The Revolt of Aphrodite (40 page)

“You are still there, Charlock?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I think all this must come from your sense of impotence aggravated by success; such feelings always result in rash moral judgements. You have never succeeded in doing the abstract work for which you pined—though that was not our fault. And you have worked up a grudge against the firm in telling yourself that it is caught up in the nets of base matter, is exploring and adapting matter, expropriating matter.”

“And the results?”

“My dear, I can do nothing, nobody can. Yes, we can make small adjustments of stress or direction or emphasis. But the wheel turns in spite of one. Come, grow up, Charlock. The firm won’t bite, you know.”

“I am still waiting to be convinced” I said grimly. “All this is special pleading.”

It was, of course; and yet in another way it wasn’t. It made sense on one level, nonsense on another. I had not yet succeeded in
penetrating
to the basic fallacy in these contentions. In a funny way, too, I thought him—Julian personally—innocent of any intention to delude. He believed what he said, and consequently it was true, not for me, but for him. Perhaps even objectively true? My reason was spinning like a top. The vertiginous sense of failure was so intense that it had got mixed up with my breathing. I was suffocated. I heard Julian put down the receiver and walk away a few steps; then in the silence I heard some music begin to play—the opening bars of a Schumann concerto. “As an honourable man,” he said “who abhors all exaggeration, I do not know what to tell you.”

How many of these ideas would remain waterproof? I wondered. Julian was sighing again. “What about Iolanthe?” I said cruelly. (Marchant said that ideas were simply nags; one rode about on them until one tired of them, then tied them to a tree and fucked them.) “Iolanthe” he repeated slowly, accenting the word wrongly. “What of her?” In my almost drunken state I could not resist a further threat. “A creation of the soap-flakes mind” I said. “Nobody would
believe it to see her picture in your flat.” Julian smiled invisibly. “An artist” he said, and “A smile to make one rise in one’s stirrups.”

“I might even leave England,” I said “where the national sloth has reached the brain cortex.”

Julian coughed. All of a sudden his voice became bony and determined; a sort of cold fury possessed it: “There is only one solution for you—to stop inventing altogether; to retire on your winnings—I will not call them earnings, for without us you would be penniless today. Abandon the game altogether.” Then his voice changed again; it sank into a lower register, it became merciful,
tender
, calm. He whispered almost to himself. “Who can gauge the feeling of a man in love who is forced to sit and look on at the steady deterioration of a fine mind and lovely body? We must celebrate the people who set us on fire.”

“Julian” I cried. “Is this your last word?”

“What else?” he said with such world-weariness, such
inexpressible
sadness, that I felt a lump come into my throat. Yet at the same time gusts of rage and frustration were still there in my mind, I could not still them. “Mountebank! Actor!” I jeered. Yet he did not seem to have heard me—or at any rate the insults produced no
recognisable
reflection in his tone.

“Graphos” he said “could only love a weeping girl. If she did not weep she must be made to—so he said.” All of a sudden I recalled a chance remark of Io’s to the effect that only the free man can really be loved by a woman; I wondered which of us she might have in mind? Ah which?

I had said it before I knew the words were out of my mouth—without any premeditation whatsoever. “Julian, for how long has Benedicta been your mistress, and what is the name of the drug?” I heard him draw his breath sharply as if I had run a thorn under his fingernail. “Do you hear me?” I said lurching about drunkenly and laughing coarsely. Silence from his end. It was war now to the very knife, I felt it. Yet the silence prolonged itself into infinity as I stood there. “Julian,” I said again “you don’t need to tell me; I shall find out from her.” There was the dry crisp click of the receiver going down, that was all; and I stood with the sea-shell of emptiness to my ear, mumbling to myself; for somehow these stupid remarks had set
fire to my mind, illuminating a whole new area of unmapped action. The key—
of
course
—the key to everything was Benedicta! I could do nothing that did not encapsulate her consent, her agreement. Before any problem could be settled I must settle the problem of this wife of mine. “By God” I said to myself as suddenly the fact dawned upon me. “Of course.” How unjust I had been to her! I was filled with remorse all of a sudden. I had never really talked to her,
explained
to her, tried to enlist her support for my plans … I must rush to her side to explain everything.

