The Mask of Zeus

by Desmond Cory

  ‘It’s no good going back to look for ideas. You said so yourself.’

  ‘I think I was looking for excuses.’

  ‘You can’t have it both ways. I won’t let you.’

  What was she looking for? Now as then? A light, perhaps, for her eyes to shine in? Something like that? ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean you can use the one thing as an excuse for the other, I don’t mind that or at least I … But if you go on making excuses for not getting anything done then it’s all a bit much, just … too much of a bore.’

  ‘All I said was that I thought the two things might be connected.’

  ‘Getting it down and getting it up. If anything I’d say they were opposites.’

  ‘Only if you want to play with words.’

  ‘You’re accusing me of that?’

  ‘Look, whatever the problem is, we’re not going to solve it by talking about it. I thought we were agreed on that.’

  ‘It’s your problem, sonny boy. Not mine.’

  ‘It’s like … when the lights go out.’

  ‘What?’

  Put out the light and then put out the light. But not a power failure, no. A loss of desire, rather, or maybe a loss of will. In the Elizabethan sense, maybe; oh yes, they’d seen the connection. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. They’d talked so many times and yet they hadn’t. Caged. Looking at each other through the bars. Regret? Yes, of course there was regret. But that wasn’t enough. The regret was for the light that had been extinguished already, not for the quiet darkness that was to come.

  ‘All right.’ She stood up. ‘If you don’t want to talk, then you’d better work.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t want to talk …’

  He picked up the programme, stared at it gloomily. Programme notes. Written by himself, of course. When? He couldn’t remember. Not by him, then. By Adrian Seymour. Some other fellow with the same name.

  Jupiter takes on the form of Amphitryon in order to lie with Amphitryon’s wife, Alcmena; from this union is to be born Hercules, greatest of mortal heroes. Similarly from this unlikely material does Dryden, in the footsteps of Molière, fashion a brilliantly amusing satirical comedy, not without profound political implications. We who have seen in modern Europe a resurgence of the law of tyranny …

  The usual semi-journalistic rubbish. Why hadn’t he burnt it with all those other papers? A dark wisp of smoke, that was all it was. Ashes at the bottom of the dustbin.

  ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’

  He nodded. Staring at the wall.

  His gold-brown eyes watched her as she undressed. He saw no grace in her awkward movements, read no awareness in her of the coming ritual; she was going to bed, just like she’d said. Yet even in the unthinking movements of a human routine a god can take pleasure; without routine, no revelation, no glory in the revealed godhead. In the heat of these summer nights she slept naked, with the window wide open, but first she would take her usual shower and emerge from the tiny bathroom fastening the sash of a towelling bathrobe around her waist. Uneasily, she sat down on the bed and turned her head to look out of the window, staring out into the moon-shadowed darkness as he had done; her bedroom, too, was small, the window a bare three feet from the side of the stripped-down bed, and in the absence of any night breeze it was warm and close; there were tiny drops of moisture at her temples and in the shallow clefts of her collar-bones where they slid under the soft white towelling. Her head was tilted to one side like that of a wary antelope, and as he watched in silence she took a cigarette from the packet on the night table and struck a match to light it, the sharp sputter of the flame illuminating more sharply the line of her brows and the lowered eyes lying deep in their hollowed sockets.

  Political implications. Journalistic rubbish. All burnt, all black and twisted ashes, hers as well as his. She pulls the bathrobe down from her shoulders, lies back on the bed and is motionless, except for the movement of the arm and hand that carries the burning cigarette up to her lips and then lowers it again. A wisp of smoke. What of those other bodies, black and twisted? The law of tyranny? No point in asking such questions. Leave them to the journalists. Alcmena abides no question. No argument asserts my will. Tonight I choose to survey her unknowing nakedness as the falcon in the treetop observes its unknowing prey scuttling through the grasses, and even when she turns her head again on the pillow to stare directly at me, her dark eyes wide open and perplexed, I choose not to reveal myself, though already she feels the sensual warmth reaching out for her, enveloping her like the still heat of the night, disturbing her; she looks out of the window again, then towards the closed door, before raising the cigarette to her mouth again. Smoking in bed. A bad habit.

  ‘There’s someone in the house.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said there’s someone got into the house.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘Well … Please have a look round. Please.’

  ‘But how could anyone have—’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’

  She sat down in the chair and rubbed her bare arms. She wasn’t cold, though. Not cold at all. She was making a fool of herself, she realised that. She heard his footsteps moving to and fro. After a while, he came back.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. What made you think there might be?’ He plumped himself down at his desk again, blowing out his cheeks. ‘Did you hear something?’

  ‘I just had a feeling I was …’ She hesitated. ‘Being watched. Being looked at. It got me worried.’

  ‘Where? In your bedroom?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That isn’t possible.’

  ‘All the same …’

  ‘You’re nervous.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s pretty hot tonight.’

