The Revolt of Aphrodite (27 page)

I took myself off to bed with an improving book, but when the clock struck midnight and she had not put in an appearance I dressed again and went on deck to find her. She was sitting alone in the deserted bar, leaning heavily upon it, dozing. “Thank God you’ve come,” she said incoherently “I can’t stand up.” She was in fact dead drunk. It was all the more surprising because she was
ordinarily
a very modest drinker. I helped her laboriously along the deck to the cabin where she sat on her bunk, swaying slightly, holding her head in her hands. “On Thursday we touch at Macao” she said. “That is where Max died of typhoid fever. I do not want to go
ashore.” I said nothing. She went on: “He was a musician, but not a good one. But he had invented something which didn’t exist until then—a copying machine for scores, for parts. It wasn’t complete, and it took some of the best brains in the firm to develop and market it. Anything else you want to know?”

“Did you have a marriage settlement with him?”

Her eye lit with a sulphurous gleam, the embers of a queer triumph shining through the whisky daze.

“No” she said; but the tone in which she said it permitted me to construe the words “There was no need.” (I jumped with guilt at so treacherous a thought.)

Then she held up her cupped hands pleadingly and said: “But even if he had been alive I’d have left him for you.”

It was not possible to resist her when she was in this mood—sitting like some forlorn collapsing edifice, foundering among its own
distresses
. I felt crushed under the weight of my self-reproaches. I soaked her patiently in hot water, helped her to be sick, and towelled her back to some semblance of sobriety; afterwards she lay, pallid and exhausted, in my arms until daybreak when she was able once more to whisper the little phrase which had become almost a slogan for us. Always after making love she would say: “Let’s always, Felix.”

So Macao passed, and with it some of the weight of her private
preoccupations
; her mood lightened and made room for a new gaiety, a new responsiveness. We had become used to the ship by now and familiar with the habit of life. It was almost as if we had never lived land-life. And as we neared our final port of disembarkation we even started to take part in the absurd dinners and fancy-dress dances which we had found so distasteful during the first weeks of the voyage. In fact the night before we reached Southampton we went the whole hog and borrowed fancy dresses and masks from the
extensive
wardrobe of the vessel. I was Mephisto I think, with
eyebrows
of jet; she was a nun in a great white coif of starched linen. It was while she was making up her face in the mirror that she said, in an almost terror-stricken tone: “You know Felix I may be pregnant —have you thought about it? What shall I do?”

“How do you mean?”

About the blood and all that. It was not very consistent.

She was sitting there in front of the mirror staring into her own wide eyes with an expression of silent panic. Then she gave a long trembling sigh and shook herself awake from the momentary trance, turning away towards the door of the cabin with the air of someone leaving the condemned cell. And all that evening she hardly spoke; from time to time I caught her looking at me with an expression of inexpressible sadness. “What is it, Benedicta?” But she only shook her head and gave me a tremulous smile; and after the dance, when we reached the cabin, she tore off her coif and shook out her golden hair, turning upon me with a sudden air of agonised reproach, to cry: “O can’t you see? It will change everything, everything.”

That last night we lay side by side unsleeping, staring up into the darkness, our strange voyage almost over.

We stepped ashore in a mist of grey watered silk, to find the car waiting on the dockside. Someone had already been aboard to take charge of the luggage; we had nothing to do except to negotiate the gangplank and take refuge under the black umbrella the chauffeur held for us. “Welcome back!” We sat in the back of the car, hand in sympathetic hand, but quite silent, watching the ghostly countryside whirl away around us. Gusts of wind stirred the tall trees; heath moulded itself away into heath, dotted here and there by statuary of soaked forest ponies. At last we came to the big house, which seemed no longer full of people; but there were fires going everywhere, and the muzzy smell of oldfashioned central heating filled the air. A lunch table had been laid for us. It was a queer sensation to be on land again; I still felt the sea rocking in my semicircular canals. Baynes was there to greet us with his air of lugubrious kindness; he had mixed one of his excellent cocktails, Benedicta took hers upstairs for a while. I heard the telephone ring, and saw Baynes switch the extension lever sideways so that it would sound on the first-floor landing. I heard Benedicta speaking, her voice sharp and animated. When she came down she was all smiles. “It was Julian. He sends his love to us. He says that you’ll have a pleasant surprise when you next visit the office. We’ve had a big success with your first two devices.”

