The Revolt of Aphrodite (58 page)

Benedicta drove while I fed her with cigarettes; drove in her brilliant fast vein as if anxious to reach the end of the journey as soon as possible. Long white headlight-ribbons winding away over the hills, melting down long avenues littered with a detritus of autumn. Beauty and melancholy of the night country softening away towards winter and the white transforming snow. At last we came slowly cracking down the long winding drive up to the house with its steely lake and horrid toffee-rose towers. O Coleridge where wert thou? A little bit slowed down perhaps by a temporary misgiving; every thing hereabouts spelt Mark, spelt sickness, hag-drawn nights of
sleeplessness,
Nash, Julian, Abel, Bang…. I put my hand inside her
velvet coat and touched her breast. “So,” she said “here we are, gentlemen of the jury, here we are.”

I hammered on the door and rang the interminable bloody
bell-rope,
while she turned the car and backed it up for shelter under an eave. For a long time nobody. Then the little old gnomish
housekeeper
came tottering down and tuttering about unaired beds and blown fuses. There was no electric light in the place, and despite all her telephoning she had not been able to get a man in to do the repair. Candles, then, a couple of big silver branches on the great marble table; perhaps more suitable in a way for visiting this great mausoleum of wasted hopes—in the sense of atrophy, I mean. Attrition. I saw her face rosy in the rosy light, so very grave and precious. (Julian had said: “Open your legs, I am going to kiss you,” but instead he had shaken the candlesticks and the burning wax sprayed her unmercifully.)

The long desolate galleries grew awake and attentive as they watched us come walk, walking in this warm bubble of candleshine; watched us pass and then slipped back into the anonymity of
darkness
behind us. We went solemnly and without speaking, spending a moment at each of the stations of the cross in meditation. Like
visiting
the picture gallery of a lost life. Here we had married, here lain down in each other’s arms in helpless silence, here quarrelled, here shouted deafly at each other, here smoked and mused. Mark had slept here, woken there, played further on. This death newly felt and revived vibrated on the heart like the concussion of some fearful drum.

Abel had gone—there was just a gaping hole in the musician’s gallery; my toy of a pet of a monster of a brainstorm of a Thing. I was glad; it had integrated itself elsewhere, been melted down. Here for some reason she kissed me and wept a small tear. And so on through the tower bedrooms and thence down the great staircase to the larger of the two ballrooms. The mirrors had not been replaced though the gunshot-splashed glass had been picked out to leave just the far gilded frames like so many reproaching frowns. Here the silence was immensely real silence, the air stagnant; there was no other resonance except ours in this place. Nobody had ever had a ball here, for a wedding or a birthday. Just she and I and a shot gun
and the Lord’s Prayer written on the mirrors with number three shot. The gun-room too was now empty except for a few twelves such as cottagers might need to chase rooks out of a tree. But in the little fridge in the buttery the thoughtful gnome had placed a bottle of champagne and two goblets as green as Venice. This too was
appropriate.

We took it, tray and all, into the fake library with its tapestry of empty bookcovers; there was a fire laid in the grate which took no time at all to burst into bristling flame. I scouted out cushions from everywhere I could and built a huge oriental divan reminiscent of Turkey in front of it. Here we sat, thinking each other’s thoughts and sipping the green champagne while the logs carved out their strange figures and stranger faces. Then of a sudden the telephone rang, which gave us both a tremendous start. We looked at each other in curiosity touched with a certain consternation. Who knew we were there? Julian was in Divonne, gambling. It rang, and rang, beseeching and beseeching. I rose swearing, but she took my arm and said: “No. Just for once let it ring. Don’t answer it Felix, I implore you.” I said: “Don’t be superstitious B.” But she was adamant. “I just know we must not answer it.” On it rang and on; I sat down again. We couldn’t talk or think any more for the noise of the damned instrument. Then it choked off. “Now we shall never know what it was, or who it was” I said with regret. But she sighed a great sigh of relief and said: “Thank Goodness no. Yet that one conversation might have made us change direction all over again—have put us back on a fatal course.”

