The Walled Orchard (64 page)

I was terrified, as you can imagine; when you heard knocking on your door in the middle of the night in those days, you expected something horrible. But the last thing I wanted was for Phaedra to be woken up, so I hauled myself on to my feet and opened the door a tiny crack.

At first I didn’t recognise the son of Philip — he had dyed his beard and brushed his hair forward over his bald forehead; but when he put his not inconsiderable weight behind the door and pushed it open, I knew who it was, and I was not at all pleased. I was about to say something or other, but I never got the chance. He thrust himself into the house and slammed the door behind him.

‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘what do .you mean by keeping me hanging about on the doorstep for half an hour? Can’t you see I’m in danger?’

I was still half asleep, and I couldn’t understand. ‘Danger?’ I mumbled, through the mouthful of greasy wool I appeared to have woken up with. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘They’re on to me, that’s what,’ he said, helping himself to a long swig of wine straight from the ladle. ‘That bastard Euxenus has sold me down the river. I got away just in time.’

‘You mean someone’s trying to kill you?’ I said.

‘Got it in one,’ said the son of Philip. ‘Now, where’s the best place for me to hide? They may have seen me come in here, since you took so long answering the door.’

‘You mean this house is likely to be searched?’ I said, horrified. ‘My wife is sick in there, she can’t be disturbed.’

‘Too late to worry about that now,’ said the son of Philip. ‘You should have thought about that when you were contemplating opening the damned door.’

I thought quickly, but all that came into my mind was those deceived-husband stories, where the wife hides her lover under something or in something when her husband returns unexpectedly. As it happens, Aristophanes had filled in a gap in one of his recent plays with a handful of these old chestnuts, and my semi-conscious mind couldn’t think farther than that.

‘For God’s sake,’ said Aristophanes angrily, while I was trying to think, ‘make up your mind or we’ll both be dead. Do you want them to catch me or something?’

It hadn’t occurred to me before then, I swear to you, that here was a chance to get even with the son of Philip for a lifetime of malice and slander, and that nobody could ever blame me for it. After all, it wouldn’t be my fault if Cleophon’s thugs chose to kill a poet; and Aristophanes hadn’t followed the correct formula for putting himself under my protection, namely clasping my knees with his hands and proclaiming himself a suppliant. He had no claim on me whatsoever, and it is a good man’s duty to hurt his enemies, as the philosophers are always telling us. But once again I remembered that Aristophanes had been put under my care by the God himself; and so, rather wearily, I told him that there was a space just large enough for a man to hide in next to the kitchen boiler. It was a big open jar where we put the rubbish and the emptyings of the chamber-pots until the cart came to take them away, and since the cart hadn’t been for a week there was quite a healthy build-up of material for him to hide under. He objected furiously, of course, and I was tempted to remind him of the olive-jar in Sicily; but I didn’t, and eventually he crawled down into this jar, while I laid a nice thick layer of ordure over the top of him. I imagine it was quite nice and snug under there by the time I had finished, once you got used to the smell.

About ten minutes later, there was another loud knocking at the door, and I went to answer it. This time I wasn’t quick enough to stop Phaedra being woken up, and she came to the door of the inner room, asking sleepily what was going on.

‘Don’t ask me,’ I said as I slid back the bolt. ‘Go back to bed, there’s a good girl.’

There were five or six men at the door, with drawn swords in their hands, and they were not in the best of moods. I didn’t recognise any of them; I think they were foreigners. Anyway, they demanded to know where Aristophanes son of Philip was. I told them I didn’t know.

‘Don’t be funny with us,’ said their leader, a big, grey-haired man. ‘He was seen coming in here not half an hour since. Where have you got him?’

Phaedra burst out laughing, and they asked her what was so funny.

‘You idiot,’ she said, ‘don’t you know whose house this is? Eupolis is Aristophanes’ worst enemy in the whole world. You don’t imagine for one moment that he’d shelter that bastard, after everything he’s done to this family?’

The leader of the men scowled at her. ‘Shut up, you,’ he said. ‘We’re going to search this house from top to bottom, and if we find him here you’re both of you going to die. Is that clear?’

