The Revolt of Aphrodite (20 page)

“I’ll see” I said. She looked at me curiously but said no more. The ride back was smooth and uneventful. Jocas was waiting for me with
a hospitably decorated table; but Benedicta disappeared, after saying that she would lunch in the harem. I tried to visualise it—a sort of glass and pink satin
bonbonnière
looking out over the calm straits, the light filtered by the intricately carved wooden screens; to this I added some cage birds singing away in melancholy fashion and a few old deaf women, all clad in black, and a few wearing clumsy and
ill-chosen
frocks from Paris and London. Lots of gold-leaf and mirrors. There would be a horn gramophone with a pile of outdated waltzes and other jazz, and bundles of old picture papers…. I wondered how near the mark this was. There did not, for example, appear to be a book anywhere. “You are wrong” said Jocas sharply. “She has a very smartly decorated suite of rooms, satin and gold mouldings; brilliant chandeliers, and electric pianola, two black cats, and a bookcase full of beautifully bound books by Loti and company.”

“Thank you” I said ironically, and he made a mock bow.

“At your service” he said. “We are not all equally gifted alas. I should have been a fortune teller in the bazaars I suppose. That’s what my brother Chewlian says. I was very backward as a boy; even now, do you know, I read and write with difficulty. I have to pretend that I have mislaid my glasses. It has hampered me very much. It kept me a trader whereas Chewlian is truly a merchant prince. I stayed here, but he went on to brilliant studies. He found a patron, one of the monks who ran the orphanage found him a rich man to stake his education. But I was always ill, always wet my bed until my twentieth year. Had no head and no taste for paper. Only in middle age did I calm down, when Merlin found us.”

“But you were orphans?”

“Yes.”

“And
brothers
—how would you know?”

“It’s only presumption, partly a joke; we shared the same
doorstep
on the same evening. What more is a brother? I love Chewlian and he loves me.”

“I think I shall go back to Pera this evening.”

“Yes, why not?” he said equably, pressing my arm. He was a most lovable man. “You will see nothing of Benedicta for at least two days now. She has a treatment. But she will get in touch with you if she wants. I think she has to go back to Zürich this coming week.”

I found the idea curiously chilling. “She didn’t say anything?” I asked, in spite of myself.

“I am not Benedicta’s keeper” he said frowning, in a chewing way.

This line of conversation seemed to come up against a brick wall; I felt that perhaps I had unwittingly offended him and strove to be a trifle more conciliatory as I went on. “Tomorrow I’ll have a last session with Vibart and decide about the contracts. I will certainly sign for the little ear device—which I call a ‘dolly’. About the more general terms of association I’ll have to see.”

“I know the cause of your hesitation” he said, and burst suddenly into a peal of clear laughter. “It is perfectly justified. Once when I mentioned something I saw from your expression that you were
surprised
: because it meant that someone had been through the papers you had left behind in Athens. The new device for electric Braille remember?”

He was dead right. I looked at his jutting nose and laughing eyes. “You thought it was us, didn’t you? Well, it wasn’t. It was Graphos, one of his hirelings who went through your stuff; what they expected to find I don’t know. But they photographed everything—all the parts in shorthand and the mathematical materials. Now, when I asked Graphos for details about you after this first idea came along, he was able to supply quite a number of them—things you are
working
on. I saw at once that we needed you as much as you need us. We can shorten your labours by years if we give you the right equipment, by years. How, for example, can you work on the firefly and the
glow
-
worm
without a chemist, indeed a big laboratory to help? We have such a place—Lunn Pharmaceuticals belongs to us. Do you see?”

“The firefly produces light without heat” I had written once,
unwisely
. “Note. If we could find just
how
chemically we would be on to a new light source perhaps.” But of course he was right, one could hardly conduct this kind of experiment from Number Seven. Jocas was watching me intently, still smiling. He said “The trembler fuse, the iodine and sodium bath experiment—how will you ever do it?” All of a sudden the lust for this vocation—of tampering with the universe and trying to short-circuit its behaviour—grew up in me and seized me by the throat. I drank my wine off at a thrust and sat bemused, staring through him. O God! There was also the danger
that they might sow these idle speculations broadcast behind my back, that other talents with bigger means might scoop me. I was ashamed of the idea, but there it was! Pure science! Where does the animal come in? “Also a passage where you ask why bats can navigate in the dark and not blind men in the light, eh?”

