The Revolt of Aphrodite (56 page)

* * * * * *

B
ut she had gone into town to do some shopping so I spent the morning in the so-called danger ward learning to tie seaman’s knots from Professor Plon who was a specialist in the garotte; he had already disposed of a wife and two daughters in exemplary fashion (running bowline?) and was technically not supposed to have any access to rope. But he had found a piece, I don’t know how, and was shaping all kinds of elaborate and diverting knots and bows. I finally got it away from him when his attention was diverted, though it was really a pity. He could have emptied that whole ward by lunchtime. But I didn’t want poor Rackstraw to go the way of all flesh; though it was almost inconceivable that he should have anything very special to tell us about Iolanthe, it was only fair to let Julian satisfy his curiosity. What else had I been doing but just that? Those elegant debauched hands had roved all over that lovely body,
touching
it now here, now there, moulding the breasts and stroking the marvellous haunches of the paragon girl, the nonpareil. I felt a sort of sick pang of tenderness when I thought of it. Iolanthe the waif, and Iolanthe the breastless goddess of the silver screen; the sick romance of all our Helens, for whom somebody’s Troy always goes up in flames.

Rackstraw himself was enjoying a period of rare lucidity. “I have been invited to go away” he said happily “to a place which is a country house to stay with a man I used to know vaguely—I have forgotten his name, but anyway it wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

“Julian?” I said.

“’Pon my soul yes!” said Rackstraw. “You do know him then? He came to see me yesterday and told me about it. It’s more like a film-studio than a country house, it’s full of inventors. They keep popping out of doors and saying things like ‘I’ve got it, old boy. Look no further. The answer is untreated sewage.’ It might prove
boring in the long run; but they are going to make a long recording lasting months, perhaps years.” Ah the blessed intervals of insulin coma! But he was radiant in a funny etiolated way. He had cleaned his shoes and was fussing over an egg-stain on his waistcoat.

“Rackstraw” I said. “What about Iolanthe?”

“I made the mistake” he said surprisingly “of treating women as grown-ups without believing in the idea; but later I found to my horror that they
were.
It was I who was the child.” He shook his head slowly and looked around him. “If only I could have a word from old Johnson. There’s no knowing if he will have a happy Christmas or not, down there in Leatherhead. It is very remiss of him. At our age, you know, there aren’t very many more shots on the spool.” Then he said “Iolanthe!” in a tone of the greatest contempt, and suddenly shuddered with horror as if he had swallowed a toad. “What does that mean?” I said. He looked at me with blazing futile eyes and hissed: “Have you seen the sharks in the Sydney zoo? Then I shall say no more!” If he went on like this I could see that it was going to be a very long and very costly recording. “To be belonged to!” he went on in the same tone of high contempt. “Pah! She killed someone and I found out because she talked in her sleep.” He knelt down and patiently undid my shoelaces, then stood up again apparently completely satisfied with his handiwork. “My success with women” he said modestly “was all due to my voice. They could not resist it. When I wanted one I used to put on a special husky croony tone which worked like a charm. I used to call this ‘putting a lot of cock into it’. It was infallible. Naturally I took great pleasure in their company.”

He walked up and down in his strange tottering fashion but with quite a strut of sexual vanity. Then he stopped and raising his hand in a regal gesture said “Now go! Vanish! Decamp! Vamoose! Buzz off!” So I did, albeit rather reluctantly, for I was intrigued by even this glancing reference to Io. Who knows, perhaps if he sat week after week in the red plush projection room where Julian now spent so much of his time, staring at the films he had helped her to make, something might be evoked in him, some concrete response? And yet to what end? Once dead … God, I wondered what sort of toy was in the process of being fabricated; a copy of the human dummy
which would pose once more the eternal problem (how real can you get?) without ever being able to answer it. Iolanthe! I had missed her somehow and Julian had never enjoyed the real girl whom Henniker described in the words, “It was her animal fervour, her warmth, her slavishness which won men’s hearts, going down to the ugliest client like a humble and devoted dying moon. Later she
became
tired, and worse still something of a lady: and intelligent, worst of all. She discovered she had a sensibility. This tied men into worse knots, intellectual ones. They were always trying to find metaphors to express things which are best left unexpressed.” All right. All right.

