The Laughter of Aphrodite

by Peter Green

“Very well.” I was uneasier than I cared to admit.

  Pittacus said: “Politics—especially the kind you’ve got yourself involved in—is a dirty game. Nothing like Homer at all. You may fancy you know the rules; I can assure you you don’t. You’re the lamb that strayed into a forest of wolves, my dear. Go back where you belong, before the wolves get you.”

  “And where do I belong? In the boudoir, I suppose.”

  He sighed. “You’re very like your mother, aren’t you?”

  “I am not.”

  “Well, we won’t argue the point. I’ve said all I can. Think it over.”

  “I don’t need to.” I began to get up, smoothing down my skirt; but before the movement was well completed Pittacus picked up the silver hand-bell on his desk, and rang it, thus suggesting that it was he who had terminated the interview. I stamped my foot in sheer childish vexation, realized—too late—that this was playing straight into his hands, and had recovered some sort of dignity by the time his understeward appeared, with Praxinoa trailing behind him.

  Pittacus said: “This—lady”—the hesitation was only fractional—“is leaving now. Please escort her out.” He watched Praxinoa with frankly sensual appreciation as she folded the light shawl about my shoulders: somehow that irritated me more than anything else.

  I smiled sweetly and said: “I promised to see Chione before I left.” Chione was Pittacus’ wife; she had brought him a very substantial dowry, and everyone said (probably with some justice) that Pittacus had married beneath him for money. Chione, at this time, was in her mid-thirties, an amiable, untidy, large woman with badly bleached hair and a remarkable talent for exotic cookery. Despite myself, I rather liked her. I sometimes wondered how two such improbable parents had produced Andromeda. With Tyrrhaeus, Drom’s younger brother, there was no difficulty or surprise: he was a darker, surlier copy of his father.

  “Please don’t bother to see me out, Theon,” I said to the steward.

  He inclined his head. “As you please, my lady. Was I mistaken, or did the faintest of winks—the merest tremble in one eyelid— change his expression for an instant? “I’ll tell the mistress you’re coming through, then.”

  “Yes,” said Pittacus good-humouredly, “do that.’ He seemed suddenly a mischievous schoolboy, bubbling over with secret enjoyment: only his eyes remained cool and watchful, and it struck me then just how formidable an enemy he would make if the occasion ever arose.

  On my way out, feeling cross and distracted, I nearly ran into a man in the lobby: a tall, sallow, overdressed dandy with lank black curls and too many rings. He had hot black eyes and smelt of stale perfume. His name was Deinomenes, and he was a former member of the Council of Nobles, where he had not been at all popular.

  “Sappho, my dear,” he said, and I felt the pressure of his fingers on my shoulder, the quick slide and shift. “A fortunate meeting.” The black eyes flickered in furtive lubricity. “Pittacus is a lucky fellow.”

  The implication infuriated me more than anything else could have done. I drew myself away sharply, inclined my head.

  “Please excuse me, my lord Deinomenes. I am late already. I have no time for idle gossip.”

  He laughed, unruffled.

  “They’re always in a hurry afterwards.”

  “I bow to your experience, my lord,” I said, and swept away down the lobby, with a crisp and satisfying rustle of skirts. I could feel those lecherous eyes following me. Then he turned, raised one hand in casual farewell, and walked through the archway towards Pittacus’ private quarters. I remember thinking, in mingled irritation and amusement, what an unlikely pair of fellow-conspirators we made.

  I took my troubles to Alcaeus, and got, as I might have expected, very little sympathy. The poetry lessons envisaged by my mother had by now become an established routine; except that they could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called lessons, and more often than not had little to do with poetry. We sat together in the family library, where—as my supposed mentor put it—we had literary slingshot available to hurl at one another’s heads when the need arose. To my annoyance, Alcaeus proved quite horribly well-read; I had somehow taken it for granted that a young man with such irritating mannerisms must also be a pretentious ignoramus. Dispelling this illusion he found intensely enjoyable—so enjoyable, indeed, that he spun the process out as long as he possibly could. Praxinoa and one of the house-slaves sat in a corner during these sessions, spinning wool, whispering together, unnecessary chaperones.

