The Revolt of Aphrodite (31 page)

“Graphos!”

“Yes. And to think that all that time I didn’t know that this
common
little fiend enjoyed the real thing.”

She lit a cigarette with steady hands and blew a great plume of smoke like a denunciation. “And now he’s dying slowly, out of reach of everybody. Nobody knows as yet, he is still active. But he knows.” She poked up the fire with one of her crutches. I said “Graphos” on a sort of grace-note. She smiled. “He explained it to me. You might say it was hate at first sight—the only form of love they could know; they had the same values, were both frustrated in the same affective
field. But they did not have to
pretend
to each other. It lasted like that, for ages and ages. And, to my humiliation, I did not know. Does one ever? I rebuilt his career, poor moonstruck me.” She used some very bad language in Greek; brief tears came into her eyes. “And now I am obsessed with her because of it. But never mind, she has made her mistakes, even though she now wears her sex like an expensive perfume. Aha, but the man
she
married creaks,
creaks.
I am glad. There is no joy to be got from
him.
It’s malicious, but I can’t help being pleased.”

“No. That’s not you, Hippo.”

“It is. It is. And what galls me worse is that she is
articulate
now; I stole some of her letters to Graphos. You see how low one can sink? I can remember parts by heart, like where she says: ‘As for me,
having
been in a sort of clinic of love, a captive when young, and forced by circumstance to take on everyone, young or old, I missed the whole point. My understanding remained unkindled. The sex act misses fire if there is no psychic click: a membrane has to be broken of which the hymen is only a parody, a mental hymen. Otherwise one can’t understand, can’t receive. So very few men can do this for a woman. You, Graphos, did this for me. Though I never could love you I’m grateful.’”

She banged her crutch on the floor and turned the journal over on its face, her face.

Well we dined there, by the fire, plate on knee; and there was a kind of luxury to talk about the past which for me had become
prehistory
—yellowing snapshots of the Acropolis or Byzantine Polis. After dinner Pulley and Vibart put in a short appearance, and though our talk gathered a superficial animation we could still feel the
hangdog
death of Caradoc looming over us. It was a deeply felt physical presence—not only because all his papers were stacked up there on the sideboard. It would only have increased the sense of constraint to have played out his voice upon my machines, so I did not try to. But there was news of Banubula who might be coming soon to London to have his prostate looked at. “In the morning he still retires to the lavatory for an hour with a churchwarden clay pipe and a bowl of soapy water. There he sits in silent rapture blowing huge iridescent bubbles and watching them float out over Athens. In harmony with
himself. Only he still moans a good deal about not getting into Merlin’s. Otherwise no change.”

Vibart had just returned from a visit to Jocas who was also
recuperating
from a fall and a fractured hip. Picture of him bedridden before a huge fire taking castor-oil out of an oldfashioned
soup-spoon
; having his toenails trimmed for him by the eunuch. Almost mad with boredom, and unable to read, he had hit upon a solution—a model railway. His little trains ran all round the house, and around half the garden. Carried from point to point in a sedan, he passed his time agreeably in this fashion.

But at last talk lagged; Caradoc ached on like a bad tooth. The decanter was empty. They took their leave, reluctant to leave the evening unachieved, yet realising they could not revive it. Hippo stayed on to gossip and meditate. “Will you come with me? I have located four other films in the provinces in which she plays. I am here for a week—all too short for London.” I agreed, feeling curiously stirred by the idea; apart from the brief glimpse on board the vessel of love I had seen nothing of Iolanthe. She pressed my hand; we spoke of other things, and I mentioned the dead boy in Sipple’s bed. Who was finally responsible, both for the deed and for hushing the matter up? She did not know; and I could sense that she was telling the truth. “Sipple had threatened to do it because the boy was going to blackmail him. Fifteen all. But later he said it was done while he was out. Thirty fifteen. Yes, it was a brother of Iolanthe, and her father, who was in Athens that week end, had also threatened to punish the boy. Thirty all.” She gave a little groan and patted her head. “There seem to be a hundred reasons to account for every act. Finally one hesitates to ascribe any one of them to the act. Life gets more and more mysterious, not less.”

“I must say I thought that she herself might have….” I gazed in abstracted fashion at the doe-like face of the world star. “I wonder if the firm knows.”