That afternoon I motored up to London to my by now unfamiliar
desk, to be greeted with good news that Julian had promised me. Congreve and Nathan brought me the whole dossier, including all the advertising and promotion. “It’s a landslide, Charlock” said Congreve happily, washing his hands with invisible soap. “You sit tight and watch your royalty scale; there seems to be no ceiling—the German and American figures aren’t even complete and look at sales.”

All this was extremely gratifying. But at the back of the dossier was another folder somewhat cryptically labelled “Dr. Marchant’s adaptation of the filament to gunsighting”. Neither Congreve nor Nathan could enlighten me as the meaning of it. When they left me I picked up the phone and asked the switchboard to try and unearth Julian for me; this took some time, and when at last I did locate him his voice sounded a good way off, as if he were speaking from the depths of the country. I cut short his conventional greetings and congratulations and at once broached the subject of the dossier. Julian said: “Yes, I was meaning to talk to you about it. Marchant runs our electrical side down at Slough. You may have met him, I don’t know. But when we were going into production he at once seized upon your device and applied it to something he himself was working on—a vastly improved gunsighting system. It looks very promising indeed; the Services are most excited by it. We have not moved properly into prototype as yet, but in a month or two we’ll have a trial shoot with the Army and see what we’ve got. I don’t need to emphasise the importance of the contracts we might get; and of course your patent is fully protected. It would mean a terrific jump in your royalties. I hope you are pleased.”

My silence must have disabused him of the idea, because he
repeated
the last phrase somewhat more anxiously and went on: “Of course I should perhaps have consulted you—but then you were somewhere on the high seas and Marchant was eager to get going with this infra-red electrical device….” His voice tailed lethargically away. “I feel” I said “as though my invention has been wrenched out of my hands.” It was marvellous the way he managed to convey the notion of a sympathetic smile over the phone, the kindly touch upon the elbow. “O don’t take it like that, Charlock. It isn’t the case. It’s your device differently applied, that is all.”

“Nevertheless” I said stubbornly, spectacles on nose. “
Nevertheless
, Julian.” He clicked his tongue sympathetically and went on with redoubled suavity. “Please accept my humblest apologies; I should have asked. But now the damage is done, so please forgive me won’t you?”

There was in fact nothing to be done but bow to it. “Where is Marchant?” I said. “He is on his way up to you now” said Julian, his voice suddenly fading into a thicket of scratchy interruptions. There was a click and we were cut off. I looked up to find Marchant standing before my desk with the air of an aggrieved collie, tousle-haired and shortsighted behind steel-rimmed spectacles of a powerful
magnification
, basted with insulation tape. He held out a long limp hand with fingers heavily stained by nicotine and acid. “It’s me” he said in his whining disagreeable voice, without removing the wet fag end from his lower lip. “Of course we’ve met.” “Sit down” I said with as much cordiality as I could muster. His whole appearance spoke of the stinks labs of some provincial university—much-patched tweed coat and grey bags: extremely dirty and crumpled shirt with missing stud. He threw a bundle of drawings on to the desk and drew up a chair in order to explain them, pointing cautiously with a
silver-hilted
pencil. His tweed smelt of wet. I was disposed to adopt an attitude of somewhat boorish resentment towards him, but one glance at his papers showed me the marvellous elegance of his application; he had made full use of the new sodium-tipped
contrivance
and applied it, with slightly modified mountings, to the conventional sighting screen of a weapon. I listened to his lucid explanation with unwilling admiration. “But then weapons!” I could not help saying at last. “How disappointing. I was hoping my toys would help the human race, not … well, contribute to its quarrels.” He looked me over, coolly, critically, and with some
contempt
. Then he lit a cigarette and said: “It’s quite the opposite with me. I hate it. Anything I can do to make things harder for it I will, so help me.” He exposed a row of uneven yellowish teeth in a ferine grin.