But by the time I reached her Benedicta had already taken one of her characteristic leaps forward into triumphant unreason, eluding more successfully than ever the vain pursuit of her doctors or her lovers.

The slim three and a half litre Lethe lay outside the office—a birthday present from the firm; its glossy black snout pointed
down-street
like a lance laid in rest. This elegant missile could sway silently through traffic, and climb effortlessly into the hundreds with a faint blue snarl. For the most part it made only the noise of cremated silk—which is to say, no noise whatsoever. Its brief insistent horn copied the note of a trumpeting goose. I tell you the intoxication of driving this deft shooting-star across London soothed away my anxieties. Cool winds came off the river at Hammersmith; cloudy sunshine feathered out the last of the daylight. It would be dark before I arrived. It was dark when I did.

The house presented its usual aspect of tenantless animation—as if the owners had gone out to the pub for a drink leaving all the lights on, the radio on, the fires unguarded. It was the servants’ day off no doubt. The lake was still. In the vague enthusiasm of my
self-discovery
(that I still had the power to conceive of independent actions) I was ill prepared for anything out of the ordinary. I could think about nothing but my own feelings: about how to make them clear to poor Benedicta. So much so that I hardly took in at first the bloody spoor which here and there marked the scarlet
staircase-carpet
; nor the trail of dummy books which lay anyhow on the
landings
—an obscure paperchase of empty titles like
Decline
and
Fall
and
Night
Thoughts
and
The
Consolations
of
Philosophy.
Up I went and up: not sufficiently attentive to be alarmed, more puzzled. Yet here
and there—it was like following a wounded lion to its lair—I came upon a red pug-mark freshly impressed in the carpet. What could it mean? How on earth could I guess that Benedicta had been at that double toe of hers with a kitchen knife?

Well, the bedroom door was ajar and pushing it softly open I entered, to stand upon the threshold and contemplate the new Benedicta in her latest yet oldest role. I vaguely surmised that her period had surprised her, that was all. But everything was quite different. She was standing on the bed naked, her arms raised in rapture, her face burning with gratitude and adoration; it was clear that the ceiling had burst open to reveal the heavens, clouded and starry, with its vast frieze of angels and demons—figures of some great Renaissance Annunciation. The ceiling had withdrawn, had become the inverted bowl of the heavens. She was talking to the figures—at least her lips were moving. In the heavy pelt of the bed you could not discern the torn foot. She was surrounded by an
absolute
snowdrift of paper, torn up very small. Most of it was my
transcripts
I suppose—I recognised the paper I use for dactyl. But there were other things, letters on lined paper. Cupboards hung open with clothes pouring from them. Her dressing table was cluttered with fallen cosmetics. The elegant little leather boxes with trees—her
postiche
and wig boxes—lay about poking their tongue out at us. It was memorably silent. The trance could have been indefinitely
prolonged
, one felt; the figures in the frieze held up their hands to bless, or to point to breasts, or crowns of thorns. But they were benign, they were on her side, and her tears flowed down her cheeks in gratitude. In the bubble of this enormous concentration there was simply no room for me, nor for my preoccupations. I stood gaping at this tableau until she caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye and turned slowly in a puzzled way—the wonder widening in concentric rings upon her white face, as if I had thrown a stone into a pool. I suppose I must have stammered out something for she stared keenly at me and then put a finger to her lips. A look of sudden panic intervened now with astonishing rapidity and clutching her ears she screamed one: “I’ve gone deaf.” Then just as suddenly dropped her hands, calmed and smiled wickedly.