  Nervous. Yes. But he probably meant neurotic. And why not? If she was, it was all his fault. Though she felt irritated at herself as much as at him. Not that the cause of the mood mattered very much. The events of that evening would in themselves account for it, if you wanted to … ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I mean it’s hot but that’s not why I’m nervous.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He looked down at his typewriter, at the ranks of black keys glittering in the lamplight. He spent hours on end looking down at the typewriter. Or gazing at the wall. Never at her.

  ‘There’s something I want to talk to you about. Or rather tell you.’

  ‘All right.’ His tone, exactly as before. ‘Tell me, then.’

  ‘I got myself laid this evening. After you’d gone.’

  ‘Do you have to put it that way?’

  ‘OK.’ He could tell that she was angry. Perhaps that was natural. ‘Phrase it any way you like. It’s not a matter of how I put it, it’s a matter of where someone else has been putting it, if you’d like to get around to thinking about that.’

  ‘It’s not a thing I much like thinking about.’

  ‘I’m afraid you just have to make the effort.’

  ‘Well, when did this …?’

  ‘I told you. Right after you left. And then again on the way back here. Since you ask.’

  He looked at the typewriter. At the eight pages of paper in the wire tray. He knew there were eight pages but he counted them again anyway. In the end he said, ‘You know, it’s really a bit too … On top of the other thing …’

  ‘I’d been seeing him before. As you should have guessed.’

  What she wanted, he thought, was for him to ask questions. But he didn’t intend to. ‘I don’t see how you can put that particular ball in my court and expect me to play it. You know I don’t want a divorce. I’m against divorce.’

  ‘As a matter of principle.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘A pretty convenient principle.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I do. All your principles are convenient. They save you having to face up
to facts.’ She shrugged. ‘I shouldn’t blame you. He’s just the same.’

  … got myself laid. It wasn’t her usual habit to be crude. Verbally crude, anyway. That day’s events had changed her somehow. Words aren’t actions but they echo actions, reflect them like mirrors. ‘Some facts are easier to face than others.’

  ‘It should be easier for you now that you know what they are.’

  ‘Is that why you’ve … told me about it?’

  ‘Of course. Why else?’

  He picked at his fingernail. ‘The trouble is it isn’t a matter of what you know.’

  ‘But of what you feel?’

  ‘Well … That ought to come into it.’

  ‘Certainly it should. And what you feel is nothing very much.’

  ‘Oh, hell, you’ve got to give me a chance. I mean a chance to … get to grips with it, with this and the other business. I need more time …’

  She lay down on the bed again, waiting for him. He watched her as he stood by the wide-open window, the star-hung sky behind him. Gradually he let his brooding presence still the movement of those stars, let the past and future merge with the present, the imperceptible become the infinite. Slowly, he took on imperfection. She had lit yet another cigarette, was blowing smoke whorls towards the ceiling. An amateurish puffer. Nerves on edge.

  Imperfection there, too, of course. How could it be otherwise? She was human. She argued, quarrelled with her husband; already today she had committed adultery, as they called it. Now she was feeling excitement, triumph, guilt, all manner of incomprehensible emotions, raising her head to exhale another thin tendril of smoke, the angled light of the bedside lamp catching the tautened contour of her throat, whiter than snow, smooth as monumental alabaster, and watching her he could at the same time see himself taking shape in the long mirror, head and broad bared shoulders being formed in the dusky lamplight, human, human too. Bone, flesh and blood. Imperfection, yes, but with new possibilities inherent, a future predictable yet still to be built waiting for him there on the bed. What am I making? he thought, staring at the watching mirror-face, darkly, obscurely shadowed; or rather, what is to be made? He could hear as he moved forwards the slow, purposeless tick of the clock on the bedside table; clocks of course would go on though time had stopped; clocks were outside his province. Advancing, he saw himself from another angle, the great brown body vibrant with unearthly power and crouched down like a warrior’s; behind it in the mirror the turned-down bed, the smooth arm and curved fingers that held the spark of the cigarette-glow, the long pearly line of the uplifted neck. And the round clock face. Put out the light, he thought, hide the clock face from view. Lest she suspect. He reached out, pressed the switch. A sudden darkness came. ‘Oh, my God … !’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Of course it’s me.’

  ‘You gave me a fright. I didn’t see you come in.’

  ‘Often the way of it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Leaning over her, over the bed, he tried to match his movements to those of his image in the mirror before remembering that it wasn’t necessary; her huge dark eyes would shine in the lamplight but couldn’t see in the dark and besides (he remembered now) he only did that when trimming his beard, the scissors clicking away between clumsy fingers, eyes half anxiously observing … Absurd, to need a mirror to check on reality, when reality was … was … but he didn’t know what reality was, not any more. He had taken on imperfection. The clock tapped gently in the stillness and the typewriter answered it downstairs with a sharp irregular rattle, softened by distance.

  ‘He’s spaced out again,’ the woman said.

  ‘He’s what?’ He didn’t understand.

  ‘Up on cloud eleven. I tried to talk to him but I don’t think he really understood.’

