The Revolt of Aphrodite (37 page)

“Sick, Iolanthe?”

“In my case physically.”

“And mine?”

“You’ve taken the wrong road—I knew you would even then: always in your cards I found it: and then yourself—you always saw real people as sort of illustrations to things—glandular secretions. I felt that you’d never get free, and then later when I heard you had joined Merlin’s my heart went down and down. I know what it has cost me to free myself from them. I knew you’d never do it.”

“Why should I?” I said sturdily. “It suits my book very well.” She looked at me with dismay, bordering on disgust; and then her expression changed. She realised that I wasn’t telling the whole truth. “Merlin’s made me what I am” I said sententiously, feeling quite sick to hear myself talk such twaddle. Now she began to laugh. Ouf! It seemed as if the whole conversation were going to take a wrong turning. “Come, let’s walk” I said. As we passed the Café Dome she insisted that I entered it to see if there was any message from Solange on the postboard. Sure enough there was, in typically bad French: she had had it planted by Mrs. Henniker. “This is going too far” I said with poor grace. “Now we better go back to the hotel and….” An expression of sadness came into her eyes for a moment and then was swallowed by her smile. Taking my arm once
more she fell into step. So in leisurely fashion we crossed the park, quizzing the statues, talking in low voices now, inhabitants of
different
worlds. “And so you are free, as you call it? What does it mean to you Iolanthe?”

“Everything; I just needed it. But it has cost me a great deal—in fact my company is hovering on the edge of bankruptcy all the time—thanks to Julian of course. He could not bear to see me free.”

“Do you know Julian?”

“I saw him once—just a single look we exchanged, a look to last a lifetime. I knew then that he loved me—indeed in a perverse way all the more for crossing him, for breaking free. With my first money I set up my own firm, chose my own parts. Julian has tried to break us because—again perversely—his only way of getting me would be by owning me, having shares in me.” She laughed, not bitterly but
ruefully
. “If you men didn’t prey on women where would you be?” she added smiling. “But Julian’s expression was so strange that I even tried to learn to draw in order to reproduce it.”

“How did you meet?”

“We didn’t; our audience research people said that there was one of my fans who was always there, never missed a single film, often saw them over and over again for weeks. They wanted to make a newspaper story of it; but the journalist was told by his proprietor that Julian had had the story stopped. Then they pointed him out to me at a Fair.”

For some reason I felt jealous of this.

Across the Luxembourg, the children’s play-pit and so on, slowly down, drawn by the inexorable strings of our Athenian memories. There was much to surprise me; it was like coming upon a bundle of letters one had read in cursory fashion and thrust aside into a
cupboard
corner—and now on re-reading discovered to be full of things which had escaped notice. For example: “It puzzled me afterwards very much to think how much I thought I loved you then. I did love you, but for singular reasons. Ultimately it was your lack of
understanding
which enabled you to occupy this place in my mind—your very indifference in a queer way. Since you could be objective, cool, and consequently
considerate
.”
(O dear, this is the mere vermiform appendix of love.)

“At times I thought you quite contemptible as a man, but I never wavered. You don’t know, Felix, how little a woman hopes for in life—for an iron ration only:
consideration.
We haven’t enough
confidence
in ourselves to believe that we could ever be loved—that would be butter and jam on the bread. But the bread itself? A woman can be won by simple consideration, she will settle for that when she is desperate. Look, you took my arm in the public street, though all Athens knew I was a street-girl. You dared to be seen with me, opened doors for me. What chivalry, I thought! Everyone will
believe
us to be engaged. But of course later I realised that it had no special connotation for you—it was pure absent-mindedness and ignorance of the mentality of small capitals.” She laughed very merrily; I turned her friendly face round to embrace her, but she groaned with pain, and said her wounds were not yet healed. “You used to talk about going from the unproven to the proven in your work; but later I realised that with each new discovery the so-called proven is falsified. It collapses. The whole thing is only a funk-hole process—necessary because you are weak.”

