Symposium

… the affair
even ended in wounds and the party was finally broken up by the shedding of
blood.

Symposium
(tr. Loeb:
The Carousal)
of Lucian

…   the chief
thing which he remembered was Socrates compelling the other two to acknowledge
that the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true
artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also.

Symposium
(Jowett translation) of Plato

‘THIS
is rape!’ His voice was reaching a pitch it had never reached before
and went higher still as he surveyed the wreckage. ‘This is violation!’

It was
not rape, it was a robbery.

He was
Lord Suzy; his title was hereditary, so that when this was explained to busy
people before their meeting him they were inclined to say,
‘Yes,
but
what about him?’ It is true that he had done nothing very much. He was
approaching the dangerous age of fifty, said to be the time of the male
menopause. His two previous marriages and divorces had passed like the storms
of old sea-voyages.

Helen,
the present Lady Suzy, was twenty-two. She stood there sleepy and leggy with
her hands up at her short dark hair, amazed. She had been married to Brian Suzy
nearly a year, during which she had frequently thought of flight. She had met
her husband at the school play where he had come to watch his daughter act in
Death
of a Salesman,
the dramatic society’s choice for that year. Helen was a
schoolmate of Pearl, Lord Suzy’s only child and from his second marriage. Pearl
was now far away in Manhattan operating a word processor at the United Nations
and had written about her ‘honey of a job’, which made Helen feel lonely and
envious. Helen’s own parents were divorced. She had missed her father most of
all, and that, she said, was probably why she was attracted to older men, and
had finally fallen for Brian Suzy.

Helen
was still standing distractedly among the wreckage, and the two policemen who
had woken them in the middle of the night to tell them their front door was
wide open with the front-door lights on, now wanted to leave. They were full of
wonder that neither of the couple had heard a sound.

‘Looks
like they made a noise, though,’ said one of the policemen.

Helen
dropped her hands from her head. ‘I heard a noise and I didn’t,’ she said. ‘At
least I dreamt a dream in which there was a noise, so I must have worked the
real noise into my dream.’

‘Now
she tells us,’ said Brian. ‘First she says she didn’t hear a thing and now she
heard it in a dream.’

‘Makes
no difference,’ said the other policeman. ‘Just as well you didn’t come down. Might
have got bashed.’

When
they had gone Helen looked for something intact among the broken bottles. She
found some port. In the kitchen where the vandals had not penetrated was a
cupboard which contained various bottles of drinks; she pounced on a bottle of
brandy, and mixed up her latest-learned brew.

‘Brian!’
she called. He was sitting at the bottom of the staircase with his head in his
hands. She brought him a glass of the port and brandy, her mixture, and sat
down on the stairs beside him.

‘Rape,’
he said. ‘It feels like rape.’

‘Does
it? — I wouldn’t know,’ she said. ‘They took the silver, they took the hi-fi
and the Georgian mirror. Then they wrecked the rest.’

It was
a Victorian house of three storeys in a quiet street off the Camberwell New
Road.

‘Robbery,’
he said, very much more quietly than when he had first met the shock.

‘Haven’t
you ever had a robbery before?’ she said. They had not been long enough married
to know each other’s detailed histories.

‘No.
I’ve lost things. Dishonest servants away back in the past. Inside jobs. My
mother lost a ring, too. But I’ve never been robbed like this. Two-thirty,
three, in the morning, and I didn’t hear a thing. You didn’t hear a thing, not
actually. They could have come up and killed us.’

‘We
should have a burglar alarm,’ she said. ‘We have to get one. But they know how
to de-activate alarms.’

‘It’s
madness to keep silver,’ he said. ‘A lot of work and in the end they steal it.’

‘It was
mostly my wedding presents from my family,’ she said. His silver was upstairs
in a large safe in his bathroom.

‘I hate
wedding presents,’ said Brian. ‘If you had my experience of wedding presents
you would feel the same.’

‘It’s
true they don’t seem to keep marriages together,’ she said.

‘What’s
this stuff we’re drinking?’

‘It’s
called jumping juice,’ she said.

‘They’ve
pee’d on the walls, you know,’ he said.

‘It’s
so awful when they pee on walls and all over your stuff. An outrage.’

