The Revolt of Aphrodite (34 page)

“My dear fellow.” He spoke mildly and yet with a scruple of genuine pleasure in his tone—as if in some obscure way I had actually conferred a compliment on him by coming here unheralded. “It’s the weirdest luck” he went on, and the dramatic pointing, so to speak, of his voice, suggested the presence of a cigar between his teeth. “To miss each other once again. Do you know, I had definitely planned to stay in this evening? Then at the last moment Cavendish rang up about an urgent decision which had to be taken about a merger up north—and dammit here I am at the airport, waiting for a plane.” He laughed softly. “But is there anything urgent I can do?” So calm, so friendly, so serene did he sound that I felt all of a sudden guilty: as if I had tried to take an unfair advantage of him in hounding him down. My voice faltered in the instrument as I said, “I wanted to discuss Benedicta with you, in very general terms of course.” He coughed and said: “Oh that!” with an evident relief, as though the subject were already trivial, or else out of date. “But I know about all your difficulties from Nash—all of them! I was going to tell you how grateful I was—we all are—that you are treating these unfortunate matters with such patience and conscientiousness. It’s heroic. And you have even put aside the notion of divorce for the present—for her sake. My dear chap, what can I say? We will make it up to you in any way we can. All our sympathies are with you.”

In the scratchy background I could hear a voice from a loudspeaker intoning plane-numbers—the faintest intonation of a muezzin from a tulip-mosque. I could feel that he had half an ear cocked back, waiting for the flight number of his own plane.

“I wonder why you hide from me?” I said at last, with a sort of graceless aggressiveness. Julian gave his quiet surprised laugh; he sounded so fond, almost tender—as if mentally he had put his arm through mine, or around my shoulders. “My dear Felix” he said with loving reproachfulness. “Answer me” I said. “Go on.”

“Above all you mustn’t exaggerate” he said. “Once or twice I might have found it inconvenient, but for the most part it was sheer coincidence—like tonight for example.”

“Would you have come home if you had known I was here?”

“It’s too late to say. The fact remains that coincidence kept us apart tonight; how can I say what I
might
have felt? That would be hypothetical merely.” I rapped my knuckles on the polished wood. “Verbiage” I said. “You wouldn’t have come; perhaps even you
did
know and deliberately sidestepped me.” He clicked his tongue in reproof.

“Come now” he said plaintively.

“No, I wouldn’t put it past you; the thing is—
why
?
I sometimes wonder what you can have weighing on your mind.” He gave a small groan—a satirical small sound. “In the age of the detective story one could hardly do less. But I fear you are building up a house of cards. Just imagine me as real, awfully prosaic, but a trifle shy—almost to the point of eccentricity if you wish. Truthfully.”

“No” I said. “It won’t fit.”

“Good Lord, why not?”

As I had been talking I had been sifting through the silver bowl which stood by the telephone, telling over the thick pile of white pasteboard invitations addressed to him—Embassies and Clubs, individuals and societies. I knew that an office secretary came down every morning from the firm to deal with his social correspondence. He had neatly annotated the top left-hand corner of each card in that beautiful secretary-hand of his. On some he had written “Refuse pl” and on others “Accept pl”.

“Not too shy” I said—feeling at the same time a trifle ashamed of myself for prowling around his private domain in this way—“not too shy to accept lunch at Buckingham Palace to meet the Persian Trade Mission.” He gave another exasperated chuckle and said, without heat: “But Charlock, for the firm’s sake I have to, don’t you see? I can’t afford to do otherwise: besides an invitation from Buck House is really a command, you know that.” Yes, I supposed that I knew that: and yet….

“Come” he said in his coaxing, conciliatory tone, as if he were speaking to a child. “Have some confidence in me, in my good
intentions
towards you. I haven’t failed you yet have I? Have I?”

“Quite the contrary” I said, with very real despair.

“And you know how deeply we are all concerned about Benedicta. Believe me, you are not the only one to care for her. Jocas must have told you about this unhappy pattern which repeats itself, no? But it’s intermittent, it never lasts for long. You should base your hopes on that, as we all do. As for our meeting—why, better luck to us both next time, that’s all I can really say.” I grunted. “Ah, there’s my plane coming up.” A vague burble of sound from a loudspeaker swelled up slowly behind his silence. “I must be off” he said, with a little sigh. “Will you tell Ali to dismiss the car? Thank you. Well, Felix, goodbye for now..” A faint click, and we were once more cut off.

I went back to the fire to finish my drink and reflect upon the little picture in its silver frame. The cat had disappeared. I heard the
man-servant
doing something in the kitchen. I sat in bemused fashion, staring into the fire, almost asleep now. Somehow, I thought, I must get a glimpse of Julian’s hands, if only to slake my curiosity. At least he could not deny me that! It was strange to feel like a suppliant, like a beggar: and then suddenly again to be overcome by rage or remorse. The moment I heard his voice a wave of sympathy was elicited. I melted. It was baffling this polarity of feelings—and I supposed, to adopt the formulae of Nash, that the whole thing was due to nervous strain, mental weariness which hovered about the central problem of Benedicta. The Victorian word was still the most expressive—
brain-fag
. Where we cannot establish the aetiology of a disease or of a course of human action—when, for example, the providing brain and the sustaining nerves are out of whack—we can always slap a clinical term on it, give it a name even if the name is meaningless.