‘Search away,’ said Phaedra. ‘I can promise you that you won’t find him.’

So they searched. They tore the inner room apart, slit open the mattress, emptied the chests out all over the floor, and pulled everything down from the rafters. They sacked the rest of the house so efficiently that you would think they were Italian pirates. They went all over the courtyard and the stable, and nearly cut open the horse to see if Aristophanes was hiding inside its skin, like Odysseus in the Cyclops’ cave. But for some reason they didn’t empty out the trash-jar, contenting themselves with sticking my spear into it a couple of times. When they had finished, Phaedra said, ‘Satisfied?’

‘All right,’ said the grey-haired man, ‘you win. Just think yourselves lucky, that’s all. And remember, we’re going to keep an eye on you from now on. One step out of line, and you’re dead. Got it?’

I waited for an hour after they had gone before pulling Aristophanes out from under the rubbish. One of the spear-thrusts had gone through his cloak, missing his chest by about half an inch, and he was profoundly unhappy. Not nearly as unhappy as Phaedra was, though. She stared at me as if I was mad.

‘You imbecile,’ she said, ‘what in God’s name did you want to go doing a thing like that for? You very nearly got us all killed.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘It seemed rather clever at the time.

Phaedra shook her head several times in utter contempt, and swept off back to bed, leaving me with a foul-smelling Comic poet to dispose of somehow. The best thing to do with him at that moment seemed to be to feed him, because he wouldn’t be able to complain so effectively with his mouth full. While he was eating, I put my finger under my nose to keep out at least some of the smell, and tried to strike at least a little spark from my brains.

The best I could come up with was this. Obviously they would be keeping an eye on the house for a day or so, and it would be impossible for Aristophanes just to walk out of the front door and go quietly away. So I had to get him out in something or under something; the problem was, what? The my eye fell on the big Bactrian carpet hanging on the wall, and I had an idea. First thing in the morning, after an extremely restless night, I put the horse in the shafts of the cart and led him round to the front of the house. My slaves then carried out the carpet, tightly rolled up and tied with rush cord. We manhandled this carpet up on to the cart, trying not to show that it was heavier than it should have been, and I took the reins and set off slowly for the country. In retrospect it was a stupid idea; had anyone been watching the house, they would immediately have started wondering why the urge to move furniture had suddenly come on me, and taken a good look inside that carpet. As it was, I had a nicely uneventful journey to Pallene; the Sicilian cavalry I was expecting to materialise from round each bend of the road never actually turned up. We unloaded the carpet into my house, cut the cords, and rolled out the son of Philip, who was fast asleep. From Pallene, I believe, he went up into the mountains and spent a month or so pretending to be a shepherd on Parnes. I wish I could have seen Aristophanes being a shepherd. It would have made up for all the trouble he had put me to.

When I got back to the City I found that Phaedra’s fever had got much worse, and I knew then that she was going to die. She took a long time about it, though, and I think those were the worst few weeks of my life. I suddenly realised that I had let her slip through my hands like a precious opportunity. You know how it is; there’s something you’re always meaning to do, such as go up to see the wild flowers in the mountains around Phyle and take a picnic with you, but you keep putting it off, and by the time you get there everything has faded and withered, and you eat your food in silence and then go home feeling miserable. I had never found time to get to know my wife properly, and when I was forced to make a start it was too late. She was delirious with the fever half the time, and said a lot of things I hope she didn’t mean; and when she came out of it, she would say exactly the opposite, telling me over and over again that I had been a good husband in the circumstances, and that she had had a better life than she had any right to expect.