I hadn’t seen a paper for months, indeed had had no desire to know what was going on in the world. So I was interested to catch myself lifting a copy of
The
Times
from a consulting-room desk, to read with my lunch. Nothing very much. I missed Benedicta as I read. Sometimes in some of our expressions, straying into the visual field, so to speak, I saw my son very clearly. Then he dimmed away and she became once more herself. It made me feel shy in a way, and guilty; I had mounted that toy in order to kill Julian and it had
recoiled
on my head. Bang! I could never have foreseen, even with the help of Abel, that Mark himself might opt out of the whole compact, press the trigger. I had such an ache too when I thought that
Benedicta
had never mentioned it, never alluded to Mark. I saw now to what extent she had been a prisoner in this fantastic web spun by the firm—a web held firm by the fanatical tenacity of Julian. Well, I read a little bit into the extraordinary fantasy of reality as captured by the so-called press. The world had not changed since my absence, it was the same. Fears of war as usual. They were crying “punish me, punish me”. And of course a war was coming. Hurrah! Everybody would be miserable but gay, masochistically gay, and art would flourish on the stinking middens of our history.

I went into the other room to find Benedicta on her knees with half-open trunks all around. “What the hell are you doing?” She said: “Packing.” Well, on the one hand it might seem logical enough. “Why?”

Benedicta said: “Nash rang me. You are released, we are both released. Free. Julian is coming to get you tomorrow and drive you
back. I’m going by air. Where do you want to live? Mount Street is always there, and also that monster you hate in the country.”

“Let me find out a little bit where and how I am working—and at what. Let’s go to a hotel first, let’s go to Claridge’s where the people are so insensitive, shall we?”

“All right I’ll book.”

B
ut you’d have thought that Hitler himself had sent for me if you’d seen the four huge black limousines coming to a halt in the drive of the Paulhaus; Julian travelled like a Black Prince with numerous secretaries, perhaps even gunmen for all I knew. He himself was in the back of the leading car holding the door open for me. He wore an immaculate dark suit and soft black hat turned well down over his eyes—and, of course, characteristically enough, dark glasses.
Chauffeurs
bustled about with my luggage. “Come into my floating office and admire it” he said indicating a shallow panel full of switches. With childish pride he showed me the radio and telex arrangements, a secretary’s folding desk; and there was even a telephone which worked externally. A cocktail cabinet. Everything in fact except a lavatory and a chapel to worship Mammon in. “What splendour” I said to humour him. “Could we call London and given them
Benedicta’s
flight number?” He was delighted to show his mysteries off and in next to no time was talking to Baum over the water. Then he sat back in the comfortable seat of the mammoth and lit a cigar. I watched him with curiosity, still consumed by a feeling of unreality; as much as I could see of him, that is, for the glasses shielded his eyes. “Always the passion for disguise, Julian” I said, somewhat rudely I suppose. “It has always puzzled me.” He looked round at me and quickly looked away again. “It shouldn’t really” he said. “I have always been terribly … shy; but apart from that I have a thing, I suppose Nash would regard it as a complex, about faces. They seem to me quite private things. I do not see why we have to walk about with them sticking out of a hole in the top of our clothes, simply because convention decrees it. I have perhaps
overcompensated
in one direction; you know that I have had my face made over twice by plastic surgery in order to get it the way I wanted it. It’s better than it was but I’m still not completely happy.
It is very boring, for example, always to have the same face—and nowadays thank goodness it’s no longer necessary. Here, I shall be quite honest with you and show you my dossier.” He groped in a shallow leather wallet and produced some passport photographs which he handed to me one by one, saying “That is how nature made me, this is where art stepped in, and this is the way I look now.” I gasped and stared incredulously at him. “But it’s three quite different men” I said. “Not really. Look more closely. There is much that cannot be changed.” Yes, he was there in each if one peered into the eyes, but in each case the change had been accompanied by a
different
hair-style. But the differences were more marked than the resemblances. “But of course” he said coolly “this may not be the end of the affair if I begin to get bored with the way I look at present. It’s a marvellous feeling of liberty to know that you can change when you wish, even though very superficially.”

He put the photographs away carefully and pocketed the wallet. “Now you know all” he said, and lapsed into an indifferent silence as he watched the countryside rolling past us. His hands seemed fatter and coarser than I remembered them to be, and he wore a seal ring. But having disposed of the subject of his disguises he seemed to have nothing more to say. In fact he seemed to doze off, to hibernate inside the dark wings of his overcoat.

We lunched in high mountains on smoked salmon and white wine; Julian had a long talk on his pet telephone to a branch in Holland which manufactured paperclips. “We have two lazy men there I shall have to deal with; one sits all day in a bubble bath of self-esteem, and the other is too scared to move: Jaeger, you perhaps know? A Jewish banker like a very very old very sharp scythe.”