  The room, like most rooms in that ancient, tradition-soaked, lovingly cared for house, generated a curious atmosphere of assurance and tranquillity. It smelt of wax and dust and leather, of oiled cedar-wood and dry aromatic herbs. Heavy faded tapestries hung above the bookshelves, and yellowing busts of Alcaeus’ ancestors glowered down in apparent disapproval at this eccentric—not to say degenerate—growth that had suddenly sprouted from so distinguished a family tree.

  I told him the gist of my conversation with Pittacus. He listened without comment, heavy eyebrows drawn together, fingers interlaced. I found myself staring at the thick black hairs that flecked the backs of his hands, and became thicker still along his dark, meaty forearms, so that you could see the way they lay all in one direction, like an animal’s pelt.

  When I had finished he said nothing. The frown deepened; his eyes were on the worn black-and-white pattern of the marble floor, but he seemed to be looking clean through it.

  “Well?” I asked a little sharply.

  “Well what?”

  “How can a man in his position think as he does. Why?”

  Alcaeus leaned back in his chair. With slow deliberation he picked up the wine-jug and poured us each a cup; frowning, and as though his life depended on it, he peeled and quartered an apple from the waxed ivy-wood bowl with a small silver fruit-knife.

  At last he said: “So all conspirators—please correct me if I misunderstand you—are united in a common cause?”

  I flushed. Not for the first time, Alcaeus had succeeded, with one neat stroke, in knocking a flawed cornerstone from the edifice of my assumptions. The moment the words were out I saw this; and Alcaeus saw that I saw. He sighed, and went on: “Because all of us are involved in a plot to overthrow the regime, you suppose we must all be doing so for the same reason—the virtuous, noble, moral reason with which we justify our actions.”

  “What other reason can there be?”

  He appraised me again.

  “You really believe it: how strange.” With unexpected gentleness he laid one hand on my arm for a moment.

  “You must try to understand, Sappho,” he said. “If a cause is worth fighting for, worth achieving, it makes no difference that the means employed are disreputable, that the conspirators involved are shabby, self-seeking rogues. What matters ultimately is achievement.”

  “You’re wrong, wrong,” I cried. “You can’t build a fine house on rotten foundations—”

  “But if there’s no alternative—”

  “The house will fall.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then, surprisingly, Alcaeus nodded. “Just so,” he said. “Just so.”

  “So you agree with me after all,” I said.

  “No.”

  “But what Pittacus told me—”

  “That,” he said, “is another thing again.”

  “It worries you. I can see it worries you.”

  “Oh yes. It worries me. As you know, I’ve always had a lively regard for my own skin. I prefer it intact.” The corners of his bearded mouth turned down: he gave a savage little smile.

  “Then why—”

  Alcaeus drank his wine at a single gulp and poured out some more. He suddenly looked bored past belief. “It was good advice,” he said. “Take it.”

  “Don’t treat me like a child—”

  “It’s appropriate, I think.”

  My hands clenched and shook: I wanted to claw his face to ribbons

  and was astonished at my own violen
ce.

  Raging, I said: “I’d rather be innocent, and a child, than what you are.”

  He grinned. Don’t tell me; I know. A drunkard, a coward, a lecher—”

  “No,” I said, in a breathless voice. “A joke. A sport. Pathetic. Sterile.”

  Alcaeus eyed me with glinting malice.

  “What an amusing notion,” he said. “And coming from you, of all people.”

  “Oh?”

  “A certain ironic inappropriateness, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  His eyes searched me, incredulously at first, then in frank astonishment.

  “I don’t believe you do,” he said. “I really don’t believe you do.” He gave an unpleasant little laugh. “If you want enlightenment on the subject, you might try asking that leggy green-eyed sweetheart of yours—does she still climb trees, by the way?—or your so-devoted cousin. Or—” and he glanced down the library to where Praxinoa stood, big-bodied, impassive, her black hair glinting in a shaft of sunlight.

  I shook my head, uneasy, irritated, anxious only to get away.

  “We mustn’t lose touch,” Alcaeus said at the door, silky malice edging his voice. “We have so much in common, you and I.”

