The Revolt of Aphrodite (73 page)

“I can see Nash,” I said “bicycling like mad towards you and muttering things about the ‘homosexual component’.”

“Yes, it would seem from my diagnosis that I am a common or garden bugger at heart. What do you know?”

He burst out laughing. Thunder crackled and a brief skirl of rain fell. “Just like last time we were here, isn’t it.”

“What a weird light; the whole damn city so subaqueous and
sfumato.
How is Jocas?”

I gave him an account of the patient to which he listened
thoughtfully
, patiently, nodding from time to time as if what I had to say confirmed his inner convictions. (The strictest style in classical painting limited its palette to yellow, red, black and white. Why? This singular fact has never been satisfactorily explained. Must ask Caradoc what he thinks about it.)

“I bet you” he said, falling to work with knife and fork “that Benedicta hasn’t gone up to Eyub with all this uncertain weather; bet you she’s hiding in Gatti’s eating ice cream or something. Anyway it’s on the way so we shall see. And by the way there’s a telegram for you from Marchant which they gave me down in town. Take.”

It was a simple and brief message to tell me that our model was “critical”—a word we used to denote the final stages before she
woke up. That meant in about a fortnight’s time. I felt my pulse quicken at the thought that we were so near launching day. Perhaps mingled with the feeling was a small touch of misgiving; this parody of a much loved person, how would it stand the test of scrutiny by those who had known her?

There was time before my rendezvous with Benedicta, and we elected to dawdle away an hour or so in the Grand Bazaar where I surrendered completely to the long stride of Vibart and the longer memory he had for everything in it. It was delightful to hear him talk now, with nostalgia and affection for the past—no longer hatred and shock. As for the Bazaar—despite its size he knew every flagstone, every stall; and despite gaps and changes brought by the times there was enough for him even to evoke what was absent as we rambled about it. The circumference of the place cannot be less than a mile, while about five covered arcades radiate from its hub, the so-called Bezistan. It is really a walled and gated city within the city, and it claims to contain 7,777 shops. Mystic numbers? Vibart walked about it all with a sense of ownership, like a man showing one round his private picture gallery. He had, I think, come to realise how intensely happy those long years in Turkey had been for him, and indeed how formative; yet he had spent the whole time grumbling about books he could not write. The little square
Bezistan,
so clearly Byzantine in feel, is less than fifty yards long; square and squat, it spiders this stone cobweb. The one-headed Byzantine eagle over the Bookseller Gate places the building as tenth century, after which time the eagle became two-headed. The gates are called after the quarters which they serve, each characterised by a product—Goldsmiths, Embroidered Belt Makers, Shoemakers, Metal Chasers….

I could see now that Vibart was living in the romantic schoolboy glow of the mysterious East. These empty rainy stalls once held damascened armour, silver-hilted pistols, inlaid rifles, musical instruments, gems of every water, seals and terra-cottas and coins. Even what wasn’t there he was able to describe with complete fidelity in this new youthful voice. I think too that in a way he was talking to Pia in his mind, remembering for her, to so speak. I fell silent and let him go, as one lets a hound off the lead.

“And to think” he said “that in a few days we’ll be back in bonny Blighty facing up once more to all the contingencies which face the creative man—buggery, gin, and menopause Catholicism. Well, I shall take it all calmly from now on. To each his well-deserved slice of sincere dog. To each his cinema picture—the best way of
trivialising
reality.”

But despite the characteristic grumbling tone and matter of his discourse one felt his calm elation. Nor was he wrong about
Benedicta
for she was indeed at Gatti’s, sitting at the end of the terrace in a brown study with a cassata before her. In her absentmindedness—or was it due to old memories, old hauntings?—she had adopted a style of sitting with one gloved hand in her lap. One glove off always—that seemed once so characteristic of her; the glove hid a ring Julian had given her, a ring which came from the tomb of a dead Pharaoh. But with the new dispensation she had thrown it away thus
symbolically
marking the new freedom which she claimed to have won.