So we lay down at last and fell asleep by the warm fire, like
hibernating
squirrels, too drowsy to make love even. It must have been nearly dawn when I woke in the chill to revamp the fire and to scout out our coffee and sandwiches. Benedicta was yawning and combing her hair, quite refreshed. I went to test the water in a nearby
bathroom
but found no hot; boilers unstoked for ages, I suppose.
Benedicta
was saying: “There’s that old cottage in the grounds which was revamped, do you recall? Why couldn’t we live there for a while and acclimatise? I would like to live more alone with you. We could have a little boat on the lake. Felix, answer.” But I was struck dumb by the brilliance of the idea. It was a very pleasant little wooden
chalet, not too small; I had once started to build a studio in it. It had originally been built to keep a housekeeper in, but proved too far from the house. So there it was, yet another place lying empty. “If I remember right the sanitation and kitchen were done over.”

“Brilliant. Let’s go and see it.”

This we did cutting swathes of dew across the meadows. A tiny brook, a meadow, an abandoned mill. A small jetty for a boat…. How the devil had I never thought of it before? “Darling, you are speaking directly to the romantic bourgeois in my soul. The secret of a happy life is to reduce the scale of things, circumscribe them; a girl doesn’t need to fill up more than the circumference of one’s arms. I have never liked big women anyway.” Yes, it was there, the cottage, but I had to force a kitchen window to get in. It was quite dry and warm because of all the timber I suppose, and spotlessly clean. A pleasant studio looking out through a weeping willow on to the misty waters of the lake. “It’s ideal.” Was it too much to hope for a few happy years here without the nagging frontal brain
intervening
to muck everything up with its bloody hysterias? One hardly dared to formulate the sort of hopes it offered, this queer scroggy chalet, looking in a vague sort of way as if it had been influenced by Caradoc’s Parthenon of Celebes.

“Don’t you feel we should at least try here?” she said. “It hasn’t the terrible gloom of the big house with all its memories—the horrid backlash of the past. But it’s only across the meadow—we could go there from time to time like one goes to visit a friend in the cemetery.” I said “Yes.”

With a certain amount of awe, though. What had poor Felix done to deserve all this? Invent Ejax by mistake?

“Yes. Agreed!”

* * * * *

“Y
ou say you’ve never been to Toybrook” said Marchant with a certain happy condescension. “I can hardly believe it.” No, I was sure I hadn’t. “They were working upon an obscure nerve-gas and
documented
me once when I was doing Abel, but that is all I know. Central nervous system.” He chuckled in a specious professorial way, like a don who is delighted to take you to lunch at the Athenaeum because you aren’t a member. He settled the car rug round him and fiddled with the heating—I detected indications of old age and badly lagged pipes. The afternoon was mild and clammy. “As a matter of fact,” he said “I opened this morning’s paper and got quite a start. I thought I was looking at Toybrook but in fact what I was looking at….” He fumbled among his cases and bundles and produced a paper which he opened and spread before me, stabbing with a lean nicotined finger. The caption was one word, a familiar one: Belsen! We laughed very heartily about this—a long terrain of old-fashioned potting sheds with the two funnels, like a liner or a soap-factory. All indistinct and furry.

“Come,” I said “didn’t Caradoc build it? It can’t be less than a Parthenon of some sort in that case.”

“It’s very beautiful,” he admitted sitting back and settling the rug around him “really very beautiful. And also marvellous from our own point of view. There are no labs like it in Europe, nowhere. The nearest comparison is Germany, but even then I think we have the edge of them. No, Toybrook is quite something. Sound like an
invention
of Enid Blyton doesn’t it? Do you know those children’s books of hers?”

“Of course. I read them in the Tube.”

“Then?”

“Well, I’m curious to see what you’ve got and to find out where you want to go.” Marchant looked at me curiously, humorously.
He said: “We want to get as real as we can.” Silence. “You mean fundamentally you want to give yourself the illusion of actually controlling reality? How real can one conceive, I mean?” Marchant gave a chuckle. “Felix, Felix” he said reprovingly, putting his hand on my knee. “The old weakness is peeping out. You want to intrude metaphysical considerations into empirical science. It’s no go. You are tapping on a door which does not exist. The wall is solid.”