I had expected him to make some reference to the sort of work he was expecting of me but he said nothing at all about the Iron Maide, so I contented myself with dipping into unreality again—reading a newspaper I mean. Dear old London! At it again. A new labour party pamphlet which would offer wholesome sex instruction to the under-fours and most probably begin: “Children, did you know that mummy was full of eggs and that daddy had to hatch them, and that is how you are here?” Life, as Koepgen never tired of reminding us, is only being let out on parole for a brief while.
Tous
les
excès
sont
bons.
Well, let Julian sleep. But I myself was half asleep when late that night we slanted into Paris in a foul grey rain. “I want” said Julian “to go first to the café where you met her, then to the hotel. I want to see the room you took her to.” I protested feebly, but there was nothing for it; a note of such passionate urgency and hunger came into his voice that out of sheer sympathy I felt I had to give in. Sordid rum-whiffing
terrasse
where we sat for a while at the chipped table; strong local colour was supplied by a little whore, a veritable midget, who uncrossed her legs and let loose an effluvium which could be smelt tables away, stables away, could almost be heard…. Then to that room where she had told me this and that, and her breasts and so on. Then Henniker with her face flushed with rage, all red and bruised from the crying, protesting about Graphos and the whip. “He taught her to enjoy it, but he couldn’t make her love him. No, if she loved anyone sexually it was me. ME. I seduced her, I calmed her, I loved her and was faithful right to the end.” What
pitiful
wounded stuff we carry around inside us; wounds that gush blood at the slightest touch of memory’s lancet. He sat in a chair looking dazed, like some very old tame monkey, gazing round him and yawning; but when I told him about the breasts he put his face in his hands and went very still for a moment. Then he cleared his throat softly and said: “About death there is something curious—a sort of shrinking; if you copy the exact dimensions the effect of your statue or dummy always looks smaller than the remembered original. In the waxworks, for example, everyone seems to have become
reduced
in size. Just over life size is the best recipe for copies. Let us go, I have heard enough.”

He did not appear for dinner that night and I amused myself by reading Koepgen, ringing up Benedicta and leafing through
Figaro.
Much literary prize-giving and distribution of honorary titles; why don’t we? The Epicurus of Letchworth, the great Aubergine of Clermont-Ferrand. Hum!

Next morning Julian decided that he must go to Holland and as I was impatient to see this new-old wife of mine I took a plane, full of a vertiginous excitement and shyness. My impatience led to
indiscreet
arguments with everyone, officials, porters and lastly with an insolent cabby who had clearly never seen a man in love before, and
made no allowances for this desperate illness. (One should be put in an ambulance with a bell; or someone should walk in front of one with a red flag crying:
“Enceinte.
Enceinte
.
”
)
But at last I arrived to find Benedicta in bed with a cold, so pretty and so woeful that I was tempted to ring up the whole of Harley Street. “You see what
happens
now when you leave me? I get ill.”

“O thank you, thank you.”

* * * * *

B
ut nevertheless, in spite of the infantile euphoria, I had the most dreadful dreams. “Dreams are but the prose of quotidian life with the poetic quantum added.” All right. All right. Cut it out now. They were horrible, and of course they made me wonder if perhaps I had been seduced once more upon the bitter path of…. I interrogated her silent form, sleeping so calmly beside me, one hand on her breast: the rise and fall so reassuring, like the spring swell of a
marvellous
free sea—a Greek sea. And I felt suddenly terribly old and went into the bathroom to examine my old carcase with attention all over again. Bits were falling out—a tooth would have to go: O not another! The hair was coming back quite strong. But an extra
magnification
of the bloody glasses.

It was amazing that my balls hadn’t dropped off after all I’d been through—like Vibart’s champion novelist. It seemed to me that I had a very false cringing sort of smile, so I decided to change it all along and because of…. But smiling from left to right instead of right to left set the wrong groups of muscles moving. Also the old knowing friendly
kindly
expression in the eyes looked just bleary to me. What despair! I knew exactly how I should look in order to rivet her
attention
forever. But suppose it got stuck, that smile, from being
artificial?
Suppose nobody could move it? I would have to go every morning to Harley Street and accept facial massage from some torpid Japanese. Perhaps acupuncture in the dorsal region, huge coloured pins being driven into my inventor’s dogged bum? O hell, please not that.