Catching a glimpse of her sitting this way, her blonde head turned away to scan the nebulous city with its turrets and minarets, I
suddenly
thought of what Vibart had been saying about Pia and realised not only how much I loved her but also why; and by the same token why she must love me, why she would never break free again. It was one of those cursed paradoxes of love which hit one like an iron bar. I sat down with a bump in the chair next to her and said to myself: “Of course, we are most united in the death of Mark, our son. The child we unwittingly murdered. At bottom what brings this hallowed sadness to our loving is a sort of criminal complicity in an evil deed.” I longed at that moment to embrace her, to comfort her, to protect her. But this train of thought would not do. Instead we listened to Vibart in full exposition while she let me hold her
ungloved
hand in mine. (Bookstores near the Mosque of Bayezid in the old Chartopratis or paper-market; here in an old Byzantine portico resided a turbaned and gowned old gentleman who sat at a table with reed pen and colour box, with gold leaf and burnisher, filling page after page of parchment with exquisite illuminated script. Left over from a forgotten age in which his art was as necessary as it was graceful. Now all he got in the way of commissions were a few
petitions from government clerks or illiterate farmers. For the jewellery and the silks you must try Mahmoud Pasha Kapou….)

“Astonishing how much you’ve remembered and how much I’ve forgotten” said Benedicta; to which Vibart replied with a certain smugness, “Isn’t it, though?”

Clouds furled back to admit a streak of sunlight; we were joined by a relaxed and almost gay Baum. “So they didn’t put essence of powdered rat in your soup?” He shook his relieved head and sighed. “To my intense astonishment I found them most receptive to this new idea; the religious leaders heard my exposition in complete silence. Am I to assume that there are passages in the Koran which sanction solitary practices—unless I misunderstood the interpreter I think that is the case? What impressed them was the insistence on the modern world with its change of viewpoint. After all Turkey abolished the fez out of a desire to make itself a modern state, and then the Latin alphabet replacing the Arabic … I rubbed it all in. And when I had finished they practically gave me a standing ovation, if I may use the phrase without indelicacy, and rushed to fill in membership forms at once. Moreover from every minaret and pulpit in the city the news will go out and true believers will flock to the standard. I am so relieved.” He smiled all over his face.

Our rendezvous with the pinnace was for dusk, so we idled away the afternoon in the shelter of Gatti’s awnings while Baum and Vibart completed several small purchases in the immediate environs. Once again we were favoured by a calm sea. It was dusk by the time we landed once more at the jetty and straggled our way up to the house, to the bed, the lamps and candlesticks; to Jocas who was completing his toilet, but in a very good mood. “Everything has gone well” he said. “All our plans agree. Even Caradoc is happy and when has he ever been happy?”

Caradoc was enthroned in a Voltaire and was playing with coloured bricks, absorbed as a child; it was indeed a child’s toy—this architectural kit. And I could see that having sat for an hour or two on the site by daylight had fired his fancy and given him the itch to begin his task. The evening passed very pleasantly indeed; we almost forgot the plight of Jocas he was in such a good humour, and so lively. But at last when dinner was brought in he said: “So you will
go tomorrow will you? Yes, I think it is best. Now that I have seen you all I am quite content to say goodbye.”

It was the end of an epoch I suppose, but it did not feel very momentous so natural were the talk and banter in the
firelight
.

It is retrospectively that one marks up and weighs the value of experiences. Looking back—as a matter of fact looking down—over Polis as the huge lumbering aeroplane swam in widening gyres, gaining height over the capital, I was touched by a nostalgia which I had not felt on terra firma. Benedicta too I suppose felt it, and
perhaps
more sharply than I. Yet she said nothing. Dawn was breaking over the forest of tilting masts and spars, the long walls turned briefly poppy-coloured before the lengthening rays of sunlight made them revert to bronze, then to umber. I had a feeling that I should not come back for a very long time, if ever; and I was also glad in a
perverse
sort of way that the pilot had decided to overfly Greece on the return flight. The melancholy and solitude of Ariadne had saddened me; it was so absolute that one could think of no consolations worth the offering—you cannot console anyone against reality.

“Thinking?”

“Yes. Thinking and cross-thinking; all the map references are criss-crossed. I was thinking of Jocas, of you as a child, of Ariadne in Athens. And I was thinking of that absurd prophecy of Zeno.” I took it out of my pocket to study once more. The idea of destroying the firm’s entire contract system had begun to tease the edges of my mind; of course it was preposterous, but then everything was. What was more preposterous than returning to England to set Pygmalion’s image walking?

“I saw Sipple” said Vibart. “He’s blind now and pale and ghostly as a mouse. He is head of the embalming section which Goytz has started up. He does everything by touch, like a mouse nibbling at cheese. He was at work on a small corpse, a boy, silently, happily. It terrified me. I buzzed off hastily.”