This called for restraint of some sort, though nothing could be
more angelic than the cool sweet smile of the demon. Underneath it, too, far down below the surface one recognised the look of a wounded animal, say a cat which tries to say: “I have a thorn in my foot. Please help.” Borne on a clumsy tide of scattered and conflicting emotions I surged awkwardly forward, mumbling, arms outspread in the travesty of an embrace, unsure what the contents of my gesture might be—to embrace, to restrain, to comfort? All three, I suppose. In the corner there was a telephone torn out of the wall which hinted at strength which that slender body did not appear to own. “You see how it is?” she whispered, and slipped from the bed to elude my arms. The operation was more delicate and awkward than I had supposed; like when a swallow flies into a room and one tries to expel it without damaging or frightening the creature. Well, so we walked round, full of an awkward stateliness. Once or twice I almost caught up with her; her attention jumped for a moment from me to other objects in the room. But it was never absent for long, and she continued to elude me in a deft unhurrying fashion. And so out on the landing, with only a pause to topple a small statuette; and down the long staircase, saturated in the loneliness of this dreadful situation. Where the devil was everyone? Normally the house was full of servants. She slipped through doors, shutting them behind her to delay me; as I entered I would see her leaving the room from the far end, still
looking
at me over her shoulder to make sure I followed, expressionlessly seductive. She was heading steadily across the mansion towards the eastern side—towards, in fact, the old gunroom with its glass cases stocked with weapons. My concern deepened, my pace increased, but she held her distance. Then, as she disappeared into the gunroom she managed to find a key to turn. I was locked out. Under the noise of my impotent banging and cajoling I could hear the sliding doors of the glass cases being opened; then a crackle of paper and carton which instantly translated itself into a vision of Benedicta stripping a cartouche of shells. There were several drawers full of them. I began to sweat; then I remembered that there was a second door, a mere hatch, which led into a tiny bar built into the corner of the room. This was a swing-door, and I rushed for it; but the delay had given her just enough time, and when I barged through it was to see
her quietly slipping out from the further end of the room with a gun under her arm.

She had chosen the second ballroom—the huge gilt one—now polished like a skull and empty of everything but its mirror and grand piano. She was standing in the centre of it, waiting for me to appear in the doorway, quite calm and composed. A few streaks of blood only—toes are relatively bloodless—marked her progress across the polished floor. But there she lounged, as if waiting for the machine to flick clay pigeons into the sky. It was no use calling her name. Inevitably, too, I feared at that instant that her target would be myself, framed by the gilt doorway in all my ineffectualness. But if by any chance the idea had not entered her head, I did not wish to provoke it by a sudden move. I stood rooted, expecting to receive the twelve-bore charge in the stomach; but she swung up and away and round, confronting the long chain of mirrors which lined the sombre room. As she let fly she began to recite the Lord’s Prayer in a shaky broken voice—a small thread of sound among the explosions. “Our Father which art” (bang) “in heaven hallowed” (bang) “be thy name” (bang). And so forth. She had picked upon a repeating
pump-gun
, a six-shot. The noise of the smokeless shots was deafening,
wit-scattering
. I felt dizzy and faint, all my impressions fused together in a dazzle; and yet with the part of one’s mind which remains attentive and critical I could not help noticing the voluptuous thwack with which the charge bust into the mirrors, embedding itself deep in the reality of the non-mirror world, shattering her image. A plump sound like someone beating up a swansdown pillow.

The rest doesn’t translate so very well. I had picked up, I don’t know how or where, a short ashplant—perhaps with some vague instinct of self-defence. I suppose I rushed at her—but it must have been with the toppling sliding motions of someone on ice, for the floor was glossy. Vaguely something in the nature of a
football-tackle
. I locked my arms round the defiant nakedness and together we stumbled and fell to the ground, the gun pressed between us. Indeed, the last discharge went off as we were falling and its hot breath burned my forehead; the barrel was fiendish hot too. So we rolled over and over until she released it and sent it skittering across the floor. Then to my surprise I began to beat her with my own
weapon, but beat her precious hard across the back and buttocks. A sort of voluptuous rage must have possessed me—I was beating Julian, I suppose. And for her part she lay, pale and with an
expression
of content almost, eyes shut, lips moving in prayer—like someone accepting a well-merited punishment. It was frightening, also sexually exciting in a dim sort of way. But an end was soon put to this disgraceful scene, for by now the room was filling up with people.