“Hush,” I said “I’m thinking.” I was, I was furiously thinking of Benedicta, sitting here trapped between conflicting hesitations.

Jocas said softly: “I do not see that the matter of Benedicta alters anything.” He was doing his mental lip-reading act again. Here he was wrong; she hung above all these abstractions and ambiguities, like a wraith, an
ignis
fatuus.
That long cobra face seemed to
symbolise
everything that this vast organisation of talents stood for. I was looking fame and fortune in the eyes, and the eyes were adding the promise of love to these other riches. “Yes” I said at last,
surprised
to find how very hoarse my voice sounded. “Yes, I am a fool. I
must
sign on.”

In retrospect this epoch, these scenes, astonished me very much when I recalled them; I mean after everything went to wrack, the period of illnesses and confusion, the period of intemperate
recriminations
, quarrels, fugues. Once, when she was hovering on the
outside
edges of logic I even heard her say: “I only really loved you when I thought you were determined to be free from the firm. It seemed to promise me my own freedom. But afterwards I saw that you were just like everyone else.” Then in my fury I shouted back. “But you made me sign on, Benedicta. It was you who insisted, remember?” She nodded her furious head and answered: “Yes. I had to. But you could have stuck to your guns and that would have altered everything. For us both.”

“Then why, knowing this, did you insist on having the child? There was no need, was there?”

“There were several reasons. Partly because Julian said so, Nash said so, it was a question of cure as well. Then also the question of succession, inheritance. Then me. All those miscarriages were a challenge I had to face. Above all I wanted a Merlin of my own, of my very own.” She paused and gazed about her as if to identify a small sound, audible only to her inner ear. “You see,” she added tonelessly “hardly anyone saw my father in the flesh—though
everyone
saw Julian at some time or another. Then the firm—O Felix, Benedicta is only a woman, she has always tried to be just.” Nearly sobbing.

“You talk about yourself as if you were a
product.”

“I am. I am.” That was the
tu
quoque
!

Then later when I was speaking to her about love she could say with burning indignation: “But love is a reality not a recipe.” As if in offering her mine under any other guise I had tricked her. Woman!

But all this lay far in the future on that day when Jocas walked down to the landing stage beside me with his choppy deliberate tread. “You will go back to Athens and wait” he said and his tone was one of delighted relief. He embraced me warmly and added “Benedicta will come to you very soon. You may find her the key to everything. Sacrapant will deal with all the contractual details. I myself am going to the islands for a week. Felix!”

“Yes, Jocas?”

“You are going to be very happy.”

But I felt bemused still and shaken by my own decision. Sacrapant gazed at me with lachrymose tenderness; it seemed that he too knew, without being told, that I had agreed to sign, but tact held him silent. We roared away across the opalescent water towards the dim horizon where the city lay half asleep, embedded in time as in a quagmire—the Orient Venice snoring its life away.

Vibart was at his habitual desk, only today he was blowing an egg to add to his collection. He had pierced the blue crown with a needle and was blowing with soft absorption into the tiny hole; from the opposite hole the yolk was being gradually expelled to fall with a plop into his waste-paper basket. “There” he said with relief, placing the tiny object in a velvet hollow among others like it. He closed the casket reverently and joined his fingers together as he gazed at me. The contracts lay on the corner of the desk among his papers.
Without
saying anything I picked up the pen from its slab of marble and signed in all the required places. “Well” he said in great good humour “I should bloody well think so. Fame and fortune, my boy, and all for the price of a signature. The luck some people have.” I sat, staring into the middle distance, still confused and somehow fearfully sad. Somehow he must have felt it (he was a discerning young man under
his flippant exterior) for his tone changed to one of quickening
sympathy
; the drink he poured out with which to celebrate the event was a stiff one, and I needed it, or felt I did. Though why?