He looked round carefully to see that Goytz was sleeping
tranquilly,
and had not heard the remark. Goytz was so easily offended when his craft was mentioned in flippant tones. “He’s become like one of those pink transparent eyeless lizards which live in caves in
total darkness. Opaque, completely opaque. You can see the
sunlight
shining right through him, Sipple.”

I had forgotten until now that the clown was still with us, in the land of the living, the land of the dying. A steward brought drinks. Benedicta had fallen into a doze now with her head on my shoulder. Soon we would be booming across the high spurs of Albania, bound for England, home and Iolanthe.

I
have the impression that if anyone had seen us that evening as we wheeled our trophy of love across the crisp green lawns, down the winding gravel paths, through the woods, until we could settle her into the little villa—if anyone had, he would have been tempted to smile at the solemnity and concern written upon our visages. As for her—why she was breathing softly but regularly under her parachute silk shroud; you could see that faint rise and fall of her breast as she lay stretched out on the long steel trolley. She was gradually coming out of the anaesthetic, so to speak. The last threads had been snipped which attached her to the machines that had been feeding slumbering life into her all these long months; the life which, in due course, she would be free to turn to her own uses, to the exploitation of good or evil. “Today she wakes, today she walks” Marchant had chanted with schoolboy enthusiasm which masked, I think, a concern nearly bordering upon hysteria. He had worked harder than any of us on the model. When first her breasts began to rise and fall, her lips to move into the soundless shapes of words, his surprising reaction had been to burst into peal upon peal of laughter, high girlish laughter. And he was still poised on the edge of a triumphant giggle whenever she gave the smallest sign of responding to the demands made upon her by the life-currents into which she was entering. His pink scalp shone through his thin silvery hair; his silver-rimmed spectacles, which gave him a slightly White Rabbit look, steamed over all too easily with emotion. He had to wipe them in his apron. It alarmed me, this laughter, I must say.

I confess that I too felt a nudge of concern and perhaps even horror as she began to take her cues—sorry,
it.
She was moving like a planet into camera range, telescope range….

She licked her lips slowly, tentatively, and her small red tongue flickered over them like that of some marvellous copperhead. Then
she sighed once, twice, but it was a very small boredom as yet. We had allowed ourselves a quarter of an hour to dress her and conduct her to the little villa where she might wake in surroundings
appropriately
familiar to her intricate memory-codes. After all, we wanted her to feel at home, to be happy, just like everybody else. So here we were, wheeling her away across country with Marchant dressed in the elaborate white intern’s coat and Mrs. Henniker tricked out as a nurse. Myself, I was still a civilian, so to speak. Marchant was going to play the doctor who by a brilliant operation had saved her life. As for Mrs. Henniker, she was ashen pale, her hair was glued to her scalp with perspiration. But she was behaving very nobly. I had given her a long talking-to about this excessive emotion. There was no need for it, after all, and there was a risk that the experiment, so delicate in its various contingencies, might be spoiled unless she kept a straight face, so to speak. “Above all nothing must be said in the presence of the dummy to suggest to her that she
is
one, that she is not real. She must not be made to doubt her own reality—because that might lead to some sort of memory collapse; whatever doubts she may eventually have must come out of her own
memory-fund
and its natural reaction-increment.” Easy to say, of course, but the thing was that she was so damn real that it was difficult not to think of her as a “person” … already! And she not walking and talking as yet—the acid test of her mock-humanity! Yes, she could even read, and by her bed lay the familiar bundles of film papers and weeklies which she would nose through like a dog, quizzing the fashions as she picked her front teeth with a slow fingernail. Yet, she was typical, as contemporary as a mere man could make her.

Julian was there at this briefing, if I can call it that, sitting very still with his hands in his lap, listening intently, looking somehow diminished, somehow like a schoolboy. He too had been showing signs of strain from all this cruel anticipation—symptoms more suited to a young bridegroom than to a grown man playing games with a dummy. Yet there it was: changing his clothes several times a day, studying himself with sombre attention in mirrors, fussing over the freshness of the carnation in his buttonhole. I could see that he was going to choose his clothes for the first meeting with the
Ur-Iolanthe with great care, for all the world as if it mattered. Yet perhaps after all it did to him. (She would hold out long phthisic fingers towards his, smiling, saying nothing.)

