The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam
Page 28
He moved his tongue about in his mouth and pressed some air up into the cavity below his nostrils. He had never seen Jocas, he said; as far as he knew it was Julian all right. I was nonplussed. Of course it could have been a mistaken ascription, a journalistic error. “You are sure?” I said again, and he nodded expressionless as a totem. He shuffled off and left me staring at this singular picture. I finished my cocktail and set the glass down. Then my eye caught sight of another small door in the further wall. It was ajar. I pushed it open and took an inquisitive look into the tiny adjoining room to which it gave access. It was a little work room, with an overflowing desk. But what surprised me was that on the further wall, beautifully framed, was a gigantic picture of Iolanthe, an enlargement from her Greek film. She stood, looking down, hands gravely clasped, on the temple plinth of the Wingless Victory, with all Athens curving away under her to the sea. I had hardly time to take this all in before a clock struck somewhere. I was dying to explore further—I wanted to see the bedroom, have a look at the clothes in the wardrobe and so on. But the noise startled me in burglarish fashion; I turned, and then the telephone began to ring in the hall. I heard Ali answer it with his gasping and grunting delivery—he must be conveying the fact of my presence. And sure enough, he appeared in the door and beckoned me away from my investigations towards the phone. How familiar were the lazy precise kindly tones. “My dear Charlock, fancy you being there. What a disappointment for me.” Sometimes it was Felix, sometimes Charlock. “It was another vain attempt to see you” I said lamely.
“My dear fellow.” He spoke mildly and yet with a scruple of genuine pleasure in his tone—as if in some obscure way I had actually conferred a compliment on him by coming here unheralded. “It’s the weirdest luck” he went on, and the dramatic pointing, so to speak, of his voice, suggested the presence of a cigar between his teeth. “To miss each other once again. Do you know, I had definitely planned to stay in this evening? Then at the last moment Cavendish rang up about an urgent decision which had to be taken about a merger up north—and dammit here I am at the airport, waiting for a plane.” He laughed softly. “But is there anything urgent I can do?” So calm, so friendly, so serene did he sound that I felt all of a sudden guilty: as if I had tried to take an unfair advantage of him in hounding him down. My voice faltered in the instrument as I said, “I wanted to discuss Benedicta with you, in very general terms of course.” He coughed and said: “Oh that!” with an evident relief, as though the subject were already trivial, or else out of date. “But I know about all your difficulties from Nash—all of them! I was going to tell you how grateful I was—we all are—that you are treating these unfortunate matters with such patience and conscientiousness. It’s heroic. And you have even put aside the notion of divorce for the present—for her sake. My dear chap, what can I say? We will make it up to you in any way we can. All our sympathies are with you.”
In the scratchy background I could hear a voice from a loudspeaker intoning plane-numbers—the faintest intonation of a muezzin from a tulip-mosque. I could feel that he had half an ear cocked back, waiting for the flight number of his own plane.
“I wonder why you hide from me?” I said at last, with a sort of graceless aggressiveness. Julian gave his quiet surprised laugh; he sounded so fond, almost tender—as if mentally he had put his arm through mine, or around my shoulders. “My dear Felix” he said with loving reproachfulness. “Answer me” I said. “Go on.”
“Above all you mustn’t exaggerate” he said. “Once or twice I might have found it inconvenient, but for the most part it was sheer coincidence—like tonight for example.”
“Would you have come home if you had known I was here?”
“It’s too late to say. The fact remains that coincidence kept us apart tonight; how can I say what I might have felt? That would be hypothetical merely.” I rapped my knuckles on the polished wood. “Verbiage” I said. “You wouldn’t have come; perhaps even you did know and deliberately sidestepped me.” He clicked his tongue in reproof.
“Come now” he said plaintively.
“No, I wouldn’t put it past you; the thing is—why? I sometimes wonder what you can have weighing on your mind.” He gave a small groan—a satirical small sound. “In the age of the detective story one could hardly do less. But I fear you are building up a house of cards. Just imagine me as real, awfully prosaic, but a trifle shy—almost to the point of eccentricity if you wish. Truthfully.”
“No” I said. “It won’t fit.”
“Good Lord, why not?”
As I had been talking I had been sifting through the silver bowl which stood by the telephone, telling over the thick pile of white pasteboard invitations addressed to him—Embassies and Clubs, individuals and societies. I knew that an office secretary came down every morning from the firm to deal with his social correspondence. He had neatly annotated the top left-hand corner of each card in that beautiful secretary-hand of his. On some he had written “Refuse pl” and on others “Accept pl”.
“Not too shy” I said—feeling at the same time a trifle ashamed of myself for prowling around his private domain in this way—“not too shy to accept lunch at Buckingham Palace to meet the Persian Trade Mission.” He gave another exasperated chuckle and said, without heat: “But Charlock, for the firm’s sake I have to, don’t you see? I can’t afford to do otherwise: besides an invitation from Buck House is really a command, you know that.” Yes, I supposed that I knew that: and yet….
“Come” he said in his coaxing, conciliatory tone, as if he were speaking to a child. “Have some confidence in me, in my good intentions towards you. I haven’t failed you yet have I? Have I?”