I seemed to hear the voice of Sacrapant saying: “The firm is wonderful, Mr. Charlock, sir. When I could not find anyone for my wife’s womb the firm found me someone.”

The telephone rang squeakily. “It’s for you” said Vibart. I
recognised
the voice of Jocas, distant and crackly. “Felix I forgot. I have a message for you to give
your friend Koepgen in Athens. He is your friend, isn’t he?”

“Yes. I didn’t know you knew him.”

“I don’t personally. But when you see him will you tell him that we have located the ikon he has been hunting for?”

“The ikon?”

“Yes. We know the monastery now.”

“I’ll make a note of it.”

“Thank you very much Felix.”

I drew a deep breath and said: “Jocas, I have just signed the articles of association.”

“I knew it” he said. “I felt it. I was sure.”

Vibart sat sipping his drink and staring at me. “I think” he said “you need cheering up. I shall invite you to dine with me and hear all the details of my literary career. It’s really moving forward. And by the way, I have found a good
French
tavern. You know the French will eat anything and everything? If the sky rained corpses’ legs they would become cannibals without a second thought. Moreover it would be doubly enjoyable because it was all free. Will you?”

“Very well. But I must first take these down to the firm and draw some money.”

This I duly did, walking through the crowded and insanitary streets among the snarling bands of dogs. Mr. Sacrapant was waiting for me: but oh, he looked so grave and tender, like an undertaker’s mute on his best behaviour. He took the documents and cashed me a voucher for what seemed to me an immense sum of money which I stuffed into my slender wallet with cold fingers.

“You’ll be going back to Athens I have no doubt” he said. “I shall treasure the memory of our association. Mr. Charlock.”

“Thank you. In a day or two I expect.” The truth of the matter was that I was reluctant to leave the city before I had seen Benedicta once more—and yet, there seemed to be no chance of that. Should I perhaps send her a message? Perhaps the mere information that I was still in Polis might…. “I think I shall be here another full week if you should need me” I told him. “At the Pera as usual.”

The malignant tumour of a passive love! All of a sudden the gloomy steamy city seemed peopled with ghosts. I was still numb from the astonishment of finding myself freed at a stroke from all the smaller preoccupations that beset ordinary men—financial dependence, occupation, etc. It was puzzling too because anyone in my place would have felt exultant, bouyant. I felt absolutely nothing. I took a cab back to the detestable hotel, confirmed my reservation, and ordered lunch in the garden. There were no familiar faces there, much to my regret. I would be grateful for Vibart’s company while I was waiting. Waiting! But suppose Benedicta did not come? There was Zürich of course.

At dusk Vibart called for me and together we wandered through the city towards his newly discovered eating-house. His wife would join us there later. As usual he was preoccupied with the building of this imaginary career upon which he was too hesitant to embark; the self-rebukes multiplied in all directions. He had decided to reverse the usual order of things and start by writing his own reviews. “Why not the obits?” I suggested. “They are always the warmest reviews. The one consolation about death is that everyone will be forced to be nice to you behind your back.”

“I never thought of that” said Vibart settling his napkin round his neck with the air of a man putting on a cummerbund. “And I think it’s too late. My novel
The
Asparagus
Tree
comes out this week. (‘A novel of surpassing tameness’.) The press will be very mixed. I
console
myself by saying that the jealousy of opinionated dunces is the finest of literary compliments. I have arranged a good sales picture however. What do you think of thirty thousand in the first week? On a sliding scale that should be a clear thousand, no?”

“Too good by half” said his wife with the resignation of one who has been forced to live with an obsession. She was a handsome brunette with shy green eyes. Her name was Pia.

The food was excellent. “I should give it up” I said “and go for criticism. Grudge yourself off in the weeklies. Loll your way to fame. Tell yourself that you are not really a bad man, just unprincipled.”

“Can I” said Vibart in envious tones “tell my wife about your terrific coup—the new job?”