“Anyway” I said with unconcealed distaste “I must congratulate you I suppose.”

“It’s too early” he said. “Wait till we have our first shoot and see
if this blindsighting device works out. Nor need you repine too much, Charlock; compared to some of the things the firm is working on, this is … why, virtually harmless.” The little intercom panel below my desk lit up and buzzed. Nathan’s quiet voice said: “Mr. Charlock, more good news. Mr. Pehlevi says to tell you that the mercury contract is secure; we can substantially reduce our price on the new costings.”

Marchant was quietly wrapping up his plans and preparing to slide them back into the cardboard tube. His cigarette dangled from his lip. “Marchant have you ever seen Julian Pehlevi?” I asked curiously; I found I was addressing this question to more and more people these days. Very few could say yes—Nathan was one of the rare ones to have had the privilege. Marchant depressed his cheek in a grin and shook his head. “Can’t say I have” he said. “He keeps in touch by phone.”

He hovered for a moment, standing on one leg, as if everything had not been said on this particular topic. “I must say,” I said with a laugh “his damned elusiveness is getting me down—he’s like some blasted ghost.” Marchant scratched his nose. “Yet” he said,
surprisingly
“he must exist somewhere—look at your paper today.” There was a daily paper lying unopened in my in-tray. Marchant took it up and hunted for a moment before doubling it back at the financial page and handing it to me to read. Julian had made a speech to the Institute of Directors which was reported in full. “You see?” said Marchant. “Several hundred of those bloody directors must have listened to him for an hour yesterday.”

Despite the long tally of successes on every front it was with a kind of subdued melancholy that I drove down to the country that
evening
. Benedicta had already gone to bed when I arrived. I went up and watched her sleeping by the rosy glow of the night-light, her breast rising and falling, her features relaxed by sleep into an expression of forlorn simplicity. It seemed to me that there were several thousand things I had to tell her, to ask her: yet they were locked up somewhere below the threshold of consciousness. I could not bring them out, rationalise them. What were they? I did not really know—but they swarmed and pullulated inside me like bees from some overturned hive. I watched her thus for a long moment, before turning away and
moving silently towards the door. I had my hand upon the panel when I heard her voice say: “Felix.” I turned, but she was still lying with her eyes shut fast. “You were watching me” she said.

“Yes.”

“I have seen Nash and Wild. They think it is true, I am.”

“Open your eyes.”

“No.”

Two tears welled slowly out from under the closed lids and ran down her aquiline nose. “Benedicta!” I said sharply. She sighed deeply. “But
you
said you wanted a child.”

“I do. But I did not know it would be like this.”

I dabbed her nose with my handkerchief and stopped to kiss her lips, but she writhed away on the pillow. “I can’t bear to be touched, don’t you see? Please don’t touch me.”

I realised in a confused sort of way that a whole new pattern of our relationship had come into being, ushered in by these words. “Go away. I must sleep now.” Her tone might well have signified “I find everything about you repellent, disgusting.” Her eyes were open now, and they said much that lips could not. In the hall I sat down in a chair and stared hard at the opposite wall, completely
bemused
and discountenaced. “It will pass I suppose.”

I had just finished dining that evening when I heard the sound of a car upon the gravel drive outside the house. It was Nash, whom I had seen only once or twice before—small, pursy and pink: he stood before the fire somewhat self-importantly, rocking slightly on his heels, and drank a whisky. We spoke about Benedicta. “She often gets into states of mild confusion or hysteria—but this you probably know. There is nothing to be done, and as yet nothing to get unduly alarmed about. I’ve brought her a sleeping tablet or two;
if you don’t mind I’ll go up and have a word with her in a minute. By the way, terrible thing about Caradoc.”

“What about Caradoc?”

“Haven’t you seen the
Evening
Standard?
Killed in an air crash. I couldn’t believe my eyes.” Caradoc killed! It was like a
hammer-blow
in the centre of the mind. Nash extracted a paper from his briefcase and made his way up the long staircase, shaking his head and muttering to himself.