The Revolt of Aphrodite (69 page)

A draught blew in from a window and the candles wagged and danced on the long refectory table; we were quite startled, as if in some intangible way it was the breath of Julian which had entered the room, attracted perhaps by the verses or by the mention of his name. “An unquiet ghost” she said in Greek, and shivering drew her shawl about her shoulders. The impression of some such silent visitation was slightly heightened when, in a little while, the
telephone
began to peal in the depths of the house, insistent as a child calling. Ariadne went out into the hall to answer it while we took our cigars and coffee back to the warm firelight in the outer room. We sat down, each absorbed in the thoughts set in motion by the verses of Heine and the mood they evoked. Presently Hippolyta came back and said: “The firm is calling you from London; they’ve traced you here. Shall I say you are out or in bed?”

“Why?” said I, “I’ll see what they want.”

I went out into the hall where the little phone booth stood; it had been converted from a satin-lined sedan chair. Inevitably the line was poor and the voices were criss-crossed with whirrs and clicks—it was like talking across the reverberations of some giant sea-shell. But yes, it was Nathan, waiting patiently for me. “It’s Mr. Marchant, sir. He has been asking for you rather urgently. Hold on while I put you through to him.”

Marchant sounded testy, as if he had been called out of bed in the middle of the night; and yet relieved. “I wouldn’t have bothered you,” he said “only Julian told me I should try and make contact and tell you that we’ve had rather a nasty accident on our hands here.”

“Iolanthe!” I cried, my heart beating faster from sheer anxiety. “What has happened to her?”

“No. No” said Marchant. “It’s the man, Adam. He’s a total wreck, a write-off I fear; but he’s gone and killed poor old
Rackstraw,
of all people. Completely unexpected.”

It could not well have sounded more astonishing, more
improbable.
“But how? Where?”

Marchant sighed with exasperation and said: “You know we had orders to let old Rackstraw into the lab to acclimatise himself to Iolanthe, and to test any reactions he might have. It was Julian’s idea; I wasn’t keen on it but he said he’d discussed it with you and that you had seen no reason why not. Well, anyway, we drew a blank from the point of view of reactions. The old boy simply stared at our girl-friend for ages without moving a muscle; I think he would have gone on for ever had he not been led away by Henniker.
Incidentally
the effect on her was terrific; I have never seen anyone cry so hard and so long and so passionately. She kept saying ‘My God, she’s so real’ over and over again and going into paroxysms, leaning against the wall. She is hardly calm as yet and they’ve been visiting us in the lab every day for a few hours. The old boy just hissed and croaked and wagged his eyebrows; but really they’d drawn a blank with him. He kept asking about the whereabouts of a chap called Johnson, that was all. Then yesterday we got so used to him standing there motionless that when I went to lunch Said forgot to lock up; or rather he just went out of the lab for a second overlooking the fact that Rackstraw was still there. The next thing is he heard a crash and smelt a roasting smell. He rushed back to find Rackstraw rolling all over the floor like a centipede with this Adam creature wrapped round his neck; it was what you’d call a muscular reflex with a
vengeance.
I don’t know what he could have been trying to do but he was badly burnt and concussed and covered with Ejax into the
bargain.
Well, Said gave the alarm, and of course we had some difficulty over the current, the dummy had become live. But anyway they finally turned everything off and disentangled Rackstraw who was led away to hospital. The next thing we heard in the middle of the night was that he had died of heart-failure. It’s being hushed up, the whole episode, and presented as a normal death—heaven knows it was about time; he’d long overstayed his welcome, the old man. But Julian said that you ought to be told. There is a bit of electrical damage to the big feeder but that can be repaired. Otherwise we are moving along; you will have to make a much stronger
temperature
control stat. or else she will overheat, and then she’s likely to
write free verse: I suppose as any normal person might do in a delirium. It all happened yesterday. She lost optimum temperature control and committed a poem. Felix, are you there still?”

