The Revolt of Aphrodite (67 page)

“Heard about Jocas?”

“Of course.”

“Are you coming to see him? Or are you on some other mission and just using the firm’s transport?” Vibart peered sideways at me and shot me a quizzical twisted look. He said nothing for a long time; then he replied with considerable hesitation. “I deliberately made an excuse to come, a publisher’s excuse. But I wanted really to see him once more in the flesh.”

“But you know him, have met him.”

Vibart sighed. “I knew him without really recognising him as the man who had completely altered my life. I suppose it is a common enough experience—and always a surprising one. But what puzzles me is that in getting me my job with the firm he knew full well that I would be transferring myself to London and taking her with me. Why did he, then, feeling as he did and she did? Why not let me moulder away for another four-year spell in the Consular, rising by slow degrees to a Chancery and some trite Councillorship in Ankara or Polis? When I suddenly heard the truth I closed my eyes and tried to remember this benign little man’s face. ‘So
that
was
him
,’
I said to myself ‘all the time
that
was
him.
’
All right, it’s not good grammar; but the surprise hit me between the eyes. And death was the result. It’s so very astonishing that I don’t believe it yet. But I want just to look at him for once—my only link with Pia now on earth, Felix. My Goodness, what a sublime trickster life is, what a double-dealer.”

His eyes had filled with tears, but he conjured them away
manfully
by blowing his nose in a handkerchief and shaking his head. He stamped on the floor and cursed, and then all of a sudden turned quite gay. I recognised this feeling: after one has talked out a
problem
there is no longer the weight of it upon the heart; one can get
almost gay, though the situation remains as desperate or as
disagreeable
as ever. “Now” he said, putting away his handkerchief with an air of decision and clearing his lungs. “Now then. That’s enough of that.” Poor Vibart and his lovely wife; I felt rather ashamed to have the figure of the reclaimed Benedicta lying asleep in one of the seats back there. But then death …? We were all crawling about like ants on the Great Bed of Ware, choked with our so-called problems; and with this extraordinary unknown staring us in the face. “To hell with death” said Vibart robustly, as if he had read my mind. “It is merely a provisional solution for people who won’t take the full psychic charge.”

“What on earth’s that?”

“To live for ever, of course. Immortality is built-in my dear boy; it’s like a button nobody dares to touch because the label has come off it and nobody knows what might happen if one dared to press it. The button of the unknown.”

“You are romancing, Vibart.”

“Yes: but then no. I am serious.” He shot another look at me, pensive and thoughtful, and settled himself deeper in his seat. “The thing is,” he said “that things turn into their opposite. For example this man wounded me to the heart, and naturally I hated him—hated him long and with concentrated fury. But after some time the hate began to turn into a perverse kind of affection. I hated him for what he had done, yes; but in the end I was also feeling affectionate, almost grateful for the fact that he had made me suffer so much. Do you see? It was something that was missing from my repertoire, a most valuable experience which I might never have had without him. So now I am ambivalent—love-hate. But I am also consumed with curiosity just to see this chap—this demigod who could hold the future and the happiness of a fellow human being in the palm of his hand. Could administer such advanced lessons in suffering and self-abnegation to others—for I presume that in sending me to the firm in England he knew that I would take her away from him. Did he think more of the firm than of
her
?
And was the inner knowledge of this what decided her fate, made her commit suicide, eh?”

What could one add or subtract? These long and furiously
de
bated
questions had obviously gnawed him almost away; they were
responsible for the new grey-blond hair, thick and dusty, which had given his features a rare glow of refinement. They were equally responsible for his present slimness—for people who don’t sleep well usually get thin. He had never, in fact, looked handsomer or in better physical trim; the weary, well-cut features had lost the last suspicion of chubbiness, had become mature, had settled into the final shape which the death-mask alone could now perpetuate. Vibart was complete. (I found myself thinking rather along the lines of a dummy-builder, occupied with the stresses and strains of false bone and ligament, nylon skin.)

