The Revolt of Aphrodite (64 page)

We kissed and she brushed my ear with her lips murmuring: “Precious. But life could have been full of so much hope, only we’re cripples, cripples. I spoke to Julian.” Well, if there was enough juice for all this there might be enough for her to get back on to the mnemonic register without an additional charge, and actually answer a “real” question. “How did you do it?” I asked. She closed her eyes, appearing not to have heard, not to have understood; then she opened them again and the tiny dimple appeared in her cheek. “The Arab doctor is kind; he got me Julian. Just for a minute. It’s so tiring.” So that was the answer! Said had obtained the call and placed the receiver to her ear and mouth. Switched on the power. Ah, my schizoid goddess, you are falling asleep again. She couldn’t help it; her long lashes declined softly and she subsided quietly once more into nescience pillowed on the sea-rhythms of the current.
Receding, receding into the tideless sleep of scientific time; her bloodstream was a wavelength only in her tissues, its force measured now upon a small dial with a face no larger than a lady’s
wrist-watch.
A little nodding blue bulb of pilot-flame winked on all through the night. Such silence and such beauty!

“Well, we’ve solved the mystery” I said. “Let’s go home. I am beginning to feel tired.”

“Kiss me just once” said Benedicta. “I want to feel how it must have felt to her … to it. No, you don’t kiss very well. Inattentive. Your mind’s always elsewhere, you are woolgathering. You should plunge it in like a spear.” But I was tucking back the white sheets round my dolly, drawing the transparent curtains once more. It was very late, and for some reason I felt very excited and nervous—a relief-reaction I suppose to find everything as it should be. Naysmith had left an evening paper and in this mood of slight disorientation, anxiety-powered I suppose, the most banal headlines took on a tinge of almost sinister ambiguity. “Attendants steal fittings” “Birds lodge in soil” “Work-providers for landless”. Amen. Amen. I locked up with method, whistling under my breath. Then with a sigh I clicked the studio door behind me. “Now,” I said “when I tell you I am working late at the office, you’ll know who I am kissing. Would it be possible to become jealous of a model? I suppose so; one can about a child or a dog, and in cases of great mental cruelty brought before the Californian courts you even find inanimate
objects
playing a perfectly satisfactory role. A man who went to bed with his golf clubs for example. Extreme mental cruelty. Benedicta when you read cases like that and then think of me don’t use bad language, will you promise?” But Benedicta would not rise to my nervous banter; she remained pale and abstracted, her hand clasped hard in mine as we found our way across the grass to the asphalt carpark. She sensed that it was mere diversionary babble, that all of a sudden this trifling incident had upset me, had made me feel hesitant, unsure of myself. Yet I could not formulate any special reason why. There was nothing really wrong, nothing at all.

She drove slowly on the way back, and indeed took a longer way round, through Croley, Addhead and Byre, which must have added some forty miles on the clock. I wondered why for a while. Of
course. Then I remembered the road all but blocked with fallen branches. I was glad anyway of the long detour; I always think better out of doors than in, and best of all when I am travelling as a passenger in a fast car. But it was mighty late when at last we came back to the cottage, sharing the last puffs of the last cigarette. It had stopped snowing. A large limousine lay at the stile across the fields with its headlights blazing. It was the office Rolls that Julian always used. Indeed his chauffeur sat inside at the wheel. We pulled in alongside him and he saluted when he recognised us. “He is waiting up for you, sir. Mr. Baynes let him in and made him a snack to eat. I am to pick him up within the next hour or so, so I’m keeping the car warmed up to run him down to Southampton.”

We docked the little Spear and cut a glittering path across the field to where the cottage stood, with its one warmly-lit window. The latch was off the door and it opened with a slight touch to reveal a blazing fire and the figure of Julian sitting in a high-backed chair holding a dossier on his knee; the little silver pencil raised in his small neat hand was poised over some abstruse calculation. He looked completely different once more—perhaps it was the clothes, for this time he was dressed in morning dress with a high stock, for all the world as if he had just come from a wedding or Ascot. A grey topper and gloves lay in the window sill, together with a copy of the
Finance
World.
The man appeared to be eternally surprising,
unpredictable.

