The Revolt of Aphrodite (41 page)

The two governesses were upon us, witch-like and purposeful in their rusty black clothes; they hardly spoke as they set about separating and shackling us. Then frightened supers like Baynes, gobbling and swallowing. And lastly fussy Nash with his calamitous concern.

I was sick and feverish and upset—and now very much out of place in all this babble. Nor was the solace of strong drink very much in keeping with so hysterical a mood. I could not sleep in spite of it. I lay awake most of the night, listening to the faint sounds which
betokened
more purposeful activities than my own in other parts of the house; the telephone ringing, the voice of Nash. “Yes, he’s here. I’ve put him to bed.” I laughed grimly to myself and shook my fist at the ceiling. It did not need much imagination to translate the keening of rubber tyres on gravel in the first dawn-light; that would be the limousine with the drawn blinds. Soon Benedicta would be
beginning
that eternally repeated journey back to the land of the
archetypes
. “Our Father which art in heaven”. By craning my head out of the window I could verify these hypotheses. The child would be in front with the harpies. Benedicta would be carried, heavily veiled, like a statue of the Virgin Mary. I don’t say it wasn’t all for the best. I don’t say it wasn’t all for the best.
Om.

* * * * *

H
uman attention is fragile and finite; won’t be mastered; can’t be bribed; is always changing…. Ah, for one moment of that total vision which might reorder the whole field and make it significant. I suppose from the outside it must have seemed like a progressive melancholia—I mean, resigning from the firm (no reaction to this) and locking myself up in the country in a desperate attempt to abdicate, along the lines suggested by Julian.
Not
to
invent
any
more.
Somehow one day one must try and stop being one’s own little hero—eh Charlock? You can do it for a year or two at most without faltering. It’s all very well, solitude and misanthropy. The beard I grew was patched with white; it gave me a startled look. I had to buy heavier lenses for my glasses. I was drinking a good deal and smoking too much. But it was a pleasure to let my appearance run to seed, to wear torn pullovers and knee-bulged grey bags. Nor was I completely cut off, except from Julian; he was biding his time, I supposed. I spoke to others on the phone, long conversations full of
non
sequiturs
,
yes, and
common-room
pleasantries. And all the time, unknown to my conscious me, that bloody old mass of wires I have called Abel was maturing. A certain resignation set in, too, walking about in the snow, hammering out Bach, skating in a deep muse upon the frozen waters of the lake. Well, so be it; if I must occupy myself, what better way? Besides, who would ever understand poor Abel, his foggy calculus of human potentials based upon the first cave-man chirp of the human voice? I was also preparing my revenge on Julian.

You may say that such an instrument could not possibly predict; but the future is only the memory of the past extended into the future. The backside of the moon of memory, if you like. The
prediction
of stars in the sky as yet undiscovered by the lens—that is a fair analogy. From the birth-cry to the death-rattle most lives can be plotted. I shall spare myself the eight lines of maths which resume
this statement—crisp pothooks, shell of the cosmic egg. How little one needs to divine the human potentials in a single given life;
translate
through vibrations back to memory and thence to situation. Something the pundits of the firm will not fathom. When they take Abel apart they will be left with a mute collection of wires, like a human skeleton. Where is the soul of the machine? they will cry. Ah me! An invention as singular, original and definitive as the telescope.
E pur
si
muovi‚
and so on.

The proof was in the pudding; and I had a pitifully small abacus to work with—just the people who had collided with me like rogue stars: just their sayings, visions, and the few facts I knew about them. I took over the big musicians’ gallery for my keyboard, mounting the long and complicated panel of my fascia in the manner of some huge cinema organ; behind it was the library with its transmuting system. What is better than reading the stars? Why, listening to them in their transports of love and pain, music of the spheres echoed by diluted animals. It all grew out of my little magnetic boxes—a lot of it scratchy as hell. Sitting there in the tremendous loneliness of the silent house (I had sent most of the servants away) I sat, a lean and bearded man, switching from life to life. It took ages, of course; more than three years before I managed to obtain the first coherent response to my data. In this way I hoped to prosecute the opening moves of my war upon Julian—my persecution of this hidden man. I had thought of other things, but they were schoolboy pranks—messages in invisible ink slowly printing themselves on astonished blotters. But Abel was better. With him I could scry and scan. Much of it was not very palatable—but is truth ever palatable? I discovered much too about myself, about my inadequacy with women. O it was terrible to see the real truth about Benedicta; she was to be pitied, not to be hated. And the quiet Iolanthe’s death-bed cry: “How little I have managed to live, and that always in hotels. There never seemed to be enough time, and now….” I should have carried off these women in my teeth to devour them at leisure on a piece of waste ground. But then women cannot help being predatory—to take up with one is to inherit a mink farm.