“Yes. I was thinking of Rackstraw. Poor old thing. Is the dummy completely smashed, irrecoverable?” Marchant thought for a moment. “Yes” he said, but doubtfully. “But the funny thing is that Julian has told us to stop work on it and get on with Io. I had a funny sort of feeling that in a way he was almost jealous of the mate. He said ‘We don’t really
need
a male dummy do we?’ He said it in a funny sort of voice, too, kind of complacent and rather pleased—unless of course I am romancing, which I don’t think. Indeed when I spoke of trying to recover the outline drawings of Adam with a view to
rebuilding
he looked extremely peeved and told me sharply to lay off and consign the plans to the wastepaper basket. So there. The funeral was yesterday afternoon. I don’t believe anybody went except Julian. I didn’t, though I am sorry for the old sod. Anyway, I have told you all and done my duty. There is nothing else to report unless you would like to hear the fever-verses that Iolanthe produced yesterday. First verses from beyond the grave, my boy, and not half bad. I thought of sending them to a paper.”

“Have you got them on you?”

“Just a sec. Yes, I have.”

“Read them, then.”

It was a strange feeling to hear these dissociated ramblings which had been produced by a simple temperature rise; was it an illusion or did they make a strange kind of sense, perhaps “poetic” sense—since poetry isn’t a stock report on experience, or written for a seed catalogue. (So I have been told.)

“Bravo” I said, but in a confused puzzled sort of way. The line went dead. The roaring in the sea-shell stopped.

Somewhat to my surprise they had all taken themselves off to bed save Ariadne who was waiting up for me; she sat, lost in thought, and gazing into the fire. I poured myself another drink and joined her—extremely depressed by the story of poor Rackstraw. I had got quite fond of him, of using him as a sort of touchstone for my own sanity in the Paulhaus where, at a certain time, I even placed
Benedicta
among the disorderly figments of my own waking dreams. Fancy to find when I woke that she was really there, in my arms! Not just a daymare. “Thinking?” I said and she: “Yes. A lot of muddled and inconsequent thoughts—what a jumble. Thinking about you all with an affectionate concern—it’s allowable in a friend, no?”

“Concern, Ariadne?”

“Yes. For example this new Benedicta—she’s suddenly normal, sensible, in full possession of herself; won’t you find her diminished, less interesting than the other?”

I groaned. “My God, you aren’t wishing me another long spell of misery with her are you?”

“But the whole mystery must have gone.”

“Thank God it has, if its only manifestation is in hysteria. Besides, she’s exactly how I wanted her, always imagined her. I almost
invented
her. It was written on the package so to speak; if the contents were different there was many a good reason. We now know the reason. But when I fell for her I saw the possible person embedded
in the witch. I fell for the blueprint of what she might be. It was a terrific gamble, but I’ve won, don’t you see? Ariadne, you’ve always thought of me as one of nature’s mother-fixated cuckolds who revelled in his suffering; but it doesn’t go very deep, my masochism. You must have misjudged the issue.”

She looked at me with smiling relief tinged with doubt. “And you don’t hate Julian any more?”

“How can I now I can see him in close-up? His life has been such a calamity, and the type of genius he was given was a catastrophic gift for someone condemned to impotence.”

She put her hand on my cheek and I kissed it. “You are an ass” I said. “I’m sorry” she replied, and then went on. “Strange how we ascribe fixed qualities to ourselves—and really we are only what others think of us: a collection of others’ impressions merely.”

