The Revolt of Aphrodite (45 page)

I do my best to try and remember this ward, but in vain; nor indeed do I remember its inhabitants with their diversified
idiosyncrasies,
though of course some of them I have known about, have heard about. But if I met them during my last sojourn here I have retained no memory of the fact. They are all freshly minted—like for example the famous Rackstraw, who was Io’s screenwriter,
responsible
for some of her most famous work. I would have been glad to remember him; and yet it is strange for I recognised him instantly from her descriptions of him. She used to visit him very often I recall. He himself had once been a minor actor—and, some say, her lover. In its way it was quite thrilling to see this legendary figure face to face, weighed down by the Laocoön-toils of his melancholia. “Rackstraw I presume?” The hand he tenders is soft and moist; it drops away before shaking to hang listlessly at his side. He looks at one and his lips move, moistening one another. He gives a small cluck on a note of interrogation and puts his head on one side. Watching him, it all comes back to me; how well she described his imaginary life here in this snow-bound parish of the insane.

How he would sit down with such care, such circumspection, at an imaginary table to play a game of imaginary cards. (“Is it less real for him than a so-called real game would be for us? That is what is frightening.”) I hear the clear dead husky voice asking the question. Or else when walking slowly up and down as if on castors he smokes an imaginary cigar with real enjoyment; smiles and shakes his head at imaginary conversations. What a great artist Rackstraw has become!

His hair is very fine; he wears it parted in the middle and pasted down at the sides. It is someone else who looks back approvingly at him from the mirror. His ears are paper-thin so that the sunlight passes through them and they turn pink as shells, with all the veins illustrated. He will appear to hear what you say and indeed will often
reply with great courtesy, though his answers bear little relation to the subjects which you broach. His pale-blue eye gazes out upon this strange world with a shy fish-like fascination. What a feast of the imagination too are the interminable meals he eats—course after course—cooked for him by the finest chefs, and served wherever he might happen to be. Who could persuade him that in reality he is nourished by a stomach-pump? No, Rackstraw is a sobering figure only when I think that these long nerveless fingers might once have caressed the warm smooth flesh of Iolanthe. (The final problem of intellection is this: you cannot rape yourself mentally for thought creates its own shadow, blocks its own light, inhibits direct vision. The act of intuition or self-illumination can come only through a partner-object—like a host in parasitology.) If one is tempted to kiss, to embrace Rackstraw, it is to see if there is any of Io’s pollen still upon him. Can one leave nothing behind, then, that is proof against forgetfulness?

But Ward D is only another laboratory where people are
encouraged
to live as vastly etiolated versions of themselves—and Rackstraw has taken full advantage of the fact. At certain periods of the moon his old profession seizes him and he fills the ward with his impersonations of forgotten kings and queens, both historical and contemporary; or will play for hours with a doll—a representation of Iolanthe in the role of Cleopatra. At others he may recite in a monotonous singsong voice:

and so forth. At other times he becomes so finely aristocratic that one knows him to be the King of Sweden. He mutters, looking down sideways with a peculiar pitying grimace, lips pursed, long nose quivering with refined passion. He draws hissing breaths and curls back his lips with disgust. He sniffs, raises his eyebrows, bows; walking about with a funny tiptoe walk, lisping to himself. When the evening bell goes and he is told to go to bed he bridles haughtily, but
he may mount the bed and stay for a long time on all fours, thinking, “Rackstraw’s the name. At your service.” His every sense has
become
an epicure. On the wall of the lavatory near his bed someone has written:
Mourir
c’est fleurir
un
peu.
Then also for brief spells, with the air of someone looking down a well into his past, he will produce the ghastly jauntiness of the remittance man—he is living in the best hotel. “I say some ghastly rotter has pipped me …
top-whole
Sunday … the boots doesn’t clean suede properly….” He has become the professional sponge of the ’twenties, cadging a living from the ladies.

