by Olivia Fane
Simon, now donning a black leather jacket, held out his hand and grinned.
‘Hi,’ he said, ‘Sam’s told me a lot about you.’
‘I can’t think why,’ said Dr Marius diffidently.
‘She likes you,’ said Simon, raising his eyebrows to make the point.
Dr Marius smiled absently and looked at his watch. ‘It’s late,’ he said.
‘It’s not late!’ insisted Samantha, ‘Why don’t you come to the pub with Simon and me? It would do you good to stay up once in a while.’
Dr Marius surveyed her quizzically. ‘I’m going home,’ he said, ‘and goodbye, Simon. You’re a good actor.’
So Simon and Samantha went to The Red Cow without Dr Marius and perched on red velvet stools. It was almost closing time, and the place was packed; but Simon and Samantha had made an island of themselves by facing each other and entwining their knees, and talking loudly into each others’ ears
‘The trouble is,’ Samantha was saying, ‘he’s so repressed! Do you know that story about the girl who couldn’t cry until she was given a bag of onions?’
‘So you’re a bag of onions now?’
‘In a manner of speaking. I might be the catalyst he’s been looking for all his life. I’m a damn good lover, you know.’ Samantha caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind the bar, and smiled. ‘I only want to make him happy! I’m a good soul. Sometimes to seduce someone is the kindest thing you can do.’
‘I’d call him a very lucky man,’ whispered Simon, putting a tongue in her ear.
‘How would you know? You’re gay!’ giggled Samantha.
‘Ninety-nine percent gay and one per cent for you.’
‘Honestly, Simon, you flatter me!’
‘Have you ever considered that Marius might be gay?’
Samantha suddenly sat up and was serious. ‘You don’t think he is, do you? How can you tell? You can tell, can’t you?’
‘Relax, Sam. What does “gay” mean, anyway? If you ask me, “gay” is such a weak word. We’re all gay, none of us are gay, so fucking what. We all like being rubbed up in the right way, at the right time, by the right person. How do you like being rubbed up?’ Simon leant forward and their interlocking knees became interlocking thighs. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘You are enchantingly naïve.’
Samantha wriggled and jiggled on her stool. The bartender told them to move on, but they ignored him.
‘No one has ever called me that before,’ she said, rising to the challenge. ‘De-naïve me, Simon.’
‘I will,’ Simon said, obligingly. Your place or mine?’
‘So what kind of justice was it that Sophocles believed in?’ mused Thomas Marius as he bicycled home to Coleridge Road, the wind whistling through his thin jumper. ‘Are us moderns right to distinguish conscious from unconscious guilt? A driver who is distracted for a moment as he watches the first swallows of spring, and runs over a child who has darted across the road: what punishment do we give him? Are we any more advanced now in our own system of justice? Would Sophocles have cursed him? Of course he would, and rightly so: the man has no piety, in the classical sense, no god-given grace. Or perhaps the man was already cursed, for sins of another generation and another story.’
Eventually Marius arrived at number eighty-three, and his frozen fingers attempted to un-numb themselves while he fumbled with the lock for his bike and the keys of his front door. He was pleased to see that his lodger, a post-graduate engineering student called Greg, had gone to bed; and in celebration of his privacy he switched on the gas fire in his sitting-room and poured himself a glass of red wine.
He crouched down by the fire and warmed his hands. ‘The problem is,’ he considered, ‘despite forever claiming otherwise, we’re all closet dualists. We’ve divided ourselves up into a mind that’s too clever, too ready to make excuses for itself, and a body which never lies, all innocent: it’s hungry, so it eats; it wants sex, so it seeks it – how pure, they say, no double-talk here, the body can get away with anything. But it shouldn’t be able to. Even in its innocence, in its inability to speak for itself, it is surely capable of being defiled, and of defiling – “am I all impure?” Now when does Oedipus say that? When he suspects the truth about himself… let me see if I can find the words in the original Greek…’
Thomas left the warmth of the fire to go upstairs to his study, the third bedroom on the top floor of his Victorian terraced house. He scanned his bookshelves for the relevant Oxford classical text, and found it with ease, abundant with pencil-written notes he’d written in the margins when he was an undergraduate. It took him barely a minute to find the appropriate line, and then he mulled over the use of the word ‘anagnos’ – ‘impure’ and ‘unholy’ are the same in Oedipus’ mind, and yes, it’s true, he is unholy. There’s no modern weight given to human responsibility, it doesn’t matter that he’s unconscious of his guilt. Blessed, unblessed, who are we to say who is or who isn’t? It’s for the Gods to decide.