We sat a long time in silence now, smoking and pondering. Vague thoughts passed through my mind like shoals of fish. I thought of the effect that her love for Graphos had had on her life. Then of a sudden a fragment of my intuition stirred and an original thought made its appearance which was disturbing and upsetting. It was: “Ariadne has outlived the death of Graphos now, it has melted, with all the luxurious pain and emptiness it conferred. She is now in mortal danger of relinquishing her hold on life, of dying from pure
ennui
.”
I took her hand as if to hold her back, as if to prevent her slipping downstream. And as if to confirm and echo this dispiriting thought she said: “We can’t believe it, can we? That we are all
condemned,
that it’s only a matter of time? Death is something we accept as part and parcel of others. Why do we never get used to it in regard to ourselves? O the boredom of waiting! One has the
impulse
to race towards it, get it over.” There! I had no consolations to offer; neither love nor opium ever really meet the case. For a pure scientist and an impure man—how to steer a safe course between the inconsequent and the outrageous?

We said goodnight; Ariadne spent all her mornings in bed reading, and would not be awake when the cars came for us at nine. She opened a window to purge the room of its cigarette smoke. The smell of lemons came in out of the darkness like a friendly animal. We did not know when we would meet again—if ever.

We had been put in the room with the ikons and the heavy
old-fashioned
beds; the sheets were of coarse island linen. Prison-bars on the windows. By the light of a single guttering candle Benedicta slept, her pale blonde head on her arm; so utterly motionless was she that she might have been dead. I climbed in beside her. She was naked and deliciously warm. She turned in her drowsing and asked me about the telephone call, and I told her of the death of Rackstraw and the destruction of the model. This awakened her. She stared at the ceiling for a long moment, and then at me. Then she said: “There! You see?” as if the mishap proved something, as if she had foreseen it. “But I wish to God it had been the dummy of Iolanthe. That would have solved something.”

I was outraged. “Darling,” I said “take pity on me. You aren’t developing a jealousy of my poor dummy, are you?”

“In a perverse way yes. I expect you will want to sleep with it out of curiosity one day—to see how real it is, to compare it with me perhaps.” My breath was taken away by this scandalous statement. “With Iolanthe?” I said in tones of mortal injury. “And why not?” she went on, talking to herself almost. “It must stir up all the most perverse instincts. Wait, vampirism. I know exactly what Nash would say.”

Ah! so did I, so did I. And not merely the matter but the manner as well—oblique regard of the cuttlefish, fussy voice and so on. And the ideas all neatly laundered and folded by courtesy of Freud. (Now
him
I love for his modesty, his hesitancy, his lack of a
dogmatic
theology; it is what poor Nash has done to him that I
condemn,
avaunt, conspue.) Anyway I had a long dream colloquy with him in which I manfully defended my dear dolly against the
penetrating
criticism of this marvellous but as yet incomplete science. Ah, the infantile theory with its congeries of undigested impulses
jumping
about in the mud like fish leaping from the subconscious water. Who was I, poor Felix, to deny the double fantasy—both of birth and of coprophilia: the faecal matter which the infant will one day knead into cakes, and then from cakes, into sugar dollies and statues of bronze and stone? Yes, but dead dollies these. Ah, there we were—poor Iolanthe for ever dead, for ever part of the
merde,
that cosmic element which makes up the
Weltanschauung
of the groping analyst;
element in which the poor fellow struggles waist high, holding his nose, and yet convinced on the basis of the evidence that what he is slithering about in is really gold. GOLD, remark you—the cement of a basic material value which binds together the shabby cultural brickwork of the times. The citizen’s toy and talisman, the giver’s gift and the receiver’s wafer…. Gold, bread, excitement and
increment
pouring from the limited company of the dreaming big
intestine.
And then, via the same nexus of associated ideas direct from the chamber-pot to Aphrodite, the austere and terrible and mindless, her sex tolling like a bell. What a vision of judgement for a simpleton like Felix … I heard Marchant singing at his work!

Benedicta stirred in her sleep, dreaming no doubt of the scarlet Turkish slippers she had promised herself, of the slices of holy muslin out of which she would make a ballgown. Softly breathing as she circumnavigated those vast and shadowy fields of sleep—the other reality which is a mirror image of our own. A living corpse like myself suffering only from the
beta
decay of the world within us. (The wish to die together is the image of the wish to lie together.)