  What was there to understand? The moonlight dappling the sheets, outlining the long naked body. He reached down for the pillow. Reach me a torch then, let me guide myself down the darker and darker stairs to the other room where the typewriter taps; words words words in spasmodic bursts criss-crossing the metal heartbeat of the clock, tick tick tick. Her hand, too, reaching out and moving across to press the cigarette stub into the centre of the ashtray. ‘What are you …?’ The dark eyes staring up at him as he covered them with the plump white pillow and pressed down upon them with all his weight. No cry, no sound at all, only the thin fingers jerking and plucking desperately at the sheet as the roller spun and the quick black keys rapped out a single space sign:

  #

  and still he sat stooped over the desk, the words spraying swiftly out over the paper in long orgasmic surges, his head lowered in ultimate indifference to the stuttering ripple of sound, the roller sliding back and forth, as out of the words a pattern took shape, a pattern of figures glimpsed as in a darkened mirror, a blue and black mosaic of interlocked shapes … The end as clearly in sight as had been the beginning, becoming actuality as the last lines thrust their way past the narrow channel of the keyboard and out on to the paper, black on a trembling whiteness, and he sat back and lifted his hands from the machine and stared for a while, only for a while, at what he had done. As time returned.

  And he thought, Well, that’s it. It’s finished, and placed one finger back on the keyboard to add the final touch.

  1

  It wasn’t true that after the death of his wife Professor Dobie went completely to pieces. Some of his friends, however, were deeply concerned.

  Among them, the rector of his university.

  ‘Something must be done,’ the Rector said, ‘about that bloody man Dobie. Something, I mean, quite definite must be decided.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Professor Traynor said. ‘However, I’m glad you said definite. Not drastic.’

  Despite the impetuousness of his tone of utterance the Rector was, as Traynor well knew, not in essence a decisive individual. It was simply his habit to address all the problems attendant upon the day-to-day running of a large university – the regrettable moral behaviour of the students, the even more regrettable laxity in the discipline exercised by members of the staff, the state of the drains, the abundance of windblown scrap paper in the carpark in just this way; something had to be done about them. By somebody else. After a full and democratic discussion, naturally.

  Traynor sat back in his chair with a painful wheezing noise, emitted not by him but by the foam-rubber cushion directly beneath him; all the armchairs in the Rector’s office could be relied upon to produce these strange farting sounds at unexpected moments, usually to their occupants’ extreme embarrassment. Not to Traynor’s, however. As Chairman of the Mathematics Department he was a seasoned armchair-sitter and wheeze-provoker. ‘He certainly seems,’ Traynor said, ‘to be temporarily not quite up to the mark.’

  ‘There’s something …’

  ‘… zombie-like …’

  ‘… about his conduct these days …’

  ‘Not, of course, that that would normally excite remark in the circles he frequents. Or be accounted in any way out of the ordinary. Dr Hayling, for instance …’

  ‘Indeed. The original Nightmare on Elm Street in outward guise. Dobie’s not quite as bad as that. The difficulty lies rather in the special circumstances.’

  ‘He’s become something of a celebrity, you might say.’

  ‘And in a most unfortunate way. It’s this combination of the characteristic qualities of Boris Karloff and of Jason Donovan that I find disturbing. Deeply disturbing.’

  Traynor nodded sagely, though both of the names just cited by the Rector were totally unfamiliar to him. He was cognisant, however, of the event which the Rector clearly had in mind and which had occurred only a few days previously. Professor Dobie, according to reports, emerging distraitly from the Senior Staff Room, had then been seized upon by a group of screaming female teenagers and borne forcibly down to the floor, where sundry intimate items of his apparel had been removed (without his consent) and hi
s person subjected to various other unmentionable and unsolicited indignities. The perpetrators of this outrage had not, in fact, been members of the university, but this had not been properly established in the subsequent lurid reports of the incident appearing in the (deservedly) popular press and the Rector had therefore had to deal with numerous irate enquiries emanating from members of the Senate – who after all should have known that full term hadn’t even started yet.

  Nor was this all. Far from it.

  ‘Some modus operandi,’ the Rector said, ‘must be found for suspending him from his teaching duties. Temporarily, of course. Until this present quite extraordinary—’

  ‘Unfortunately he can’t be truthfully said to be performing them inadequately, since he hasn’t actually begun lecturing yet.’

  ‘In times of war,’ the Rector said, ‘truth is the first casualty. And this is war, let’s be in no doubt on that score. With your department in the front line.’

  Traynor elicited another agonised ppf’fffff from the cushion as he leaned forwards to reach for his sherry glass. Some earlier brief exposure to the ethos of a Cambridge common room had induced the Rector somehow to suppose the imbibing of sherry to be an essential concomitant to all civilised and intelligent discourse, such as the one in which he and Traynor were at that moment indulging, the actual quality of the plonk provided being so secondary a consideration as to be deemed irrelevant. This accounted for the strangely withered appearance of the potted plant beside Traynor’s armchair (Dryophilus academicus) which was constantly receiving surreptitious libations from those many of the Rector’s visitors whose throats were not lined with asbestos.

  ‘You speak,’ Traynor said, disposing of the vitriolic liquid with a neat and well-practised jerk of the wrist, ‘metaphorically, I hope.’

  ‘Do you think he murdered his wife?’