* * * * *

M
archant rang me the following day and at last I began to think that things were moving along as planned. He asked me to meet him at Poggio’s which I duly did, enchanted to see my old stablemate again. But he had changed a good deal; his hair had gone very fine and quite silver and you could see pink scalp through it. He sported a set of new false teeth of fantastic brilliance. His clothes were much the same—the stage uniform of the absentminded professor: baggy grey trousers and a torn tweed coat (acid-stained here and there) with leather patches on the elbows. And a huge college scarf of garish design, bearing his college colours I don’t doubt. But he was full of energy and excitement, gesticulating and twitching his face as he spoke like a lively earwig. And yet somehow tired and highly strung; and I noticed that he was drinking rather heavily for such an
abstemious
man. Anyway “How” he said, giving me the benefit of a Red Indian salute. “How” I replied gravely.

“I had all your news from Julian. Imagine my delight. To hear you were coming to work at Toybrook with me. I have been bored stiff among all those corpses.”

“Wait a minute” I said. “First Toybrook. Isn’t that a hush-hush plant of some sort?” Marchant nodded and said: “It’s where we work on anything which might be on a secret list for the forces; it’s a security A factory. I brought you a pass, all neatly made out for you. When will you begin? It’s only a very few miles from the country house, if you have your car. You could drive over every day. Why the grimace, Felix?” I sighed. “Bad memories, painful memories. I wonder. I’ll ask Benedicta.”

“Do. It would be convenient.”

“Now what about corpses?”

“A literal fact; working on these models which I must say are beginning to look quite frighteningly like the real thine, we found we
knew next to nothing about anatomy. We could have called in great surgeons and all that, but they work on living bodies; we were only imitating and where possible simplifying in glass wool, nylon, jute and so on. In other words the inside of the Iron Maide did not have to be copied provided we mocked out a musculature and a nervous system and allowed her to imitate human behaviour, speech, gesture, mnemonic response. Of course Abel has been invaluable with his memory bank which we have now reduced spectroscopically to the size of a pea virtually—talk about writing the Lord’s Prayer on the point of a pin! It’s only a matter of detail. She’ll have twice the vocabulary of Shakespeare, and all the
souplesse
of a mummy trained for a ballet. Gosh, it is really amazing. Julian is incredible. Do you know when they moved a model of her into Madame Tussaud’s he used to go there day after day to watch the crowds filing by her. One day I saw in the paper that this wax model had been damaged and I wondered if he had … well, I don’t know … started kissing it or doing something even more drastic. He hasn’t dared as yet to see what they’ve got. He says he will only come when you authorise him to. You know he is scared, Felix, very scared by this nylon Iolanthe; and she is coming along so well that I’m rather scared too. Suppose we get within three decimal places of a perfect copy? What are we going to do with her? Could she live an
independent
life as a free dummy, in a three-dimensional world? Eh?”

“What about the sexual stuff—is she designed to poke the other one? Will they be monogamous?”

“All that is feasible; but they will never be able to produce—the whole pelvic oracle is sketched in I’m afraid. But the vagina will please you. And incidentally, another chance remark of yours has borne fruit in a marvellous way. You’ve probably forgotten. Ejax!”

“Ejax?” I said vaguely. It meant nothing to me. Marchant chuckled and said: “One day when you were drunk you said that for real sexual pleasure the quantity of sperm was important. The heavier the discharge the greater the excitement of the female.”

“I said that?”

“Yes, you did.”

“Good god! Is it true?”

“Our new sperm-thickening pill called Ejax is having a wild
success—surely you’ve seen the advertising in all the Tube stations? No? ‘Have you taken your Ejax today? If not what will the wifey say?’ It’s swept the board. And it was so easy chemically to work it out. A very slight provocation of the prostate with an irritant does the trick. So far no side-effects, but by the time these come along we’ll have a counterblast to them.”

“Marchant,” I said “are you happy?” I don’t suppose it was the question to put at this time and place. He stared at me angrily for a long moment and then said indignantly:

“Yes.”

We went on looking at each other, critically and carefully. “Yes” he said, and again, “Yes, Felix.” But it was stagy; he didn’t want to be probed on this topic and I realised with a pang of regret the full measure of my tactlessness. Whose happiness is whose business after all? It was also a bit alarming to find that so much of my own was intimately bound up with Benedicta—surely this was a fearful weakness?

“Go on,” I said “go on, Marchant boy, and stop me from
thinking.
I have never heard of such a beautiful project with all the
problems
it raises. Why it’s like having a baby!”