Then Thomas hurried to the Chorus to look for more evidence, and found it, even a monotheistic reference to ‘Our only father Olympus in Heaven’ and the ‘laws’ which were ‘made in Heaven’. Just about the same time as Moses was writing down the Ten Commandments on stone tablets on Mount Sinai, the Greeks understood and paid heed to laws which were never written down, but intuitively apprehended. And isn’t that what human beings are always seeking, truths which are universal? And aren’t the Greeks right to suggest such laws are agraptos – unwritten and unwritable? For no culture has better understood that truth cannot be categorized, only recognized. Blessed, unblessed, clean, unclean: today we don’t want any of that. Holy, unholy: it doesn’t make sense to us. Today we have one unwritten law: everything is permitted provided no one gets hurt. But why are we so arrogant that we think we know what ‘hurt’ means? The Greeks were more subtle than we are. They understood that being moral and simply being didn’t present an insoluble philosophical conundrum, but were two sides of the same coin. Their concept of miasma, the seeping pollution which accrues when wrong has been done and hubris festers, where there is nothing blessed and dark shadows lie hidden from the Gods, is an ontological and not a moral thesis.
And while Simon’s pulse raced and Samantha was crying ‘mercy’ into her pillow, so did Thomas Marius’ when he found notes he had written in the margins of the Greek text. ‘Family curse’, he read, ‘What about Laius?’ Oedipus’ father, the innocent victim of his own unblessedness, destined to be murdered by his own son. Sophocles doesn’t mention the fact that Laius himself was guilty of kidnapping a beautiful young boy called Chrysippus and taking him to Thebes. Laius set eyes on Chrysippus at Pelops’ house and fell in love with him – this was another Zeus and Ganymede story – and Pelops cursed him. Chrysippus ends up killing himself. Would Sophocles’ audience have been aware of the story? If they had been, modern order is restored, Oedipus becomes a mere crime and punishment story, albeit not his own. But why do human beings need that sense of order? Why are we always looking for cause and effect, cause and effect, as though that was the only way of looking at the world? Why do we limit our Christian God to the role of meting out justice, to being a shadow of us, rather than admit to ourselves that we are a mere shadow of Him?
We have turned ourselves into a race of terrifying free agents, responsible for everything we do, everything depending on our own free actions; but what about fate? What about providence? Would it not be more religious to say that Oedipus was simply unlucky, than that he was living out a family curse which was deserved?
And on that passionate note (while strawberry gel and bodily fluids were drenching Samantha’s thighs, and metal handcuffs were digging into both her wrists and ankles) Thomas Marius looked at his watch and saw it was already almost one in the morning. He went down to the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea and a hot water bottle, and took himself off to bed.
It would be fair to say that Dr Marius didn’t like his house; or at least, house-ownersh
ip didn’t mean a great deal to him, and seemed to bring more bother than pleasure. When he had decided that it was time to move out of college, it had been because college life was beginning to oppress him: being continually cajoled into formal functions in which he had no interest, and being too easily accessible to anyone needing his help, academic or otherwise. But the last straw had been a Girton girl in the Spring term of 1994 who used to come round almost every evening looking all starry-eyed to ask about this or that reference, or an obscure poet she had suddenly learnt the name of. Finally the girl, whose name was Annabel, had had the courage (or desperation) to ask Dr Marius to have dinner with her, and because Dr Marius was a decent sort who didn’t wish to offend, he’d reluctantly agreed.
That fateful night: his cheeks burned whenever he remembered it, the girl sitting opposite him in a dress which seemed to raise her breasts up to her neck, defiant of gravity. And when she confessed her love for him, only huge self-discipline had kept him from leaping up and leaving the restaurant for air.