“Quite the contrary” I said, with very real despair.
“And you know how deeply we are all concerned about Benedicta. Believe me, you are not the only one to care for her. Jocas must have told you about this unhappy pattern which repeats itself, no? But it’s intermittent, it never lasts for long. You should base your hopes on that, as we all do. As for our meeting—why, better luck to us both next time, that’s all I can really say.” I grunted. “Ah, there’s my plane coming up.” A vague burble of sound from a loudspeaker swelled up slowly behind his silence. “I must be off” he said, with a little sigh. “Will you tell Ali to dismiss the car? Thank you. Well, Felix, goodbye for now..” A faint click, and we were once more cut off.
I went back to the fire to finish my drink and reflect upon the little picture in its silver frame. The cat had disappeared. I heard the man-servant doing something in the kitchen. I sat in bemused fashion, staring into the fire, almost asleep now. Somehow, I thought, I must get a glimpse of Julian’s hands, if only to slake my curiosity. At least he could not deny me that! It was strange to feel like a suppliant, like a beggar: and then suddenly again to be overcome by rage or remorse. The moment I heard his voice a wave of sympathy was elicited. I melted. It was baffling this polarity of feelings—and I supposed, to adopt the formulae of Nash, that the whole thing was due to nervous strain, mental weariness which hovered about the central problem of Benedicta. The Victorian word was still the most expressive—brain-fag. Where we cannot establish the aetiology of a disease or of a course of human action—when, for example, the providing brain and the sustaining nerves are out of whack—we can always slap a clinical term on it, give it a name even if the name is meaningless.
I had drunk more than one cocktail from the silver canister before it occurred to me to look at the time; it was not as late as I’d thought. I set out to walk across London to Mount Street. A fresh tormenting wind blew, the parks rustled. In my mood of prevailing despondency I hardly noticed my feet covering the pavements of the capital, between the dark brown houses; slow and regular as breathing. And the half attention I could devote to the life around me cast a curious kind of glow about ordinary realities—making them seem disembodied. In Bond Street the back of a lorry blew down and out fell a hundred gilt chairs. They tumbled out like a river and gave the illusion
of dancing with each other on the pavement before subsiding into eighteenth-century curtsies. They had obviously been bound for some Embassy ballroom. Then later, in a narrow street, a woman dropped a big leather purse which exploded on the pavement scattering hundreds of halfpennies. Almost at once the passing crowd, like an ant-file diverted, started to help her gather them up—they had rolled everywhere, even into the centre of the street. Within the space of a breath everyone was transformed into a snail-picker or mushroom gatherer. The woman stood looking vaguely around her, almost tearful, holding her bag open; one by one the kindly helpers filled it with the coin they had gathered. I stood and simply watched. Thence onwards to the dry click of the key in the door, to the ministrations of silent servants, to my tapes and papers. We were still not finished with the Cham, thank goodness. “Modern architecture reflects the dirty vacuum of the suburban mind.” Yes, but other voices had to be cleared off the track, vexatious and interfering voices—many of them unidentified; but some of these baffling irruptions were singular enough to be worth preserving. One voice, for example, which said: “When Merlin was dying of GPI he had his Rolls brought out and sat by it in a wheel-chair touching it, as if rubbing cold cream into its glossy velvet skin.” Who on earth could that have been?
There remained such a lot to do—so many confusing diversions to be followed up or to be eliminated. In such a chaotic collection, spanning such a long period of time, the problem of ascription had become a formidable one. It was all right where I had captured a distinct voice saying a distinct thing—a voice made recognisable by its familiar timbre—like that of Caradoc. But what of the droning quotations which so frequently supervened; and sometimes even the background noises which gave substance and point to what had actually been recorded? My little dactyls worked loyally enough transcribing all they overheard, but with faulty transmission I was left often with huge sheaves of confusion—speeches one could not faithfully ascribe to one person or another. And yet many of them too good to tear up. It was like some mad accumulator building up its energies to supply a mnemonic museum…. Goodness, that was it. Somewhere in the midst of these studies, wallowing in this mountain of white paper, I had the idea which later led to the building-up of Abel, the computer. It was only a germ, then, though in the succeeding months it began to take sharper form. The raw materials of phonology are relatively simple if reduced to an alphabet. But if the actual phoneme—so I thought in my muddled fashion—could be translated, by a conversion table, into vibration … why, poor Charlock, in terms of frequency, could sort out the authors of this voice-fest and bring scientific order into chaos: not even chaos, just a mis-numbering of the data? It was all horribly vague; I still had much to learn from Marchant of electronics. I might even go so far as to make people seem explicit simply by marking down the tonalities of their ordinary speech. Who knows? A new sort of interpretation of the human being in terms of his vocal chords?