“You know” he said “that
we
had a child very late in the day? No? Well we did, or rather perhaps
they
did. At any rate it was too late in the day for Pia for the result was a Mongol—a horrible little thing with flippers. Thank God, it died after a very short time—but there again I am not sure: did it fall or was it pushed? I think Pia did away with it in pure disgust, and I am glad that she did, if she did. And so on. And so on in endless
mélop
é
e.
Ouf! my dear Felix, here I am chewing your ear down to a stub when you yourself have really been through it. I came to share your distrust and terror of the firm after I had been in it awhile, after I had watched your antics, your long battle in and around the idea of a personal freedom which must not be qualified by this Merlin octopus. I too wanted to react against all this moral breast-feeding and might well have run away like you did, in order to hide myself away and start something
uncontaminated,
something really my own. But I decided that we were looking at it from the wrong point of view. I mean that in thinking of the Firm as a sort of Kafka-like construct exercising pressure on us from without we were wrong; the real pressure was interior, it was in ourselves, this pressure of the unconscious lying within our consciousness like a smashed harp. It is this which we should try and master and turn to some use in the fabrication of … well, beauty.”

“Lumme!” I said. “Beauty? Define please.”

“In the deepest sense Beauty is what is or seems fully congruent with the designs and desires of Nature.” We both burst out laughing, like people discovering each other for the nth time in the same maze—instead of finding each other outside the exit, I mean.

“Enough of this” I said and he bowed an apology, his eyes full of laughing exasperation. “Anyway, now it’s too late” he went on. “So we must put a firm face on it; here, have a look at this outline will you? Some spy in the industry has unmasked all the activities of the firm in the drug business. Fortunately for us the manuscript was sent to me; they—he must have been unaware that my house was a Merlin subsidiary. So it gave me a chance to look at it and to muse; how much of this do we want out, and what can be done about it if we don’t? That is why I am here; the Polis end of the drug business is shrouded in mystery, simply because business methods are so different; abacus-propelled, old man. So I want Jocas to see and judge. That’s my excuse anyway.”

He absented himself for a while and I took a look through his drug dossier which was written in rather a jaunty journalistic vein which reminded me vaguely of Marchant’s minutes—though the paper could hardly have been by him…. “Resin of cannabis is collected in various ways including, in Turkey, running through the fields naked to catch it on the bare skin …. Cigarettes are dosed with the dried tops, the shoots, or the flower-pistils powdered …. As for qat, you must chew leaves or branches of the plant, but smoke while you chew and drink water copiously. In Ethiopia it is mixed in a paste with honey or else dried into a curry powder for use with food. In Arabia the leaf is rolled and smoked. But these are only some of the humbler drugs in which Merlin’s has come to deal. The firm has also a virtual corner in Mexican Morning Glory seed—
ololiuqui.
But if the oriental end of the firm handles products which give it rather an old-fashioned air, the London end is fully aware of contemporary standards and demands. The pharmaceutical
subsidiaries
of Merlin have gone further than any other such
organisations.
Befotenin, for example, is a drug first found in the skin-glands of toads (the Bufo vulgaris) and also in the leaves of the mimosacea of the Orinoco. This is already finding new medical uses as a
hallucinatory
snuff, though it is still on the secret list of the firm. Merlin subsidiaries are also working on a protein fraction obtained from the blood serum of schizophrenes which has been named taraxein;
injections
of this substance induce apparent schizophrenia in
monkeys
. But most disturbing of all the new secret drugs is Ditran—
which is calculated to be very much more powerful than LSD or Mescalin….”

Here at last I came upon some marginalia in the characteristic handwriting of Marchant. “Ref Ditran. A single dose of 15 mg. rocks the world, old man; for extreme cases in the Paulhaus they supply multiple doses of 30 mg. intramuscularly. God, you should hear them scream! It is so painful and so terrifying that the cures are often instantaneous as Lourdes and often much more general. The author is also slightly out about LSD. When the syndrome gets out of hand chlorpromazine can save the day with 20 to 50 mg. intramuscular doses repeated every thirty minutes—unless the heart gives out.”

Vibart was back from his wash and brush up. “Well I see nothing wrong about all this.” He lit a cigar and said: “I don’t know. It’s a question of degree. For example we have launched (under the counter, so to speak) a new cocktail with immense adolescent appeal—equal parts of vodka and
Amanita
muscaria
juice—the
hallucinogenic
mushroom, no less. It’s called a Catherine Wheel, after Catherine the Great I suppose who used to mushroom herself
insensible
in between love-affairs. For my part I just don’t know how much of all this should go out or not. We shall see what Jocas thinks, and then what Julian says.” He read in a sententious voice a phrase which went: “‘Since earliest times a change of consciousness has been accredited with great healing power; this was recognised since the Eleusinian Mysteries and long before them.’” Then he snapped the MS shut and thrust it back into his glossy briefcase. “We shall see” he said.