“It’s quite a consideration if the things you make get up off the operating table and start being MORE real than you? You will surely be forced to reassess your … dirty word … culture?” Marchant shook his head vigorously. “We must move step by step, not in your quanta-like jumps—you can do nothing scientifically if you get the typical clusters; it’s like seizing up your engine by
overheating,
hence the Paulhaus.” I watched the wonderful socialist country rolling by with all its marvellous advertising. “Ejax makes a man of you.” Why not a woman, I wondered? It damn soon would. Hair down to the waist and a costume from Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Perhaps there was a future for poor Felix in all this?

“
Bon
”
he said, with a growing sense of familiarity. It was not simply the firm—it was the particular smell of self-satisfaction it
unleashed.
“And Julian?” I said. Once more Marchant gave a small earwig chuckle. “Gambling,” he said “all the time. But now he has started losing and this is not in nature—at least not in his. I love Julian, you know, now that I have really got to know him. He is humility itself—humble as the Pope. Self-effacing. Tender. Felix, what a man!”

“What a man” I echoed piously, and indeed the funny thing was that I felt it; I felt a strange sort of reverence for this … mummy. I don’t know if that is the right word. But to have so much
understanding
humanity as Julian had and to manage to live apart, to play no direct part in its strange or deformed operations—why really it was something to doff the hat to. “All that Planck stuff is fruitful from a theoretically viable point of view; but from our point of view it is a matter of scale, in our empirical test-tube business the three dimensions are all one can cope with.” He was pursuing the
argument
like a sort of granny. He cleared his throat while I lit a cigarette. ‘Our only problem down in Toybrook is a simple one, namely does
it work ninety-nine times out of a hundred? If it does it is real.” I coughed slightly and scanned off the scenery a bit. We were
travelling
mighty fast with a chauffeur who, for all I knew, might have been a dummy invented by Marchant. Then I said: “And the
hundredth?
Is there no room in your system for the miracle? That trifling shift of temperature or wrong mixture of chemical salts … it’s so easy to go wrong. What exactly would be the miracle for you, Marchant?” Chuckle. “Well,” he said “something like Iolanthe. She can for the moment be exactly controlled. Or so we hope. So we hope.”

But reassuringly enough Toybrook was not in the least like Belsen—quite the contrary; despite the two stout brick towers exuding a lick of white smoke from the ovens in the experimental section.
Toybrook
was laid out with great dignity in two long complexes
enfilading
a piece of wild woodland, so that there was no laboratory or theatre without its fine green view. Moreover in the woodland there were several families of wild stags which appeared and disappeared dramatically among the trees, mating and battling in full view of the scientists; sometimes even coming shyly down to put a wet muzzle on the plate glass of the aquarium-like laboratories. It was both elegant and very peaceful—the chemists’ studios with their long rows of microscopes glinting, their scales and pulleys and grapnels. A long pendulum hung slowly swinging in the hall. They had
everything,
these boys, even a wind tunnel and a cyclotron. Marchant was in high good humour as he showed me round, stopping here or there to present me to a colleague. Thence to the elegant theatre where the progress reports were read and recorded audio-visually for whatever posterity a scientist might believe in or hope for.

In the darkness Marchant flicked a couple of switches and a bald man appeared on close-circuit image. “That is old Hariot” he said while the celebrated man read haltingly against a blackboard upon which someone had written in violet chalk: “Does perhaps the rate of blood-sedimentation dictate the oxygen intake?” A vexing
question,
I should have thought. Anyway Hariot went on: “As you know, oxygen pushes carbon dioxide out of the blood and vice versa; as far as the circulation is concerned, about five litres of blood a minute are pumped by the heart of an ordinary resting adult. The
distribution
is not uniform; I mean that brain and kidneys get
disproportionately
large amounts compared to their relative size. As far as the brain is concerned, a decrease of ten per cent oxygen will give the first signs of confusion; decrease it by twenty per cent and you get the equivalent of four or five strong cocktails, say; around forty per cent you would expect to get coma. If the total supply is cut you get unconsciousness in a few seconds; and after four to five minutes the damage to the brain may be irreversible.”