We had chosen the evening as the best time for her to start; it enabled us to see if our settings were right, by her reaction to nightfall and bedtime and so on. Iolanthe used to wake punctually at six every morning, and was usually in bed by eleven at the latest every night. Henniker had promised to re-enact her usual role of nurse-secretary and friend with all the fidelity she could command, and I presumed that she would soon get over her initial worry and take everything naturally; she would familiarise herself with the new Iolanthe in the long run. It was just a question of the initial
awakening
. If the dummy was as “real” as we expected its memory-reaction code would instantly throw up the whole of Henniker’s history
together
with “her own” past—every damned thing. Yes, from the simple point of view of memory, she would simply be coming back to life after a critical illness—the gap created by the real Iolanthe’s death would be filled in the memory of the false one by vague
intimations
of an illness, an operation, an absence. Her life
henceforth
(though we had not made out any elaborate schema to cover the range and scope of her activities: how could we?)—but her life henceforth would be a sort of long convalescence. At least so we thought. She was not “coded” or “programmed” forwards. She was, so to speak, free.

The little villa in the woods was unobtrusively surrounded by a tall wire fence and entered through a gate. It was very pretty, set upon a deeply wooded knoll. The garden was a riot of wild and tame flowers; behind ran a brook and beside it lay an apple-orchard. It was if anything prettier and more comfortable than the house in the woods which I myself occupied with Benedicta. Inside this elegant little place Henniker had arranged all the possessions (they were astonishingly few for such a rich woman) of Iolanthe senior; laid them all out in familiar dispositions to re-engage memory, yet also haphazardly to suggest perhaps that she (who had lived out of suitcases for half her life) was simply on location for some film or other. But it was beautifiil, it was peaceful, the little house. A fire sparkled in the dining-room with its new novels and
bibelots;
the
Renoir hung upon the wall. On the small upright piano stood the sheet music of a film-score and a volume of Chopin’s Études.
Eh
bien,
the sheets had been aired. On the bedside table were two novels she had been reading when she, the real one, had suddenly lapsed into death. (Some underlinings in one.) Everything in fact conspired to produce a normal setting and atmosphere for this softly breathing Other, lying under her aeroplane silk. I touched her fingers. They separated easily, flexibly. They were warm.

Marchant had timed it all very accurately. We unpacked her body softly and slipped on the blue silk nightgown while Henniker brushed out her hair with long strokes (she sighing luxuriously the while). Then we lifted her to bed. She smelt the newly-ironed freshness of the sheets with appreciation, wrinkling up a newly-minted nose. There were also the faint wisps of odour from the lighted joss-sticks which burned in a small Chinese vase. It was time; there was nothing to do but wait. Marchant hung over his watch like a demented
crystal-gazer
, his lips counting silently, a smile upon his face. “A minute” he whispered. And then
“Ahhh”
with a long delicious inspiration the lady woke; the two eyes, bluer than any stone, inspected first the clean white ceiling, and then travelled slowly down to take in our own surrounding faces; recognition dawned, together with that famous mischievous smile which was so warm that it had always suggested a marvellous intimate complicity, even when projected on a screen. The slightly husky and melodious voice said: “Is it over? Have I come back, then?” While she addressed the question to Marchant her long slender arm came out and touched me, grasped my fingers, giving them a tender squeeze of recognition as she
whispered
in Greek “Hullo, Felix.” Marchant was bobbing and ducking his affirmative and vaguely going through a repertoire of Chinese gestures, shaking hands with myself, as if to congratulate himself for this feat—this living and breathing feat of science, with her
china-blue
eye and scarlet, rather ravenous mouth. “It’s all over” he said. “A great success; but you must rest for a while, quite a long while.” She yawned as naturally as a cat and whispered “I feel wonderful Felix. Doctor, may I go to the loo?” She had not as yet recognised the blenching Henniker, but now as she turned back the sheet in order to stand up she did, and gave a sharp delighted cry like a bird.
“But it’s you—I didn’t see!” In some curious way the very
naturalness
of this embrace seemed to allay the emotion and anxiety of the older woman. Perhaps a sense of verisimilitude, of the reality of the flesh and blood, the gesture, released her from a very natural fear—I don’t know. But all at once she looked unafraid again. “I’ll come with you” she said, and accompanied Iolanthe to the bathroom, smoothing her hair with her hand as she sat on the lavatory and gave her little mechanical shiver of pleasure. “Is it really all over?” she asked Henniker. “Are you sure?”