Night was falling over the dark sea, the clouds were straining away westward. We had lost altitude and gained the last frail
blueness
of the evening; softly we came down with an occasional rubbery bump, as if an air bladder had been as often smacked with the flat of the hand, until we were moving along almost in the water. Under us a fresh spring sea tilted and coiled back on itself, it’s simply lazy gesturing suggesting all the promise of sunshine which could not long be deferred. The lights went on and turned the outer world to lavender and then to dark purple. We were running along a heavily indented coastline with an occasional mountain pushing its snout into the empty sky. Somewhere a moon was rising. In another hour
or so we should be skating and strumming across the Bay of Naples, where the captain had elected to stay the night and refuel. But it was not worth going ashore as his plan was to start on the next leg of the flight a good hour before dawn, to gain as much light as possible for the Greek touch-down which he seemed to regard as rather more chancy than the Naples halt. None of this was our affair; we dined early and slept in our comfortable bunks.

Athens when at last it came was something quite other—at least for me; poised in its violet hollows like some bluish fruit upon the bare branches of night. The day had been brilliantly calm with here and there a mountain in the deep distance showing its profiles of snow, and a sea calmly pedalling away to a ruled horizon. But of course it was not only the old and often-relished beauty of the site, it was really the thronging associations. I suppose that Athens will always be for me what Polis must be for Benedicta—a place as much cherished for the sufferings it inflicted on one as for the joys. I had spent part of my youth here, after all, that confused and rapturous period when everything seems possible and nothing attainable. Here I had lived for a while with Iolanthe—not the semi-mythical star whom we were trying to recreate out of the pulp of rubbers and resins; but a typical prostitute of a small capital, resolute, gay, and beautiful. (I repeated her name to myself in the Greek way,
reclaiming
the original image of her, while I pressed Benedicta’s arm with all the recollected tenderness I felt for this other shadow-woman whom I had not recognised as a goddess when I actually owned her. Was I later to start almost to love her retrospectively, so to speak? And perhaps this is always the way? The amputated limb which aches in winter? I don’t know.)

We moved now in a great fat bubble of violet and green sunlight, sinking softly down into the darkening bowl to where the city lay atrembling. The night was darkling up over Salamis way. The
outlines
were turning to blue chalk, or the sheeny blue of carbon paper. But always the little white abstract dice of the Acropolis held, like a spread sail, the last of the white light as the whole of the rest of the world foundered into darkness. Hymettus turned on its slow
turntable
showing us its shaven nape. We were just in time. We circled the city and its central symbol in time to see what was to be seen.
Ants waved to us from under the plinth of the Parthenon and Caradoc waved back in a frenzy of amiability—to what purpose I could not discover since nothing could be seen of us save smudges of white. Nevertheless. Meanwhile my eye had taken a swift reading, basing itself upon the plinth, and was racing through the streets to find the little hotel where, in Number Seven, so much of my life had passed. But I was not quick enough; by the time I got my bearing right the street had slid into another and the buildings formed fours, obscuring the site I was hunting for. By now of course we had come down low for our landing, but must perforce carry out a long loop which would take us several miles out to sea, thus enabling us to run landwards into Phaleron and touch down upon its placid waters. Everything went calmly, smoothly; a naval tender full of chattering Greek customs officials carried us joyfully towards the shore, making us feel that we had been anxiously awaited and that our arrival had thrown everyone into ecstasy. It was simply the national sense of hospitality manifesting itself; later on land we started to have trouble with an elderly official but all at once Hippolyta’s chauffeur appeared. “Grigorie” we all cried and there was much embracing and dashing away of happy tears. Overcome by our bad Greek and obvious affection for the venerable Grigori the customs people passed us through with bows and smiles. We were in. There were two cars, and after a short confabulation we decided on our various objectives. Caradoc, Benedicta and myself were to go to Naos and stay with the Countess while Vibart elected to spend the night in Athens with the other members of the party.