stay only a few hours; it was hardly worth going ashore for such a brief period; a gaggle of sightseers were rushed ashore, crammed into buses and given a swift glimpse of the great walls of smoking dung. But we sat on deck, talking drowsily, until they returned and the warning siren sent its herds of echoes thundering across the sky. Benedicta was leaning at the rail now, staring down into the water. “In the old days” Jocas was saying dreamily “they had bird-fairs all over Central Europe—singing birds I mean. Her father was a renowned breeder of songbirds, and won prizes everywhere with his exhibits. They say he was the first to think of blinding birds in order to improve their singing—you know, red-hot copper wire. It’s easily and painlessly done they say. He built up quite a trade in cage-birds at one time, but the business
outgrew
it. Now only a few specialists are interested; the fairs have all lapsed. There is no room for them in the modern world, I suppose.”

“Did it improve their singing?”

“It would improve anyone’s singing; one sense develops to
compensate
for the loss of another—you know that. Why do they try to find a blind man always for muezzin? It needn’t be eyes necessarily. The voice of the castrato, for example.” He yawned heartily, by now half asleep. “Benedicta,” he called “I must leave you, my dear. I wish I could come too but I can’t.”

The sightseeing passengers were panting aboard again led by two steatopygous priests—soutanes stuffed with blood-sausage.
Benedicta
came thoughtfully back to us and said, without any preliminary gambit: “Jocas, did you give Mr. Sacrapant the sack?” Jocas was surprised into a smile as he answered. “Of course not.”

“Then why?” she said with a puzzled frown.

“His suicide? But he left a letter listing a number of reasons—mostly trivial ones you would say, even insignificant reasons. Yet taken all together I suppose they weighed something. Good Lord, the firm had no part in the matter.” He looked shocked. She drew a sigh of relief and sat down. “Then?” Jocas went on, frowning, as if trying to puzzle out the matter for himself. “We look at things from the wrong point of view. I mean, how many reasons could you give for wanting to go on living? The list would be endless. So there is never one reason, but scores. You know in a funny sort of way he could never get used to the idea of security—it was almost as if he couldn’t wait for his wife to get her pension.” He burst out laughing in a strange half-rueful way and struck his thigh. “Ah! old
Sacrapant
!” he said and shook his head. “He will be impossible to replace.” I saw the little figure falling.

A bell rang urgently and someone signalled from the deck house by the bridge. Reluctantly Jocas took himself off, to stand in the sheets of the little pinnace looking up at us with a curious expression on his face—a mixture of affection and sadness. “Be happy” he called across the separating water, as if perhaps he had scented some fugitive disharmony in us after all: and the little craft suddenly reared up and began its glib motion as it raced away towards the land.

“Come,” said Benedicta, taking my arm “let’s go down for a spell.” She wanted to go down to the cabin, to lie about and talk or read—most probably to make love: until the first bell went for dinner. Well, but by dark we were crawling through the Straits
again bound for the furthest corners of the world. Columbus
Charlock
! I do not believe that one can love without analysing—though I know that too much analysis can spoil loving: but here at least
nothing
but contentment found a place, a luxurious self-surrender which made death seem very far away. That was it, death!

Somewhere there is an album full of photographs of this royal progress—photographs taken, not by us, but by the captain and crew who shepherded us through all the adventures of travel with such docile assiduity. Later a handsome bound volume, with the record duly mounted and in the right order, arrived on the hall table with the compliments of the shipping line. Well then, on the back of bloody elephants bucketing up the holy mountain in Ceylon, wearing weird pith helmets against the sun. Then some tiger shoots in India —Benedicta lavender-pale and slender, with her triumphant little boot upon the head of the beast: the rigor had stiffened its snarl into a silent travesty of the last defensive gesture. Smack! Hong Kong, Sydney, Tahiti—the long ritual led us on, offering no demands upon us.