But the difference between Rackstraw’s reality and mine is
separated
by a hair—at least as things are now. For me too, reality comes in layers suffused by involuntary dreaming. Some mornings I wake to find Baynes standing by my bed with his silver salver in hand, though there is never any letter on it. He says: “Which way up will you have your reality, sir, today?” Yawning, I reply in the very accents of Rackstraw. “O, as it comes, Baynes. But please order me a nice L-shaped loveproof girl of marriageable age, equipped with learner plates. I have in mind some heart-requiting woman to lather my chin; someone with sardonic eyes and dark plumage of Irish hair. Someone with a beautiful steady walk and a thick cluster of damp curls round a clitoris fresh as cress.” He salutes and says, “Very good, sir. Right away, sir.” But at other times I think I must be dying really because I am beginning to believe in the idea of Benedicta.

I had been about and around for several days when I caught sight of her, sighted along the length of the long corridor with its bow window at the end, standing in the snow in a characteristic distressful way. She had rubbed a small periscope in the frosty glass in order to peer in upon me, her head upon one side. A new unfamiliar look which somehow mixed diffidence and commiseration in one; I gave her the sort of look I felt she merited—O, it was all I could afford: a tired frog’s smile: it was a package, a propitiatory bundle of nails, hair, menstrual rags, old dressings—everything that our joint life had brought us. But it contained little enough venom—I felt too bad about it all, too emotionally weak to expend more upon the encounter. And yet there was something in her face at once touching
and despairing; her inner life, like mine, was in ruins. It was the fault of neither. So when she tapped with her nail upon the glass I said not a word but unfastened the glass door into the garden and let her in. Of course it was suspicious. We stood, featureless as totems, gazing at each other, but unable to thread any words on the spool. Then with a soft groan she put her arms out—we did not embrace, simply leaned upon one another with an absolute emptiness and exhaustion. Yet the personage in my arms in some subtle way no longer corresponded to any of the old images of Benedicta—images she had printed on my mind. A qualitative difference here—you know how sometimes people return from a long journey, or from a war, completely altered: they do not have to speak, it is written all over them. What was written here? There was no discharge of
electrical
tension from those slender shoulders—the vibrations of an anxiety overflowing its bounds in the psyche. Her red lips trembled, that was all. “For God’s sake be kind to me” was all I said, was all I could think of. She started to cry a little inwardly, then began to
cry.
She crew buckets, but without moving, standing quite still; so did I, too, from sympathy, just watching her—but inside like usual: tears pouring down the inside of my body. “I am coming to you tonight—I have permission. Somehow we must try and alter things between us—even if it seems too late.” Only that, and I let her go, a snow demon in her black ski clothes against the deep whiteness of the ground and the clouds. She walked carefully in her own imprints towards the trees and disappeared, never once looking round, and for a moment this whole episode seemed to me a dream. But no, her prints were there in the snow. I swore, I raged inwardly; and when night fell I lay there in the darkness of my room with my eyes open staring right through the ceiling into the snow-sparkling night sky. I have never understood the romantic cult of the night; day, yes—people, noise, motors, lavatories flushing. At night one recites old phone numbers (Gobelins 3310. Is that you, Iolanthe? No, she has gone away, the number has been changed). Recite the names of people one has never met, or would have liked to sleep with if things had been different. Mr. Vincent five years. Mr. Wilkie five years. Yes, the night’s for masturbation and death; one’s nose comes off in one’s handkerchief, an arm drops off like Nelson….

The minutes move like snails; the faintest shadow of a new hope is trying to get born. It will only lead to greater disappointments, more refined despairs, of that I am sure. Yet thinking back—years back, to the beginning—I can still remember something which seemed then to exist in her—
in
potentia,
of course. I wrestle to
formulate
what it was, the thing lying behind the eyes like a wish
unburied,
like a transparency, a germ. Something like this: what she herself had not recognised as true about herself and which she was all but destroying by running counter clockwise to the part of
herself
which was my love. (Go on, make it clearer.)