‘It’s not right,’ he had said meekly.
It did no good. On and on she had whinnied, she had given him her whole life’s story, her misspent youth, her parents who had never understood her, and a catalogue of her physical desires: and all the while he could only think how much happier he’d be if he was a beetle lying on its back, or the moth blackening its wings with the soot of the candle on their table – anything, anything would be preferable to sitting here with Annabel, eating zabaglione with a long-handled spoon and watching her licking her own in a hideously suggestive fashion.
He’d left Annabel in the market square and told her he still had some marking to do that night. And in fact, that was the last he ever saw of her: in her humiliation she persuaded her Director of Studies to find her another supervisor in Peterhouse. But her legacy was to make Dr Marius realise that he was becoming claustrophobic living in his college rooms, beautiful though they were, and that the time had come for him to move out.
Number eighty-three Coleridge Road was the first house he had looked round. After all, what could one expect of a house besides its having four strong walls and a roof? He neither noticed the avocado wood-chip wallpaper, nor the brown, nylon carpets or the dingy kitchen; and when he moved in he continued not to notice them, and four years later when the condition of the house was even worse he never understood that it was within his power to do something about it. The best he managed was the self-reproachful question, ‘Was I right to move here?’
Then one night during an Autumn storm in 1996, while Marius was in bed with a cup of tea and his copy of Herodotus, he noticed that water was dripping through his ceiling onto his quilt. So he moved his bed by a couple of feet, put a bucket on the floor to catch it, and resumed reading. It wasn’t until the morning that he understood the full significance of two pints of rainwater: the plumber he’d called told him he was going to need a new roof.
And now poor Dr Thomas Marius was going to have to re-mortgage his house and find a lodger. He went to the University Lodgings syndicate and was introduced to Greg, a post-graduate student in engineering. He didn’t much warm to Greg, who was small, with glasses and mousy, wispy hair, and was deadly, deadly silent; but he had no choice in the matter, and Greg moved into his spare bedroom.
That first breakfast they had together: Thomas had laid the cereals out on the table and put into operation for the first time a cafetiére that his mother had given him for Christmas.
‘Would you like a boiled egg, Greg?’ he asked him, and in the dreadful realisation that ‘egg’ rhymed with ‘Greg’, he turned his back and began fiddling with the toaster.
‘No thanks,’ said Greg.
‘I always like an egg,’ mumbled Thomas, which was a lie.
When there’s no conversation at breakfast one is perhaps too aware of the noise of food rolling around the mouth. And if on that first morning it was a little embarrassing, to the extent that Thomas tried to modulate the movements of his own mouth (in the vain hope of leading by example), on subsequent mornings Thomas’ sensibilities were being tested a full ten minutes before the very first cornflake was being scrunched up against Greg’s palate. In addition to which, Greg had taken to eating yoghurt. Within four days of his arrival, he had taken over a shelf of Thomas’ fridge with twenty-eight pots of Eden Vale’s natural yoghurt; and when Greg had finished his cornflakes he would put his bowl to one side and begin a ritual which would ruthlessly hold Thomas’ attention until its perfect completion.
First, Greg would remove the foil lid in one piece: though never in a thousand breakfasts was Thomas ever to witness it tear, each morning it seemed to present a new challenge to Greg. Then, carefully laying the lid face up on the table, he would take his teaspoon and scrape off the thick layer of yoghurt in exactly five successive strokes, each time his tongue hovering beneath the upturned spoon in piquant ecstasy. Next, he would make a well in the centre of the pot and fill it with two dessert spoons of granulated sugar, and Thomas would watch the sugar mountain subside bit by bit, mixing firstly with the yoghurt in the pot, and then with the yogurt already moving around inside his mouth. Finally, Greg would fold the foil lid into four, put it into the empty pot, and get up from the table.
Even on the sixtieth occasion Thomas was mesmerized by the accuracy of Greg’s breakfast performance, even on the hundred and sixtieth occasion, but after Greg had been living with him for nine months there was another distraction. Her name was Cilla.
And, quite fittingly, it was breakfast when he first met her.