But these superficial records could not deal with everything, take account of everything. For example, unknown to either of us, Iolanthe was also aboard—or rather her image was, the public one, printed on celluloid. Among the films we were shown as we crossed the Indian Ocean was one made in Egypt, trivial and melodramatic, in which to my surprise Iolanthe had a small part. She swam up out of the screen without warning, moving into close-up which
projected
her enlarged face with its heavily doctored eyeshapes almost into my lap. My surprise made me sit up with an exclamation and grip Benedicta’s hand.

“Good Lord.”

“You know her?”

“It’s Iolanthe of all people.”

It was not much of a part, it lasted barely half a minute. But it was enough to glimpse an entirely new person grafted upon the one I had known. After all, the smallest gesture gives a clue to the inner
disposition
—a way of walking, position of hands, cant of the head. All right. Here she had to cut up food and put it on a plate; then to walk with the plate across a strip of sand, to bow, to serve. In this very
brief repertoire of acts and gestures—some so familiar from which I recalled the old being—I saw a new one. “It’s a common little face” said Benedicta with distaste and a contempt that extended itself with justice to the whole ridiculous film, with its sheiks and dancing girls. “Yes. Yes.” Of course she was right; but how much less coarse, less common, than the original Iolanthe I had known. On the
contrary
these photographs suggested a new kind of maturity; her gestures had become studied, graceful, no longer impulsive and uncoordinated, fluent. Some of this I tried to express to Benedicta but she did not follow; she turned her cryptic smile upon me and pressed my hand confidingly. “But she is being directed and
rehearsed
by the
metteur-en-scène,
my dear: and he probably sleeps with her as well to get her to do things his way.” Of course this was true and yet … entirely factitious? The change seemed to hold a whole range of significance for me. I was puzzled; more mysterious still, I felt wounded in an obscure sort of way—almost as if I had been tricked. Could I perhaps have missed the most interesting part of my little mistress by the merest inattention? I was nudged into surprise by that short insignificant scene. Moreover, in order the better to analyse my own response to it, I asked for it to be played over again the following afternoon while Benedicta was taking her siesta. No, the astonishment remained. The coarseness, the
street-arab
knowingness, had found a point of repose where it could
manifest
itself calmly as naked human experience. This gave point to a new angle of the head, to the resurrection of a smile which I knew on lips which I knew—but which I had never noticed. Or had they not then been there? Iolanthe! Heavens! I saw the rust-stained marbles rising against the keen skies of Attica. I rummaged, so to speak, among my stock of memories, to find correspondences to match this new personage—in vain. The screen-figure corresponded so little to the original that I felt as if she had somehow hoaxed me. My mood of puzzled abstraction lasted until dinner time, when Benedicta noticed it—for she missed nothing. “I hear you have been visiting your girl friend while I was asleep” she said with a rather cruel smile, her lips curving mischievously up at the corners. “Isn’t it rather early in the day to start being unfaithful to me?” It was a joke, and should have been taken as such.

But I wanted to be serious, to explain how confused and puzzled I had been by this parody of nature. O yes I did. Benedicta would have none of it. “You can have all the women you want provided you tell me about it in detail” she said, and a sudden new light, a little grim this time, came into her eye. It was rather annoying for this was hardly the point. Besides nothing could be more distasteful than to provoke the sort of middle-class tiff common to middle-class couples in the suburbs of loathsome capitals. I was outraged by her vulgarity. “It was only a joke” she said.

“How idiotic to quarrel over a strip of film.”

“I am not quarrelling. Felix, look at me.”

“Nor am I.” I obeyed. We kissed but with constraint. What the devil was wrong? But we finished the meal in silence and after it stalked up on deck to sit side by side in deck-chairs, smoking and musing. “How much do you know about this girl?” she asked at last; somewhat peevishly I replied. “Certainly more than I know about you, even after all this time.” Benedicta’s eye narrowed with anger, and when she was in this mood she set her ears back like a scared cat.

“I will answer any question you put to me.”

“I have never insisted on you answering questions.”

“How could you
insist
?”

“Or even ask. I want you as you are, exactly as you are at this moment; I don’t care if you are still a bit of an enigma.”

She turned her hard blue eye upon me with a new expression which I had not seen before and which I might describe as an amused contempt, and yawned behind her brown fingers. “My poor Felix” she said in a tone which made me long to strike her.