I didn’t care about all this, inhaling the warm Jupiterian air, the leaves, the crunching passers-by who walked as if upon a tilting deck, or else were dragged widdershins by huge dogs on heat. Intuition can become a conditioned reflex? “And then” she went on “I heard what you’d done, and I crossed my fingers for you. I half believed that you might decide for independence one day like myself. But when I saw your face the other day I knew that you hadn’t made a serious effort. You had the same funny stillborn look you always had; I was tempted to kiss you very hard, very triumphantly, simply because Julian was there in the crowd.”

“Julian was there?”

“I
think
it was Julian.”

I kicked some pebbles about for a moment wondering if I shouldn’t become angry. “I don’t much like this sort of curtain-lecture coming from you,” I said at last “with its boastful idea that you have done something very special; you who supply a surrogate mob-culture with vulgarised versions of classics watered down by pissy-witted cinéastes….” Iolanthe looked at me with delight. She said: “It isn’t the point; even if it had only been a small dressmaker’s shop in
the Plaka instead of a film company. It means living without
deceptions
, awkward secrets, living in the round. The real freedom.
My
own.”

I laughed contemptuously. “
Real
freedom?” She nodded briskly. “Inevitably you would ask yourself how real you were; you would think that it isn’t just the firm which confers an illusory reality upon you. O I’m not saying the firm is anything but benign, it helps you towards what you want to do, to achieve.”

“Then why all this quaker-maid nonsense?”

“I’ve angered you” she said sadly. “Come let’s talk about other things. You know Graphos is dying; now he would have been worth the love of some great-hearted woman if his health had not spoiled his mind. It’s typical of the cynicism of fate that he should imagine he loved me, and still does. And I like him too much to deny that he does. After all, he educated me, taught me to see—in spite of his perverse habits and tastes.”

We had come to the doors of the old hotel; I took my key and we mounted slowly, arm in arm. She chuckled as she gazed round her. “It’s typically your sort of room” she said. She went to the grimy window and stared out into the foliage. It was raining now, quite a storm of rain. “Do you remember the spoiled picnic on the
Acropolis
when the sky seemed to come down in whole panes of molten glass and our footsteps smoked on the marble?” She kicked off her shoes and lay down beside me, setting a pillow in the nape of her neck, lighting a cigarette. It needed only a lighted candle and an ikon. … Ikons, the portfolio of the collective sensibility. I imagined them as I dozed. (“There is no God and no plan: and once you accept that you can start to identify”?) She lay quietly with her eyes half shut. I had penetrated again the cardboard, the outer cerements of the worshipped mummy. Above all, one should not make a mythology out of one’s longing.

My hand sought out hers and pressed it; we were half dozing, reconstituting like archaeologists with every drawn breath, a past which had long since foundered. The arcane clicks and whistles of the little owls; mountains of gauche leaves blowing in the parks. The firm was like one of those great works of art which perish from
over-elaboration
. (“The greatest happiness of the highest few is what
nature aims at, the great aristocrat.”) The white mice I have cut up, starved, tortured on behalf of science—as Marchant might say; some people one can only convince by drawing blood. I kissed the nape of her neck softly and lapsed into inertia, dozing by her side while she quietly talked on and on in sweet leaden tones. “It’s a terrible thing to feel that one has come to the end of one’s life-experience—that there is nothing fundamentally new to look forward to: one must
expect
more and more combinations of the same sort of thing—the thing which has proven one a sort of failure. So then you start on the declining path, living a kind of posthumous life, your blood cool, your pulse steady.” She pressed my finger to her slow calm pulse. “And yet it is just the fruitful point at which some big new
understanding
might jump out on you from behind the bushes and devour you like a lion.” Small sighs, small silences, we were like people drugged; without any sexual stirring we had reverted to the
prehistoric
mode of an ancient intimacy.

“It’s a sort of curse, you might say, for I’ve brought little comfort to anyone; and some I have gravely harmed. Not voluntarily, but simply because I was placed at an axis where all their lives
intersected
. That Hippolyta—I had to act to deceive her. And others, like that poor Sipple. Whenever I am in Polis I look him up as a sort of expiation, though we never mention my brother.”

“What on earth about Sipple?”