After a while I couldn’t bear it any longer, and in my heart I wanted her to die and make an end of it. But the thought that the next day or perhaps the day after she wouldn’t be there any more was completely intolerable to me, and I kept pestering her with doctors and miracle cures when all she wanted was to be left in peace. Finally she begged me not to bother her any more, and I gave up and tried to accept the situation. I stayed with her all the time, however, because both of us were terrified that if I went away for a moment she would be dead when I came back. And even then I failed her. She had just come out of a dreadful bout of delirium and appeared to be sleeping peacefully, and I was so tired that I fell asleep in my chair. I can’t have slept for more than ten minutes, but as soon as I woke up I knew she had died on me. I didn’t look for a while, and then when I opened my eyes I thought for a moment that she was just asleep, and that I had been imagining it. But she was dead all right, and as soon as I had made sure, I started sobbing and wailing like one of those dreadful old women who make a living as professional mourners in the City, until one of the slaves gave me a cup of wine laced with poppy essence, like the potion that Aristophanes’ men gave to my leading actor Philocharmus. After that, they tell me, I went off my head for a day or so — the idiot had put too much of the poppy stuff in it, and nearly killed me too —but I don’t remember any of that. All I remember was waking up with a dreadful headache and knowing that she was dead.

I buried her at Pallene, next to my father’s grave, where I will be buried myself; and I had the best stonemason in Athens set up one of those carved slabs, with a verse on it. Now being a poet I should have produced a really fine epitaph; and I thought I had. But when I saw it, it just seemed silly, so I had it chiselled off and replaced with a simple inscription recording her name and her father’s name and her deme. I miss her more and more as I get older, which is strange considering that when I am honest with myself I have to admit that I didn’t know her all that well. Perhaps that explains it, I don’t know. I think that sometimes I forget what she was really like, and get her confused with the legendary heroines like Penelope or Laodameia, the archetypal perfect wives. She wasn’t perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but I would willingly have traded all my prizes in the Festivals, even the prize for the
Demes,
just to have known her a little better.

So now I have outlived all the good or interesting characters in this book, and you are left with me. If you do not share my undying fascination with myself, I suggest that you leave out the next bit and carry on down to the top of the last roll.

I have never been to Delphi or any of the great oracles, and so I have never been given any insights into my future, other than those the God Dionysus gave me, as I have described above. But when I went down to the Market Square this morning to buy some fish, they tried to charge me one and a half drachmas a quart for anchovies; and when I said that the price was outrageous, the fishmonger said that anchovies were on their way up, because of the War, and that he confidently expected to be charging two drachmas a quart by the end of next month. Didn’t I mention we are at war again? Indeed we are, and with Sparta too, but it’s nothing like the Great Peloponnesian War; it’s like a fight between two extremely old men, more funny than violent.

Two drachmas a quart; what a price to pay for anchovies. When I look back over my life, I feel rather like the three men from a tiny city somewhere on the edge of the Black Sea, who had always wanted to see Athens. They were stone-masons by trade, and from every building and statue and tombstone they made, they set aside a few obols towards the cost of a trip to the City of the Violet Crown. After twenty years or so of saving in this manner they had enough put by, and so they booked a passage on a wheatship. All the way, as they sailed past Byzantium and along the Thracian Chersonese, they talked about what they were going to see — the temples, the Theatre, the Nine Fountains, the great civil buildings, the Propylaea, the Erechtheum. Eventually they landed at Piraeus and walked up under the Long Walls — this must all have been before the end of the War, when the Long Walls were pulled down by Lysander, the Spartan general — and into the City itself. The trouble was that they didn’t know what the great monuments they had travelled so far to see actually looked like. So when they passed one marble structure, one of them would turn to the other two and say, ‘That must be the Erechtheum.’ And the other two would nod excitedly, and they would stand for a moment and drink in the full splendour of it. Then they would pass on and come to another magnificent pile; and another of them would say, ‘No, that must be the Erechtheum.’ Then they would think back over everything they had heard about Athens, and they would agree that the building in front of them was indeed the Erechtheum, and the one they had seen before must have been Solon’s Council Chamber. And then they would find themselves standing in front of a still more imposing edifice (I shall run out of words meaning building in a moment, and then this story will grind to a halt) and they would all be forced to agree that
this
must be the Erechtheum. When they had been all round the City and seen everything larger and more impressive than a water-tank, they looked at each other in silence for a while. Then the eldest one said, ‘Anyway, we’ve seen the Erechtheum. Let’s go and have something to eat.’