  That year spring came suddenly, like the opening of a door. One day the sky was heavy with piled clouds, and cold winds blew, scattering the early blossom: the next, we walked abroad in a dazzle of sunlight, the air was all gold and bird song, the stones came warm under our fingers. The swallows returned, as though their bickering conversation had only been interrupted for a few moments, looping and diving round the familiar landmarks—carob-tree, barn, southern-facing garden wall—waking us early with their plectral trill and a black shudder of wings under the eaves. Small green lizards stalked warily up the cracked, mossy stones of the cistern, watching, blinking, as the first mayflies skimmed deliriously across the water. Butterflies scribbled their brilliant-coloured signatures in the dancing air, and the silver-skeletal winter fig-trees groped sunwards with new, quickening fingers.

  Blue haze smoked the headlands, the pine-forests turned a deeper green between shadow and sunlight: when you walked there, on the dry fallen needles, you could smell resin in the air like wine. Now fishing-nets were brought out, fresh-tarred for the spring season, boats came creaking down from the slips, the first big merchantmen were warped out through the narrow channel and set sail for Egypt or the Black Sea. After that long winter, life began again, sweeter and richer than one could have dreamed, Persephone returning in triumph to her flowery meadows.

  Light filters through the treetops, high above my head, a pricking, refulgent scatter of gold-dust. I am lying on my back, knees a little drawn up, head pillowed on my hands. Somewhere a wood-pigeon is calling—that soft, sentimental, endless coo—and far off in the wood I can hear girls’ voices: Telesippa’s, Meg’s, Gorgo’s, excited, full of laughter, yet remote as the voices one hears in half-waking dreams.

  Andromeda is stretched out beside me, “half-raised on one elbow, watching the play of sunlight across my face. Her own features are half-shadowed: I can only guess at her expression. The white linen dress she wears is smeared with tree-mould, and has rucked right up above her knee, exposing a long, brown, surprisingly muscular leg. We are lying in a natural hollow, three sides of which are surrounded by a spinney. My heart is thudding so hard against my ribs that I feel certain Andromeda must be able to hear it too. But she gives no sign; just lies there chewing a piece of grass, her eyes always on me.

  “Well,” she says at last, in that low-pitched, mocking voice of hers, “here we are.”

  “Yes.”

  What can I say to her? And what is it I feel when she walks into a room, with that awkward, boyish, striding gait?

  Achilles on Scyros.

  Her eyes search mine: I catch a glint of secret amusement in them, and something else, something very near contempt.

  “Do I bore you terribly, Sappho?” she asks.

  “How can you think that—?”

  “We have so little in common.”

  “Do we?”

  “Tell me one thing.”

  Silence.

  “You see?”

  The wood-pigeon coos and chars overhead. It suddenly occurs to me, with the force of a revelation, that Andromeda might be right. This idea ought to distress me: instead, unexpectedly, it makes me want to giggle. I get up, brushing twigs and dead leaves from my dress.

  “Let’s go and find the others, then.”

  “Sappho—don’t be hurt.”

  “I’m not hurt. If you only knew—”

  She hesitates a moment; lays one brown hand on my arm. The forest is suddenly very still.

  “We may never get another chance,” she says.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will. Oh, you will.”

  The shutters stood wide open: moonlight silvered the bay below and cast soft, chequered shadows across the sleeping city. Lampflames flickered in the night-breeze, and from the cistern a solitary bull-frog complained, with testy monotony, to the unlistening stars. Everything was still, familiar, folded in peace: the dimly outlined carob-tree, the rucked and angled rooftops stretching down to the harbour, the courtyard, the crumbling garden wall. It seemed impossible that in a quiet myrtle-grove, less than a mile away, men were, at this very moment, preparing to kill or be killed: for their ideals, their ambitions, or other reasons best not thought about. Well, I thought, they have a good night for it; and my fingers pressed hard into the woodwork of the shutter, as though I needed physical proof of my own existence, in the here-and-now that embraced this still moonlight, that unimaginable silent violence.

  Aunt Helen sat beside the hearth, in her favourite high-backed chair, her face half-shadowed, the fine planes of jaw and cheekbone thrown into startling high relief. She was so still she might have been carved from ivory. My mother, in contrast, was as restless as a caged beast: she paced to and fro, taut with impatience, occasionally pausing and staring out into the courtyard.