He had chosen, too, a highly dramatic point of vantage in the room—over against the old fireplace and directly under a brilliant lamp with a dull blood-coloured vellum shade. The result was bright light upon the crown of his head and on his knee, but a subdued swarthy reflection upon the skin of his face making it seem deeply sunburnt. With this great contrast of tone one could not but find his hair very white, or at least much whiter than usual. Yet the warm tone shed by the vellum’d light gave him all the benefit of a whole skiwinter of snowburn. “Ah,” he said, and recrossed his legs in their polished shoes “I took the liberty of calling in on my way to Jamaica. I hope it is all right? Baynes has looked after me like a child.” He indicated with his chin a tray with sandwiches and some champagne in a pail. But he did not stand up. Benedicta slipped across the room
to embrace him in perfunctory fashion while I busied myself in pulling off my stormcoat and slipping my feet back into my lined slippers.

Baynes must long since have gone to bed; so while foraging for a cigarette I implored Benedicta to put some coffee on the hob. “You were right, Julian” I said, and all of a sudden I recognised my own relief by the tone in which I uttered the words. “But you gave me the devil of a start. What you suggested was impossible at this stage without outside aid, and when I rang Marchant he swore that he hadn’t taken a hand in it. All kinds of gross scientific short-circuits flashed into my mind. But of course we had both forgotten Said—he provided the number and arranged the call. Phew!” I sank down in front of the fire, and a silence fell—the deep rich silence of the countryside; I could feel him drinking it in with nostalgia, his head cocked like a gun-dog. “How still it is here” he said, in a wondering sort of way. “Somehow much stiller than the big house—there were always noises there. It’s the small rooms I expect.” Benedicta came with coffee on a tray; she had already changed into her pyjamas and combed out her hair. We sat down before the fire, stirring it into flame, and pouring ourselves mugs of the steaming stuff.

Julian stared hard into the fire over our shoulders. He seemed very calm, very much at peace—and yet with the sort of peace which suggested the resignation of old age rather than the inner resolution of, say, conflicting anxieties. “You said she would be ready next month, didn’t you? We must start of course insinuating her into our lives a little, no? She is after all, from her own point of view, taking up a long life from the point at which she left it off. One wouldn’t want her to have the cold comfort of being some scientific orphan.” I was very touched by a curious sort of plangency in his tone, rising and falling like the rosined note of a viol; it had an accent of rather naïf sympathy. Even his face looked somehow juvenile and unlined in the firelight as he spoke. “Wouldn’t you say, I mean?” he ended a trifle lamely, but with the same unemphatic wistfulness which I found somehow touching. “I only hope” I said “that you don’t identify too closely with the model we’ve made, and mistake it for the actual subject! It wouldn’t be too difficult as a matter of fact—she’s so damn true to life, if I may use such an
expression. Indeed Marchant and I have both found ourselves thinking of her as if she were real and not merely a man-made doll, however word-perfect.” He nodded once or twice as I spoke. “I know,” he said softly “I know.” And his lips moved as if he were whispering some
sotto
voce
admonitions to his inner self. I suddenly said impulsively: “Julian, how did it come to you to … think of having her copied, made?” He looked at me now with such a
reproachful
sadness, such a concentration of unanswering pain, that the
superfluousness
of my question became all too clear. Damn! “One does the obvious thing in given circumstances” he said at last. “It never occurred to me that anything else was possible.” He was right. What question was there to be answered which could not be so within the terms of the experience we had both undergone with Merlin’s? The apprenticeship I myself had served, for example. No, the fantastic was also the real. It was all as clear as daylight, as the saying goes.