Every fool is somebody’s genius, I suppose. Just to have touched again those long, scrupulous yet sinister fingers gave me the sense of having reoriented myself with reference to the real Benedicta; it was because I myself had also changed a skin. Past suicide, past love, past everything—and in the obscurest part of my nature happy in a sad sort of way; climbing down, you might say, rung by rung, heartbeat by heartbeat, into the grave with absolutely nothing to show for my long insistent life of selfish creativeness. Put it another way: what I have left is some strong emotions, but no
feelings.
Shock has deprived me of them, though whether temporarily or so I cannot say. Ah, Felix! The more we know about knowing the less we feel about feeling. That whole night we were to lie like Crusader effigies, just touching but silently awake, hearing each other’s thoughts
passing.
I thought to myself “Faith is only one form of intuition.” We must give her time…. Are you stuck, then, dactyl? Come let me clear you….

Later she might have been more disposed to try and put it into words: “I’ve destroyed you and myself. I must tell you how, I must tell you why if I can find out.”

To find out, that was the dream—or the nightmare—we would have to face together; following the traces of her history and mine back into the labyrinth of the past. No, not simply looking for excuses, but hunting for the original dilemma—the Minotaur, which itself seemed to connect back always to Merlin’s great firm which had swallowed my talents as Benedicta had swallowed my manhood. It is this fascinating piece of research which occupies me to the exclusion of almost everything else now—perhaps you can
guess how? With the help of my keys I have vastly extended the boundaries of my freedom; for example, I can now traverse Ward D, and make my way into the central block without being specially remarked by anyone; but more important still I have found the
consulting
rooms of the psychiatrists and the library of tapes and dossiers which form a part of Nash’s patrimony. Up the stairs, then, past the ward with the huge Jewesses (big bottoms and nervous complaints: fruits of inbreeding). Down one floor and along to the right, pausing to say a timely word to Callahan (pushed through a shop window, cut his wrist: interesting crater of a dried-up carbuncle on his jaw) and so along to the duty consulting rooms where the treasure trove lies. The tapes, the typed dossiers, are all grouped in a steel cabinet, according to year—the whole record of Benedicta’s illnesses and treatment….

I thought at first that she might find this prying into her past objectionable, but to my surprise she only said: “Thank goodness—now you will trust me because you can double-check me. After so much lying to you … I mean involuntary lying because things were the way they were, because Julian came first, his will came first; then the firm. You have already guessed that Julian is far more than just the head of Western Merlin’s for me, haven’t you?”

“Your brother.”

“Yes.”

“So much became clear when I discovered that simple fact—why did you never tell me?”

“He forbade me.”

“Even when we were married?”

She takes my hand in hers and squeezes it while tears come into her eyes. “There is so much that I must face, must tell you; now that I’m free from Julian I can.”

“Free from Julian!” I gasped with utter astonishment at so
preposterous
a thought. “Is one ever free from Julian?” She sat up and grasped her ankles, bowing her blonde head upon her knees, lost in thought. Then she went on, speaking slowly, with evident stress behind the words: “There was a precise moment for me, as well as one for him. Mine came when the child was shot—like waking from a long nightmare.”

“I fired that shot.”

“No, Felix, we all did in one way and another.”

She pressed my hand once more, shaking her head; continued with a kind of scrupulous gravity. “The image of Julian flew into a hundred pieces never to be reassembled again; he had no further power over me.”

“And from his side?”

“The death of that girl, Iolanthe.”

“How?”

“He described it to me in much the same words, a suddenly waking up with a hole in the centre of his mind.”

Yet in Julian’s case the emptiness must always have been there; one could imagine him saying something like: “A faulty pituitary foiled my puberty, and even later when the needle restored the balance, something had been lost; I had lived a complete sexual life in my mind so the real thing seemed woefully hollow when at last I caught up with it.” Hence the excesses, the perversions which are only the mould that grows upon impotence and its fearful rages against the self.