“You must ask Julian.”

Later, of course, I did. He said something like: “You know most questions become more macro or micro, more Copernican or Ptolemaic: they don’t stay still, the pendulum is always on the move. They change as you watch. And always the answer proposed,
particularly 
by an organisation like the firm, is provisional, short-term. We have to accept that.” There was an overwhelming sadness in his voice. I was so touched by his sadness that I almost had a lump in my throat.

“Questions and answers” said she with bitterness. “How should I explain you loving Benedicta Merlin?”

“Easy. It was like breathing in.”

“And now?”

“Exactly. I am all confused.”

She gave a cruel little laugh. “Ah wait” I said reproachfully. “It still goes, on my side.”

“No woman can stand her” she said. “You know that.”

Of course I knew that. It wasn’t easy to explain the sort of
mesmeric
influence Benedicta exercised over her witless scientist. “A form of hysteria I suppose; in the Middle Ages it would have been classified as possession.”

“They say that the firm has her regularly burgled in order to offset her tremendous expenditure against insurance!”

“Malice” I said.

“Very well, malice.”

There was a ring at the door; I had ordered her a taxi, and now slowly and reluctantly I helped her hobble to it. She turned in the street and said: “Shall we tomorrow afternoon? Please.”

“Of course we shall.” She meant the film of Iolanthe. Away she rolled with a wave of a white glove and a tremulous smile.

All at once the house seemed very old and damnably musty, like some abandoned tomb which the grave-robbers had not spared. I got out one of the firm’s calendars—huge meretricious pictures of colonial landscapes—and marked off the days to Xmas. I supposed I should have to make some preparations to receive her. Or should I just leave it to chance, let her walk back naturally into the circle of our common life if you could call it that like one who had only left the room for a few moments? I wondered. I wondered.

But the pilgrimage to the shrines of the love goddess intervened among these preoccupations—poor Hippolyta’s week of self-torture and admiration; riding to suburban cinemas in Finchley and
Willesden
where the sacred mask was being exhibited in a series of hieratic
roles which, superposed at such speed one upon the other, and with such variety of age, situation, landscape, hypnotised me hardly less absolutely. Sitting in musty seats, inhaling dusty floors whose peanut shells crackled under foot: in afternoon flea-pits, holding the white glove of Hippo and watching, heart in mouth—well no, I couldn’t any longer use the prop of her name as a memory-aid. Iolanthe had slipped away, far beyond me now, out of sight of Number Seven, of Athens, the Nube. She brought to this new silver life a gravity, authority, distinction, even a tender mischievousness which
bewitched
; she had refined her potential for gesture and expression in some radical fashion. No. No. This creature I did not know at all. I whispered her name once or twice, but it raised no echo. And yet it was with real concern for her true self that I watched this mammoth distortion of Iolanthe into a world-fetich. (Hippo gasping after some great scene, saying “marvellous”, touched to the quick.) But my goodness, the responsibility she had taken upon herself was frightening. She lived by the terms of this mock-art, lived a travesty of a life passed in public: as much a prisoner of her image as any of us to the firm. She couldn’t walk down a street to post a letter unless she was disguised. I saw in the flash the sad trajectory of her new life, the life of a priestess, with a clarity that no further information could ever qualify. It was all there, so to speak. Even what she told me
herself
afterwards added only detail—even the worst things, like having to dress up and “really act” when she wanted to be alone, out of the glare of the following pressmen. For example, even to visit their securities in the bank vaults twice a year—a ritual the husband
insisted
upon: it lulled his sense of insecurity. Then about how one day the child gets locked in a safe, suffocated, brought out dead—all that stuff; and running down the street from the hospital in tears there comes a snap from a street-photographer and a tendered card. “Your picture, lady?” He did not notice the tears under the dark glasses. Well and then pacing a long low-ceilinged room with her new camera-shy walk, so painfully learned from a ballerina, she says piteously: “Why should I not love this life, Felix? It’s the only real life I have known.”

Indeed. And then Hippo saying savagely: “If it were an
art-form 
she would be really great. Thank God it isn’t. I should be even more angry.”

“How can we know?”

“Why it’s aimed at the mob.”

“And?”

“And!”