Mark came, my son—how strange the word sounds! But he sheered away from me, sneaking round corners to avoid encounters.
I saw him, a pale thin little creature with sticking-out ears, walking solemnly to church between those two black harpies, as if between warders. It was clear that they had had their instructions. The boy was doing some sort of preparatory work for an entrance exam though still barely out of kindergarten. I could pick him up on Abel, but dimly. I saw him,
heard
him, sitting at my desk in Merlin’s—a pale small-boned young man with a widow’s peak. But that lay far ahead as yet, after my own … disappearance. This was foggy, with more than a hint of suicide about it. But talking of suicide, since the word has cropped up, I remember Mark’s own little effort. I was working very early one morning when I happened to glance out of a window in time to see him walking down towards the lake. The earliness of the hour struck me—it was barely light. He had a slice of bread in his hand and was apparently about to feed the swans. I was about to turn away when something about his walk aroused my curiosity; it was so stiff and stilted, as if he were forcing himself to advance by sheer will-power. A moment later and he has walked right into the icy water, wading slowly outwards. Heavy sleet was falling. I shouted twice but he did not turn. Suddenly the
comprehension
of what he was doing dawned upon me and I raced for the door. The cold struck one amidships. He was moving steadily into the deeper reaches, already almost up to his neck. In spite of the blazing freeze I plunged after him, gasping with pain. I just reached his head as the water rose to his mouth, and grabbed him. He was blue and contorted with cold, crying and snickering. I half pushed the little creature into my shirt and crawled laboriously back to land with him, myself half fainting from the cold. Through his little blue prawn lips he was saying “They are trying to keep me away from you.” Over and over again. I plunged for the downstairs bathroom with its hot taps, in a delirium of cold and anguish; plunging him into the hot water to soothe his numbed limbs. Then I slumped down on the bidet opposite him and wept; I wept my way right back to my solitary childhood, back to the breast, back into the very womb which is the only memory we know about. He wept too, but
commiseratingly
; and presently I felt his small pale hand touching my head, patting me, consoling me. I did not need to ask who or what was trying to keep him from me. So we sat for an age, staring at each
other. Then I towelled his pink frail body back to life, alarmed at his slenderness, his shallow lungs. Our clothes fumed upon the radiators. Waiting for them to dry I said “Would you like to work with me on Abel?” and his eye lit with a frail gleam. He sighed: “They wouldn’t let me.” “Then they mustn’t know, Mark, that is all. You must find times like this, too early or too late for them.”

And so it was, he became my famulus, sneaking down before first light to spend two engrossing hours among my lights and wires. It was difficult at first to teach him the first principles of the thing; but later he mastered the whole system and crawled about my organ-loft like a powder-monkey.

“What is Abel really?”

“Well, one day you will want to know about us all, about your past and mine, about your future.”

“Will I?”

“Almost certainly. Everyone does. Here look at the programme manual—do you see the different bays marked ‘When’ ‘Who’ ‘Why’ ‘Where’ and ‘If’.”

“
If
?” he said with surprise. “Why
If
?”

“It’s the most important question of all in a way—it can change all the others: just one tiny grain of
If
.”

It was a pleasure too to have someone to talk to; and as we worked I gave him the whole pedigree of Abel, starting with the
Theaetetus
and its block of wax in the human soul eager to imprint itself with every perception, thought, emotion; the whole theory of Platonic memory and all that blubber to which the child listened with wonder and a certain understanding. The only thing was that I had to warn him against the Julian dossier—how to be careful; because when I had finished with Julian I knew he would walk into my trap and come down to find out what there was to know about himself. What man could resist reading a secret report on himself? It was the second panel on the left with an inviting red button. I pushed it open for Mark—in order to make certain that he understood—and
together
we stared into the barrels of the loaded twelve-bore I had lashed to a stand and wired for action. I would leave this behind me when I left. Mark gazed at it wonderingly, and then at me, his small blue eyes narrowed as he tried to assess the meaning of this present.
But he said nothing. “You won’t give me away?” I said, feeling so sure of his love for me. He shook his head proudly.

So we opened up several of the channels and completed the elaborate programmes which would bring them to life—if that is the scientific word. I don’t know when I have been so happy. Nor was the business kept a secret; Nash came and had it all explained to him. He looked very strange, declared that he understood, and tiptoed away again. If he did not tap his head significantly before my eyes he perhaps did it before the eyes of others. Marchant also came—but he turned pale and gnawed his lip, whether from jealousy or contempt I do not know. Yes I do, though. I had pitifully little on him and I hadn’t really assorted the field with any thoroughness but up in the predicter came the word “plagiarism”. I wanted all this guff to filter back slowly to Julian, and it did. But that was only the
beginning
.