At any rate anything would be better, however factitious, than to surrender all this equivocal but often amusing or instructive babble to the dustbin. We were making a beginning with Caradoc, and for a specific purpose. But even here the identification was becoming questionable. It was mixed up with other things—which might have been his—pronounced in other voices, or in different keys. It was in a way as if his personality (now dead) had begun to diffuse around its edges, become less distinct, less easy to grasp in terms of an individual psychology. He was entering into his own mythology now; and of course our own mistakes of ascription might completely falsify him by adding to his massive incunabula of obiter dicta examples of Koepgen or others. These were the irresolute ideas which crossed my mind as I plugged in and watched the little creature begin to sick out her pages for me on to the expensive carpet—a human ticker-tape from the strongrooms of memory, of destiny.
To what degree is pattern arbitrary? Please help me, little faithful dactyl, with your pretty claws, please help me. I marked slowly and with as much conscientiousness as possible the voices that I knew, using a letter of the alphabet for such of my friends as I could. But often these cursed toys had been left running when I was not there. Both Caradoc and Iolanthe had been shown how to play with them. It was no wonder that there were so many puzzles to be sorted out.
Come, a drink, my boy
Winch me in a drink,
Gaff me a zebib,
Harpoon me a gin (C)
his death is still fresh
paint Ah do not touch
a mystic who likes his breakfast
in bed would you say? (?)
Fundamentally every woman
wants to give birth to an
upper-class child, my dear.
(H)
Little gold ear-rings in the
shape of a guillotine darling;
they all wore them under the
Terror. Look how pretty.
(B?)
an abacus of the
contemporary moods
(K?)
steeplejack
your beanstalks
are the sky
(K?)
Poets; put your
sperm to work
(?)
my balls have bells Wang Shu
while your balls have little
ad hoc bells, so ting a ling
cherished master as you pass
in your swansdown sampan
(C)
One lesson women teach is that
it is possible to be superb in
mind without being at all
intelligent. (K)
Eros de-fused will save
the human race. (K)
My ancestors, yogically untrained, died
through the eyes as they say; hence me,
look, a house, a museum, a brothel.
(?)
So the labyrinth of this intermittent record poured out of the little machine to spread themselves on the carpet, to be gathered and stacked like sheaves; later our three bent heads would try to puzzle them out, to listen to them played back, to dispute their authorship. And some which were only holes in sound. For example, simply a sweet long sigh—the unmistakable sigh of Iolanthe in my dark room. She must have had someone there while I was out? A door opens, a match scratches, someone sees the wooden pattens. Graphos’ voice—but in a whisper so that I cannot say for certain it is his: but certainly speaking Greek says “These are your shoes, then?” The silence scratches on for an age; the bed creaks. Later came the equally unmistakable clank of the bath-tap and the sound of running water. Yes, some of the scratched parts could themselves be human sighs, luxurious sighs to correspond with simple acts—a voice whispering “Ah” or else (I am not so sure) “Ah mother”. Such faulty transcription defies significance; some of those dreadful crepitations could be the sucking of a breast. My little instrument whirrs on transcribing nothing—nothing in darkness. This is one tape I shall be able to destroy without compunction. Iolanthe!
Sitting among the tall columns of blue cigar smoke I meditate on this broken record of a past which is still not too far away to be revived and recaptured; which can still be compared to itself for example—memory against records. Only the faults in human memory cause the doubt and distortion. Where neither memory nor machine is completely sure you often get this kind of tentative ascription on the page. Palimpsest.
after all nature is big-breasted
indiscreet, undiscriminating, ample,
a spender … why not you?
(C or K)
Zoë Pithou
“the life of the jar”
think of it, for the mind
needs housing-space
(C)
I do not usually like the type
but if he is rich he must be
very nice (H)
the present overtaking the past
bit by bit and falsifying it all
the time, breath by breath;
seeing it through the spectrum of
death one supposes. (K)
formation, the pursuit and identi-
fication of dead selves, the accom-
modation of the idea of death—
these are the capital preoccupations.
All the rest is tinsel.
(K)
you talk of the prodigality
of nature; but the old bitch
why not in spite of those swollen dugs
you? is really lean as a bedrail,
all the superfluous fat is
melted off her in her war to
the knife with history.
(C or K)
All change for Moribundia!
ah the beautiful anguish of change!
(C?)
a dialogue in whispers, but
the transcription very faulty;
a few phrases, among them:
“But must he die—can’t you make
him disappear?”
O God what have I done?
(?)
Come in. Lock the door.
(?)
I don’t know, I shall never
know. (?)
To wake up with a start at two o’clock in the morning, surrounded by these growing hillocks of paper: to switch off and crawl girning up to bed. Only to echo on, I fear, in the dreams and fevers which crowded the skull of the happy weed. Did I say happy? Ah, Charlock infelix—why ever did you let your fancy stray along these unbeaten paths, lured by the idea of razors which sharpen themselves as they cut, of an electronic Braille vibrating through the sensitive fingertips of blind men? All those hybrid voices filtering through my toys afflicted their creator’s sleep. A confused jumble of historical echoes—for once dead everything sleeps in the same continuum: a historical reference from Pausanias or a remark by a modern streetwalker—“a public mouth from which the lipstick has been gnawed”; or a line here and there of poetic aphorism—“poetry which modifies uncertainty awhile”. Somewhere walking hand in hand with a girl among the great stored stones of Delphi which seem to yawn at post-Christian relics—the Goth of a yawn.