He lowered his head for a moment and hooded his dark eyes like some bird of prey, and watching him there in the reflection of the vellum shade I could not help reflecting that the whole power behind his mental drive, and indeed that for the firm itself (they had become co-equal) rested really upon impotence; the slowly spreading stain of a self-conscious ignominy, a shame, and all the spleen which flowed from it. Nothing much more than that—as if that wasn’t enough! But it was something at least to be able to formulate it, to indicate the region in which it lay. It threw into relief so much that I had wondered about, so much that I had been quite unable to
explain
to myself before. Indeed the article of value about which we were all fighting, brandishing each his sterile and desexualised penis, was the eternal anal one—the big tepid biblical turd of our culture which lay under the vine-shoots of modern history, waiting to be…. (“The Moldavian penis is all back and no sides” writes Tinbergen, while Umlaut adds the rider, “And not seldom glazed like the common eggplant”. Where would we be without the studies of these northern savants?) The enormous cupidity of impotence!

“You have been lucky in a way,” said Julian slowly while my attention had been wandering “in that you came to us fresh from the outside. What you had to fight—or felt you had to fight—was
something
quite apart from yourself. But if, as in my case, your adversary
is more than half yourself …? What then? I found myself trying to do two different things at the same time which were mutually
contradictory
—trying to harness and direct the firm’s drive, and at the same time to enlarge the limits of my own personal freedom within it. I
belonged
to Merlin, you see; you never did. And yet I feel a greater need for freedom than you ever could. And then, other things which nail me down—family, race, environment … all these things held me spellbound and still do. Benedicta, don’t cry.” Unaccountably Benedicta had given a brief sob before bowing her head upon her knees; but it was only the noise of a child troubled in sleep by some fugitive day-memory of a quarrel over a toy.

“Her death
halted
Me” said Julian with a meek softness of tone which carried a sort of weird hidden intonation in it—the provisional hint perhaps of a madness which one had come increasingly to feel was not so far away? No, this is too strong. “This week” he went on wearily “has been a week of great misgivings, all due to Nash, who has suddenly appeared on the scene with all kinds of new questions to ask about her. None of which I am able to answer, though I am quite as much up in the lingo, and anal-oral theology, as you are. Nash, incidentally, wants to have her destroyed.”

“Destroyed!”

“‘She will do us no good’ he says. ‘Indeed she carries buried fatally in her construction the thumbprints—the Freudian
thumbprints
of her makers.’ So he says. In other words, she can’t as I suggested stand for an aesthetic object related to our culture because you have deprived her of the very organs upon which it is based. I am repeating only what he said. Where is the
merde
that sank a thousand ships? That is what he asks. In fact he has been trying in his clumsy way to analyse why I should have decided to have her created, and specially in the image of the only person….” He broke off and stared into the fire, following with restless intentness the shifting flames as they patterned themselves upon the wall. “They are satisfied with so little,” he went on “these psychologists, and the most trifling analogy offers them an apparent explanation to something. As when Nash analyses why I should choose her, above all women, as my prime symbol—the money goddess, the goddess of the many. It smells too easy, doesn’t it? And analysis is often
along a very shallow trench; it isn’t very far down to the Palaeolithic levels either. But on Nash plods, with his free association. The screen itself is a sterile thing in essence—bed-sheet or winding-sheet, or both; but lightly dusted over with alchemical silver the better to capture the projected image so dear to the collective unconscious—the youthful mother-image with its incestuous emphasis…. On the one hand one would have the right to burst out laughing, no? Yet on the other … ah! Felix.

“Yes, this week of misgiving has been chock full of questions about Iolanthe; it would have been better if you yourself had been there to answer them, however provisionally. I tried my best to get Nash to see her as simply a small observation-post upon the field of automation—nothing much more. But that does not quite satisfy him. It was a mistake in the beginning to talk to him about culture or aesthetics—unconsciously we were all trying to disguise the base metal of our search in a number of pretty ways. Yes. To the
psychoanalyst
it is dirt. By the way, have you ever seen a gold brick? I happen to have one with me; I am taking it off to Jamaica. Let me show you.”

It couldn’t well have been more incongruous the juxtaposition of tailcoat, top hat, and the small brown paper parcel which lay under them, tied up with string. A middle-class enough looking parcel which he undid with an air of dogged, modest triumph and then set the little greenish loaf with its deeply indented seal squarely upon the carpet between us. It sat there glinting saturninely in the firelight.