  “Past midnight,” she said.

  Aunt Helen tapped on the arm of her chair: a tiny, impatient gesture I knew all too well. She said: “There’s nothing any of us can do. Except wait.”

  They will all be assembled now, I thought: Pittacus, Phania’s, Deinomenes, Alcaeus, Antimenidas and the rest of them, shadows moving through blacker shadows under the moon, whispering to each other in the sweet-smelling darkness. The arms are cached there for them, oiled and wrapped in linen, buried, marked, waiting. Ready to strike. Then, over the blackness of the wall beyond the carob-tree, a humped shadow rose, wavered for a moment, vanished again. I heard a soft slither and thud as someone dropped to the ground, the sound of panting breath. The watch-dog stirred in its kennel, growled, woke. There was a sharp rattle as it sprang to the end of its chain and began to bark. Then, quietly but with urgency, a familiar voice called: “For heaven’s sake, somebody strangle that damned dog—” and terror gave way to near-hysterical relief.

  “Antimenidas,” I said.

  He came swiftly across the courtyard and in through the open doorway, stepping between us and the moon, his great black cloak like a pall. Sweat glinted on his face, and his chest was heaving. Even in the reddish glow of the lamp-light he looked tallowy-pale. His hand clenched on his sword-hilt: he looked round at each of us in turn. For a moment no one spoke. Then my mother said “Well?” in a kind of nervous bark, and Antimenidas’ restless eyes settled on her. There was angry compassion in his voice as he said: “It’s over. Finished before it ever began. I should have known.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s betrayed us, sold us. The pot-bellied old fox.”

  “Pittacus?” My mother’s voice scooped up in angry incredulity. I glanced at Aunt Helen, who was nodding slowly to herself.

  “Yes: Pittacus. He’s gone over to Myrsilus—he and that time-server Deinomenes together.”

  “You’re lying,” said my mother, a
nd it was as though the words were directed at me.

  “No, Lady Cleïs, I’m not lying. I only wish I were.”

  “He might have been held up—” My mother’s voice lacked conviction.

  Antimenidas said, wearily: “Pittacus is never late—least of all when his life depends on punctuality.”

  Aunt Helen said: “Of course you’re right. It’s just what he’d do.”

  I thought of Phrynon, trussed and tangled in a fisherman’s net between two armies; I remembered the words scrawled on a note from the Troad: “I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that Thersites was the only sensible person in the Iliad.” I heard that humorous, faintly burred voice remark: “You can’t eat honour, and the world has changed quite a lot since they buried Achilles.”

  “Yes,” I said in a small voice, “yes, it’s just what he’d do.”

  Aunt Helen looked at me sharply: for a moment there was perfect understanding between us.

  Antimenidas said: “If I know Pittacus, we’ve got till daylight to get out of Mytilene. The last thing he wants at the moment is the embarrassment of having to deal with his—late fellow-conspirators, shall we say? Myrsilus would insist on having the lot of us executed— except for little Sappho here, perhaps”—he flashed me a cheerful grin—“and that would leave Pittacus looking very shabby indeed. But if we’re still in town tomorrow, he’s no alternative. I don’t propose to let myself be crucified just for the pleasure of reducing his popularity.”

  “Most commendable of you,” murmured Aunt Helen.

  “My impetuous brother, I may say, wanted to attack, regardless—which was just what Myrsilus hoped might happen. He’d have had the perfect excuse for a mass execution—with Pittacus sitting by, stroking his beard and looking judicial.”

  “Alcaeus?” I exclaimed. This surprised me more than anything.

  “Poets,” said Antimenidas, “are not renowned for their consistency of behaviour—even when it comes to a fight.”

  My mother said, in a hopeless, defeated voice: “But why? Why?” No one answered her. There was a moment’s awkward silence.

  Then Antimenidas cleared his throat and said: “We have good friends at Pyrrha, Lady Cleïs. The guards at the north-west postern will let you through. A carriage and horses are waiting at the Three Mules Tavern, on the Pyrrha road. But there’s no time to lose.”