She rose yawning and stretching to seat herself at the mirror; she took off her wig and began to comb it softly. “I thought you knew about that boy; he
was
my brother; I was obliged to kill him.”

It was like a pistol shot fired in the quiet room. She turned round to me smiling, with an air of patient fidelity. “And poor Sipple has had to bear the odium. He is going blind, you know. He has become a perfume-taster. They dab those little flippers of his with scent and he tells them how to mix their perfumes. He is studying to be
received
into the Catholic Church, of all things.”

“But why, Iolanthe? Why on earth?”

“That’s the sad thing—in order not to let my father take it upon himself; he was a very rash, violent little man, and he had vowed to punish Dorcas. To the Virgin, you know. I knew that he would be obliged to do it, if only because of his vow. I could not let him go to
the grave with that upon his conscience—a man of sixty-five. So I stepped in to shield him; and Graphos had it all hushed up. I suppose the idea of atonement is a lot of conceit really—who can say?”

“As arrows fit the wounds they make!” She crossed to the bed and placed a lighted cigarette between my lips; so we stayed silently smoking for a long while, staring at each other.

Then she began to speak of her father’s death. He at least was
unaware
of what she had done for his sake. The scene rose so vividly before my eyes—the little house with its cobwebs, its table and three chairs before the fireplace. A dying peasant wrestling with a death by tetanus, closing up slowly like a jacknife. “Have you heard someone scream with their teeth firmly locked together—an inhuman
screaming
like a mad bear?” And stumbling, knocking over the furniture. He would not submit, fought death every inch of the way. And the rigor setting the body in such strange shapes. He was like a man wrestling with riding boots too small for him. And then the candles smoking; but even dead he wouldn’t lie down. Up he came each time they pushed him down like a jack-in-the-box. The piercing lamentations of the villagers. But it was no go, he wouldn’t fit. Finally the village butcher had to be summoned to break up his bones like a turkey in order to coffin him properly. But now there was sweat on Iolanthe’s brow, and she was walking slowly up and down at the foot of the bed. They tied a ribbon, a green ribbon, round his arm before the barber bled him. There was so much blood in that withered old arm. “He wouldn’t give in, you see.” Then she paused and went on. “The little house is still there, it’s mine, but I daren’t go back. I left it just as it was, the key in the hole by the coping of the well—but you remember, don’t you? If ever you go that way will you visit it and tell me about it? I’m sufficiently Greek to feel that I might return one day when I am much older—but how? Someone must exorcise it for me. Felix, if you did that I should be grateful. Will you?” She was so earnest and so beseeching that I said yes, in my futile way, yes I would. And of course now it’s too late, as it always is.

“Meanwhile I am here.” she said with a rueful bitterness “the most beautiful woman in the world they say. O God.”

She has gone such a long way away now, dissolved among the shadows of time; only her masks are preserved in the tin cans that
crowd the lumber rooms of the bankrupt companies. Iolanthe now is an unidentified wave to sadness which reaches out for me
whenever
I see a slip of blue Greek sky, or a beautiful late evening breaking over the Plaka. And then the horror and sadness of the way in which she said “Look” in a voice of a frightened child; and ripping open the cheap bodice showed me the bandaged breasts plumped out with their surgical wadding, and taped like hot cross buns. “I haven’t completely healed up as yet.”

“Cancer?” I exclaimed; but she shook her head and replied: “Not yet at anyrate. It’s even more ironic. Last year in Hollywood they brought in a new treatment for falling breasts—injections of liquid paraffin. It was all the rage. But mine went wrong though I am not the only one, Felix.”

She sat down at the mirror once more to adjust her disguise, saying tonelessly: “Now I have brought you up to date.” Subjects of calendar time trapped in the great capitals of the world. I let Iolanthe sink deep into my reveries; down she went and down like a
plumb-line
, turning and rolling through the subaqueous worlds of memory and desire, dissolving and disappearing from view.

“Come,” she said at last “enough of these post-mortems. I have ordered a hire car to wait for us at the office. Let us drive into the country together, have lunch, lie on the grass, forget, pretend.”