I had drunk more than one cocktail from the silver canister before it occurred to me to look at the time; it was not as late as I’d thought. I set out to walk across London to Mount Street. A fresh tormenting wind blew, the parks rustled. In my mood of prevailing despondency I hardly noticed my feet covering the pavements of the capital,
between
the dark brown houses; slow and regular as breathing. And the half attention I could devote to the life around me cast a curious kind of glow about ordinary realities—making them seem
disembodied
.
In Bond Street the back of a lorry blew down and out fell a hundred gilt chairs. They tumbled out like a river and gave the illusion of dancing with each other on the pavement before subsiding into eighteenth-century curtsies. They had obviously been bound for some Embassy ballroom. Then later, in a narrow street, a woman dropped a big leather purse which exploded on the pavement scattering hundreds of halfpennies. Almost at once the passing crowd, like an ant-file diverted, started to help her gather them up—they had rolled everywhere, even into the centre of the street. Within the space of a breath everyone was transformed into a snail-picker or mushroom gatherer. The woman stood looking vaguely around her, almost tearful, holding her bag open; one by one the kindly helpers filled it with the coin they had gathered. I stood and simply watched. Thence onwards to the dry click of the key in the door, to the
ministrations
of silent servants, to my tapes and papers. We were still not finished with the Cham, thank goodness. “Modern architecture
reflects
the dirty vacuum of the suburban mind.” Yes, but other voices had to be cleared off the track, vexatious and interfering voices—many of them unidentified; but some of these baffling irruptions were singular enough to be worth preserving. One voice, for example, which said: “When Merlin was dying of GPI he had his Rolls brought out and sat by it in a wheel-chair touching it, as if rubbing cold cream into its glossy velvet skin.” Who on earth could that have been?

There remained such a lot to do—so many confusing diversions to be followed up or to be eliminated. In such a chaotic collection,
spanning
such a long period of time, the problem of ascription had
become
a formidable one. It was all right where I had captured a
distinct
voice saying a distinct thing—a voice made recognisable by its familiar timbre—like that of Caradoc. But what of the droning quotations which so frequently supervened; and sometimes even the background noises which gave substance and point to what had actually been recorded? My little dactyls worked loyally enough transcribing all they overheard, but with faulty transmission I was left often with huge sheaves of confusion—speeches one could not faithfully ascribe to one person or another. And yet many of them too good to tear up. It was like some mad accumulator building up its
energies to supply a mnemonic museum…. Goodness, that was it. Somewhere in the midst of these studies, wallowing in this mountain of white paper, I had the idea which later led to the building-up of Abel, the computer. It was only a germ, then, though in the
succeeding
months it began to take sharper form. The raw materials of phonology are relatively simple if reduced to an alphabet. But if the actual phoneme—so I thought in my muddled fashion—could be translated, by a conversion table, into vibration … why, poor
Charlock
, in terms of frequency, could sort out the authors of this
voice-
fest
and bring scientific order into chaos: not even chaos, just a
mis-numbering
of the data? It was all horribly vague; I still had much to learn from Marchant of electronics. I might even go so far as to make people seem explicit simply by marking down the tonalities of their ordinary speech. Who knows? A new sort of interpretation of the human being in terms of his vocal chords?

At any rate anything would be better, however factitious, than to surrender all this equivocal but often amusing or instructive babble to the dustbin. We were making a beginning with Caradoc, and for a specific purpose. But even here the identification was becoming questionable. It was mixed up with other things—which might have been his—pronounced in other voices, or in different keys. It was in a way as if his personality (now dead) had begun to diffuse around its edges, become less distinct, less easy to grasp in terms of an
individual
psychology. He was entering into his own mythology now; and of course our own mistakes of ascription might completely falsify him by adding to his massive incunabula of obiter dicta
examples
of Koepgen or others. These were the irresolute ideas which crossed my mind as I plugged in and watched the little creature begin to sick out her pages for me on to the expensive carpet—a human ticker-tape from the strongrooms of memory, of destiny.

To what degree is pattern arbitrary? Please help me, little faithful dactyl, with your pretty claws, please help me. I marked slowly and with as much conscientiousness as possible the voices that I knew, using a letter of the alphabet for such of my friends as I could. But often these cursed toys had been left running when I was not there. Both Caradoc and Iolanthe had been shown how to play with them. It was no wonder that there were so many puzzles to be sorted out.

So the labyrinth of this intermittent record poured out of the little machine to spread themselves on the carpet, to be gathered and stacked like sheaves; later our three bent heads would try to puzzle them out, to listen to them played back, to dispute their authorship. And some which were only holes in sound. For example, simply a sweet long sigh—the unmistakable sigh of Iolanthe in my dark room. She must have had someone there while I was out? A door opens, a match scratches, someone sees the wooden pattens. Graphos’ voice—but in a whisper so that I cannot say for certain it is his: but certainly speaking Greek says “These are your shoes, then?” The silence scratches on for an age; the bed creaks. Later came the equally unmistakable clank of the bath-tap and the sound of running water. Yes, some of the scratched parts could themselves be human sighs, luxurious sighs to correspond with simple acts—a voice whispering “Ah” or else (I am not so sure) “Ah mother”. Such faulty
transcription
defies significance; some of those dreadful crepitations could be the sucking of a breast. My little instrument whirrs on transcribing
nothing—nothing in darkness. This is one tape I shall be able to destroy without compunction. Iolanthe!