Then unluckily Mark was caught; one of the harpies in a wizard’s dressing-gown stood sibilating in the doorway of the gallery. “Mark, you have been
told
over and over
again
.”
She reached out a hand like a spade. I watched with a sort of recondite insolence, tipping the bottle of lemonade to my lips. Mark allowed himself to be led tamely away, head high, lips white, ears pink—the captive rabbit. It seemed useless to protest, so I did nothing, secure in his confidence. He stepped high and proud, and did not turn his head to say goodbye.

Well: and then what? Why, a whole winter lay before me of
ordering
and scrying—on a much firmer wicket than John Dee ever was. Fires blazed everywhere, the snow blanketed everything. And now
Julian
was being persecuted. His
own
voice was ringing him up! “Is that Julian?” “Yes.” “This is Julian too.” It had been pretty largely given out that Abel was some sort of electronic hoax; but truth is relative. It was far less accurate than I would have liked to hope, but nevertheless I found I could use it. After all, the planchette is no good without the hand, the crystal ball without the sorcerer’s eye. Yes, I could see backwards and forwards along the tragic ellipse of these segmented lives, to come up now and again with partial
fragments
of truth. At times my nets were full; at times I had to empty the small fry back into the stream. Goodness, but enough came up to fill Julian with alarm. He tried to ring me several times, and I was
delighted by the concealed agitation in his tones. How did I know what I knew? Truth to tell, by the merest divination in the name of Abel. It took hardly any time to convince and disturb him because I fell upon some trivia which proved themselves accurate within days of Julian’s voice telling him. Perhaps all this might prove a useful guide to the stock market or the race-course? I made Julian ask Julian this in a slightly bitter tone. But then inexorably I began to edge towards his private life—the field of his emotions and hopes. Ah, I wanted to reduce him slowly, with infinite slowness; already I scented his weakness. He was like a drowning man. At times too I was overcome with remorse to be so brutal, for now he was really suffering. And I brought the whole weight of my tortures to bear upon the sick Iolanthe, upon her silent native death. He had heard enough by now to suspect that the rest might well become true. And then Graphos too: the sad footsteps of Hippo echoing on the lino of some gravid hospital corridor. The ignominy of the acetone breath, the legs gradually filling up, turning gangrenous. So
carefully
kept, those legs, in grey woollen socks. He had been
warned
not to try and cut his own toenails, for the slightest wound…. But Graphos was not used to obeying others. He always knew better.

I had written to Iolanthe, promising to exorcise her house
provided
she came with me; but the letter arrived too late and she burned it along with many others. All this comes of a strange meeting I was to have with Mrs. Henniker on the Zürich plane. Her face had been hollowed out by suffering, scaled and pared to the bone by the sleepless nights she had spent at the bedside of Io. The tall steel bed against a window full of Alpine stars and tumultuous grass. One candle burning before an ikon—no need to say which. Shaken by a kind of involuntary sobbing which contained no more tears—she had used them all up. At first nobody knew except Julian
of
course.
Whenever she was ill she was registered at three different clinics in order to enjoy some peace and anonymity at a fourth. Well, there by candlelight reciting her past and peering with those wild enlarged eyes into the fastnesses of the future, the pinewood coffin.
Tunc.

It was so slow, the simple declining into the final pens of sleep, without too much pain, too many numbed regrets. Rolling down the green slopes of death, moving faster and ever faster, turning through
the slow spirals of consciousness towards the heart of the fire opal. All night long now Mrs. Henniker sat beside the bed, her
stone-coloured
eye fixed upon the face of the white woman who had become her daughter; all night upright in an uncomfortable steel chair, the whole building silent around her, save for the shuffling shoes of the night-nurse—one for the whole floor. From time to time the patient’s eyes would open and wander about the ceiling as if seeking for
something
. Her lips might move a little, perhaps even tenderly smile. I would have liked to think—I
did
think—that she was picturing both of us crossing to her father’s island in the blue fishing-boat. A church, cypresses, sand-coloured jetty, box-dwellings of coloured whitewashes, the pink-toed pigeons crooning. Up and ever up to the abandoned barn where his whole life had been lived, had completed its simple circle. The well overgrown with moss now, the marble well-head grooved by the cable which for centuries had drawn up the sweet water. One loose stone extracted revealed the hiding-place of the key. Let us suppose we entered on tip-toe—entered the smelly gloom of the apple-charmed room full of unbroken cobwebs—the room he died in. Somewhere along the line, at this exact point,
everything
about my life threatens to become successful; everything takes a turn for the better. A fresh wind fills the sails—so Abel tells me, but always adding the rider “a delusion like so many others, that’s all”. Then the field goes blank again and the hints about suicide come up. It would not last, you see: could not last.