The hostess introduces the
people who have not met before. ‘Lord and Lady Suzy, that’s Brian and Helen, I
want you to meet Roland Sykes; and Annabel Treece you already know. Oh, Ernst,
lovely to see you … Ernst Untzinger … You’ve met, oh, good. Ernst, do you
know Mr and Mrs Damien, William and Margaret …‘ The host dispenses the
drinks. They are a party of ten. The house is in Islington. The room is very
beige, with a glimpse of the dining-room which is predominantly kingfisher
blue.

The
women in the party are extremely diverse, the five men more similar, although
they vary in age. The hosts are Hurley Reed, an American painter in his early
fifties, and Chris Donovan, a rich Australian widow in her late forties. They
live together. It is a union of great convenience and contentment.

Half an
hour later the party is seated at the table. Some are new to each other but on
the whole the pair of hosts and their eight guests are far better known to each
other than they are, at present, to us.

Hurley
Reed sits at the head of the table at this dinner for ten with Helen Suzy on
his right and Ella Untzinger on his left. At the other end of the table the
hostess, grand-looking and rich Chris Donovan, is already having her attention
occupied by Brian Suzy who sits on her right. His dark eyes start out from his
thin, dark face. ‘They pee’d’, Brian insists, ‘on all the walls.’

Ernst
Untzinger, bronze-faced and successful, with hair greying before its time, is
placed on Chris Donovan’s left. He has arrived in London on one of his many
official trips from Brussels where he sits on one of the international
commissions of finance for the European Community. His wife Ella is directly
diagonal to him, beside Hurley Reed.

‘Pee’d
all over the place,’ says Brian Suzy.

Ernst
is anxious to get him off the subject, since dry champagne is being served in
tubular glasses; he feels the details of Brian Suzy’s robbery are entirely out
of place.

The
manservant, not long acquired from the Top-One School of Butlers, assisted by a
temporary hand, a young graduate in modern history, are moving round the table
in their white coats, serving quite impassively, but Ernst is troubled that
they should overhear this talk of Lord Suzy’s, and shows himself altogether
relieved when Brian Suzy goes on to list the actual goods missing and damaged.

‘I
always say to Hurley’, says Chris Donovan, ‘that every time you turn your back
on your stuff you should say goodbye to it. You never know, you may never see
it again.’

Margaret
Damien is a romantic-looking girl with long dark-red hair, a striking colour,
probably natural. She says, ‘There’s a poem by Walter de la Mare:

Look thy last on all things lovely

Every hour …’

Hurley Reed now raises his
champagne glass: ‘I would like us to drink to Margaret and William and their
future.’ William Damien smiles. Everyone toasts the newly married pair.

Hurley
Reed, at his end of the table, is now conversing with Helen Suzy on his right.
Helen looks uncomfortable since it is impossible to avoid hearing her husband’s
list.

‘That
was last week,’ says Helen.

‘Rape,’
comes her husband’s voice. ‘It felt like rape.’

Helen
looks at the plate of salmon mousse that has been softly and silently placed
before her. She takes up her fork.

Hurley
takes up his and, while passing the tiny rolls to Ella Untzinger on his left,
continues his conversation with Helen Suzy. ‘Have you ever heard’, he says
quietly, ‘of St Uncumber?’

‘Saint
Un-what?’

‘A
medieval saint,’ he says, ‘to whom people, especially women, used to pray to
relieve them of their spouses. She was a Portuguese princess who didn’t want to
get married. Her father found her a husband. She prayed to become unattractive
and her prayer was answered. She grew a beard, which naturally put off the
suitor. Her father had her crucified as a result. She’s depicted in King Henry
VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, with long hair and a full beard.’

‘I’d
better not pray to St Uncumber,’ says Helen, whose husband at the other end of
the table could not be hushed, but was continuing to lament his robbery; ‘I
might’, says Helen, ‘grow a beard.’

‘Not at
all likely,’ says Hurley.

‘Then I
might try the Uncumber method,’ says Helen.

Ella
Untzinger on Hurley’s left, though she is talking to young William Damien,
keeps her ears on this exchange between Hurley and Helen. Ella is talking to
young William Damien without saying very much, for the subject of the robbery
prevails, and William has remarked that his wife Margaret had her bag snatched
in Florence on their honeymoon. Ella’s long fair hair hangs over her face like
a wispy veil.

‘Rape,
like rape!’ comes Brian Suzy’s voice from the other end of the table.

‘Did
you go to the police?’ says Ella, her ears still fixed on Hurley’s seditious St
Uncumber.