Henniker reassured her gravely and then escorted her back to bed, puffing up the pillows behind her head and smoothing the sheets with her hard scaly hand. Yes, she had ceased to tremble now. Marchant played the doctor damned awkwardly, swinging a
stethoscope
in his hand. “Well” he said. “It has all been a great success.” She turned her smile on him and expressed her gratitude by taking his hand in hers. “I am so grateful” she said gravely. “I had given myself up for lost, in a way.” We studied her gravely, amazed at what we had done, and wondering a little if she would keep up this extraordinary performance of an understudy who had so thoroughly mastered an intricate part. I could well understand Marchant’s unease, his desire to get away. It was like the first impact of falling in love—one paradoxically wants to get away, to be alone, in order to ruminate upon the feeling. His love was scientific, that was all. Dolly worked! Iolanthe was saying dreamily: “When you come out of the anaesthetic it’s with a soft bump that you land in the middle of consciousness—like those lovely flying dreams one has when one is a child.” Marchant stood on one leg and then the other. Finally he took his leave promising to call on her in the morning. “Henny,” said Io, yawning profoundly “O Henny dear, can I eat something? Something small, a boiled egg?”

“Of course, darling.”

Henniker retired to the kitchen and left us staring at each other with amusement, yes, affectionate amusement. It was a very unreal feeling indeed. “I must just see” she said at last “what they have managed to do about my breasts—that was what really worried me and brought on the other, I think.” She got out of bed with a swift lithe gesture and turned her back to me to enable me to help her
divest herself of her blue nightgown. Naked she walked towards the full-length mirror at the other end of the room. She gave a little crooning cry of relief as she caught sight of the beautiful new breasts the doctors had given her, cupping them in her palms, head on one side like a parrot. Then she leaned forward and stared intently into her own eyes as if to make some critical assessment of her own looks; then, sighing, turned to me as naked as sunrise and put her arms round me to kiss me lingeringly on the lips. It was the old affectionate, concerned kiss of Io, quite unbearably real yet utterly without any new sexual connotation. It was as sister to brother, not as lover to lover; but I was thrilled to have a chance to put my arms about her, to test the smooth flexion of her muscles, to stroke the pearly haunches of my darling, proud as any sculptor to have confided such a thing to nature. She giggled as she got back first into her nightgown and then into her bed. “You look so serious” she said. “Still the same old Felix, thank goodness. How is Benedicta?” she added with a faint frown of concentration as if she were trying to summon up an image of her face. “Happy at last” I said. “And me too. Everything has changed.” She shot me a cool and rather
quizzical
look, as if she were in doubt as to whether I was being ironical, or pulling her leg. Then she said “If it’s true, then I’m glad. It was about time, I must say, that you had a decent break.”

Henniker came back with the long-legged bed-tray on which lay her boiled egg, some nursery bread and butter, and a glass of milk. I watched with anxiety, for all this she would eat only in her
imagination
; the plate, the glass, would seem to her quite empty, though all she had done was to cut the food up and mess it about a bit. But ideally the reflex hand-to-mouth action would satisfy her sense of participation in a natural ritual; one could hardly have denied her that. (I was reminded of the slow imaginary meals of Rackstraw in the Paulhaus.) She did her act and leaned back pushing the tray away and wiping her lips. “Gosh, I’m full” she said, and then “Felix, is there an evening paper? I want to see what plays are on.” I found one and she consulted the theatre pages with attention, her lips moving. “I don’t know a single one of them” she said, and then looked at the date. “How long have I been here, Felix?” I parried this with talk about long sedation and memory lapses and so on. She
wrinkled her brow and wandered through the headlines of the paper before abruptly putting it aside.

“By the way,” I said “Old Rackstraw is dead.” She looked at me with wide-eyed regret for a moment and then turned away to fold up her napkin. “It’s probably for the best” she said in a low voice. “He was so ill it was to be expected I suppose. And yet everyone who dies takes a whole epoch with them. Racky was a saint to me, an absolute saint. Sometimes quite recently when I thought how contemptuously I had let him sleep with my body—not my me, my
you
, so to speak—I felt shocked and disgusted with myself. In a way I owe him everything; he made my name with his scripts. Felix, do you ever think of, do you ever remember, Athens?” The words came over with a kind of wild pang, saturated with a sort of forlorn reserve. “Ah yes, Iolanthe, of course I do.” She smiled and shaking out her hair said: “I tried to reconstruct us in a film at one time, you and me. It didn’t work. Racky was doing the writing and couldn’t get it.”