‘Hello, my name’s Cilla. I hope you don’t mind me staying sometimes,’ she enthused, grinning wildly at Greg. ‘Would it be all right if I called you “Tom”?’
Now, no one had ever called Thomas Marius ‘Tom’, at least, not since he was ten years old. But that wasn’t why his jaw dropped now, nor did it drop because she was evidently a pretty, sweet thing somehow lured into Greg’s lumbering embrace. No, what astonished him was her name. For in his time he had met two Camillas (both rather aptly named, he thought, fighting Aeneas with Amazonian courage and one breast bared); an Athene (and why not call your daughter after the goddess of wisdom?); a Clio (muse of history, quite inspiring); a Thalia (muse of laughter and good cheer, a blessing, surely); and even a Calypso (whose sexual charms arrested Odysseus for seven years.) But what could Cilla’s parents have been thinking of? Perhaps they were thinking of Scylla before Circe cast a spell on her and gave her six heads with three rows of teeth in each. Scylla, beloved of Glaucus, one of the deities of the sea…
‘Or I could always call you “Dr Marius”?’ Cilla giggled nervously. The expression on her host’s face was unfathomable, and he didn’t answer her.
‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘this place could really do with a lick of paint to cheer it up a little. I’ve had a bit of training in colour, you know, I’m a beautician. I’ve quite an eye, so they tell me. I’ll be bold. I want to paint Greg’s bedroom coral blush.’
Dr Marius was still one conversation in arrears. ‘No, don’t call me “Tom”. I wouldn’t know who I was.’ And then, he added tactfully, ‘What would you like me to call you? Have you got a nickname or something?’
Cilla giggled again. ‘Greg calls me “Cill”,’ she said.
‘Right then,’ said Thomas, ‘I’ll call you “Sill” too.’ He was oblivious to Greg’s stony stare, and thought only how much better to be reminded of windows.
‘And the spot of decorating?’
‘What?’
‘What I mentioned, getting this house in a bit of order.’
‘Oh yes, yes,’ said Thomas, vacantly. ‘Go ahead, by all means.’
And before his very eyes Thomas Marius watched his house become coral blush, orange pekoe and lime green: only his bedroom and his study were impervious to Cilla’s promiscuous paintbrush, remaining stalwart behind their avocado woodchip wallpaper.
‘What a good job you’ve done, Sill,’ Thomas would tell her when he was shown
yet another transformed room, and Cilla would grin, chest out, hands behind her back, and say, ‘It was nothing, Tom, honestly. You know, I could always do your bedroom, too…’
‘No, no, thank you. I’m quite happy.’
And by day, at least, Thomas was quite happy. Cilla was always smiling, always ready to oblige; and sometimes when Greg was at an evening seminar and Cilla was back from her beauty parlour, she would make Thomas a cup of tea and bring it to his study.
‘Come in, Sill, haven’t you brought a cup of tea for yourself?’
‘Well, I thought you’d be working.’
‘You get yourself a cup. Come and talk to me.’
And that was, for Thomas, a rather pleasurable twenty minutes of the day, when Cilla would tell him about her father and his father before him who’d both been train drivers, and she promised that one day she’d bring in the family photograph album because the early photos, what with the steam and that, were something else. Occasionally Cilla even tried to regale him with stories from her parlour, about eyebrows and waxing and hairy moles, but she could see from Thomas’ grimaces that these didn’t go down well, and being a sensitive sort she kept them for Greg. Meanwhile, Thomas was always trying to switch the subject to Greek mythology, telling Cilla all about the voyages of Odysseus, which was as close as he ever got to a direct question about Cilla’s peculiar name. She never rose to the bait, of course, but enjoyed the myths and would tell Greg when they were snuggled up in bed together, ‘Your landlord is so eccentric, but I do like him.’
Then Cilla began to cook for her man, and the invasion of Thomas’ fridge continued apace: hamburgers, sausages and bacon appeared on another shelf, and tins of tuna and sardines were piled high in his kitchen cupboard. Thomas soon got into the habit of going back to college for his supper, and when he returned home at ten o’clock he was greeted with wafts of Greg’s fishy breath. But for some reason this only became truly offensive at the thought of that lovely girl suffering it as well.