Then later over repulsive tea and buttered toast in some small café she explained in more detail. “You see, the majority must always be denied the higher pleasures like art etc. which in our age it feels entitled to. It’s not a matter of privilege, my dear. Just as literacy doesn’t confer the ability to really read—so biologically the many are unfitted for the rarest pleasures which are travestied by Iolanthe; love-making, art, theology, science—they each contain whole lives, silver lives, encapsulated in a form. They exist for the maker and his few subjects. She exists for everyone. When we speak of the
destruction
of an ethos or a civilisation we are describing the effect on it of the mob-discovery of it. The mob wants it, but it must be made palatable. Naturally the efficacy becomes diluted. There you have Iolanthe.”

I was not sure at all about this. I had spilt butter on my tie. But
inside
I simply ached with vexation at never having met Iolanthe.

But there was no news until the day before Christmas when Nash rang up very chirpy. “Well, here she is at last” he said with his
false-sounding
heartiness. “All safe and sound.”

Flowers! In my benign way I had always thought of her returning to Mount Street; but Nash dispelled the illusion. “No, she’s in the country. She wants you to bring Baynes down to her if you will—you will go down this evening won’t you?” I said I would, though I had to disguise a distinct pique that Benedicta had neither bothered to inform me of her arrival before the event—nor telephoned me to tell me of her whereabouts. However I swallowed the toad-like thought as best I could, and went out to buy such presents as might be deemed suitable to the season. It was sleeting, the taxi-driver was kindly garrulous; there was, as usual, nothing that I could give Benedicta, for she had everything—nothing, that is, of any real value or worth; things such as paintings or books would not have felt to her like presents. It was going to be an unbridled yuletide.
The shops were all lighted up with a ghastly artificial array of colours and forms which signal the triumphs of commerce over religion. Loudspeakers everywhere were playing “Silent Night”, pouring the spirit of the Christchild over everything with this amplified crooning of organs and xylophones: into the frosty streets with their
purple-nosed
crowds of milling hierophants, busy buying tokens of the miracle—poor pink-witted, tallow-scraping socialist mobs. It was cold. It was biting cold. I was angry. The latest jazz hit sawed at the frosty air, with its oft-repeated refrain:

In all this tremendous tintinnabulation Charlock walks, the “
self-inflicted
man” of Koepgen’s fable, wondering what he might buy as an offering to the season. There’s something wrong about a
philosophy
which doesn’t offer the hope of certain happiness. Despite man’s estate (tragic?) there should be at least a near-guarantee of happiness to be dug out of the air around us. In Selfridges the air hovered and lapped us, impregnated with the heat of our bodies and breath. Pressed in sardine fashion on all sides I let myself drift slowly down the carpeted streams. Our predispositions reveal
themselves
very accurately in our
moeurs.
Never mind. I bought some
expensive
gifts and had them elegantly wrapped; then swollen with these acquisitions waddled back to the doors like a woman at term, crushing up my paper as I went. The crowds milled and swirled. “Freed from the economic whip, we will not steer your bloody ship.” Nor could I find another taxi. I had to walk almost all the way back to the office where the duty car was waiting for me. At Mount Street Baynes was waiting, he had already packed for me. I looked around to see if anything had been overlooked, gasping a bit, like a goldfish fallen out of its bowl on to the carpet.

But by now, with the falling evening temperatures everything had become stringently real—for heavy creamy snow was falling, showers of white inhaling the white lights of cars, fluttering like
confetti
from an invisible proscenium of heavenly darkness. Speed and visibility got into lock-step; we slithered down Putney and away into the spectral ribbons of main road which led us ever deeper into
what now slowly became an enchanted forest—a medieval
illustration
to Malory. To beguile the time I played over some prints of recent voices which were destined for my collection; it was strange to sit watching the snow while Marchant’s somewhat squeaky voice… “The war, my boy, meant all things to all men; full
employment
, freedom from the wife and kids, a fictitious sense of purpose. Blame your neighbour for your own neurasthenia and punish him. It was all real, necessary and yet a phantom. The reason why
everyone
loved the war was simple: there was no time to think about the even more pressing problem namely: ‘Why am I making a mess of my life?’ I had had the time, but not the good sense. I threw myself into this delicious amnesia which only wholesale bloodspilling can give. Thirsty Gods! What hecatombs of oxen. Hurrah!”