The Revolt of Aphrodite

by Lawrence Durrell

  “You must ask Julian.”

  Later, of course, I did. He said something like: “You know most questions become more macro or micro, more Copernican or Ptolemaic: they don’t stay still, the pendulum is always on the move. They change as you watch. And always the answer proposed, particularly by an organisation like the firm, is provisional, short-term. We have to accept that.” There was an overwhelming sadness in his voice. I was so touched by his sadness that I almost had a lump in my throat.

  “Questions and answers” said she with bitterness. “How should I explain you loving Benedicta Merlin?”

  “Easy. It was like breathing in.”

  “And now?”

  “Exactly. I am all confused.”

  She gave a cruel little laugh. “Ah wait” I said reproachfully. “It still goes, on my side.”

  “No woman can stand her” she said. “You know that.”

  Of course I knew that. It wasn’t easy to explain the sort of mesmeric influence Benedicta exercised over her witless scientist. “A form of hysteria I suppose; in the Middle Ages it would have been classified as possession.”

  “They say that the firm has her regularly burgled in order to offset her tremendous expenditure against insurance!”

  “Malice” I said.

  “Very well, malice.”

  There was a ring at the door; I had ordered her a taxi, and now slowly and reluctantly I helped her hobble to it. She turned in the street and said: “Shall we tomorrow afternoon? Please.”

  “Of course we shall.” She meant the film of Iolanthe. Away she rolled with a wave of a white glove and a tremulous smile.

  All at once the house seemed very old and damnably musty, like some abandoned tomb which the grave-robbers had not spared. I got out one of the firm’s calendars—huge meretricious pictures of colonial landscapes—and marked off the days to Xmas. I supposed I should have to make some preparations to receive her. Or should I just leave it to chance, let her walk back naturally into the circle of our common life if you could call it that like one who had only left the room for a few moments? I wondered. I wondered.

  But the pilgrimage to the shrines of the love goddess intervened among these preoccupations—poor Hippolyta’s week of self-torture and admiration; riding to suburban cinemas in Finchley and Willesden where the sacred mask was being exhibited in a series of hieratic roles which, superposed at such speed one upon the other, and with such variety of age, situation, landscape, hypnotised me hardly less absolutely. Sitting in musty seats, inhaling dusty floors whose peanut shells crackled under foot: in afternoon flea-pits, holding the white glove of Hippo and watching, heart in mouth—well no, I couldn’t any longer use the prop of her name as a memory-aid. Iolanthe had slipped away, far beyond me now, out of sight of Number Seven, of Athens, the Nube. She brought to this new silver life a gravity, authority, distinction, even a tender mischievousness which bewitched; she had refined her potential for gesture and expression in some radical fashion. No. No. This creature I did not know at all. I whispered her name once or twice, but it raised no echo. And yet it was with real concern for her true self that I watched this mammoth distortion of Iolanthe into a world-fetich. (Hippo gasping after some great scene, saying “marvellous”, touched to the quick.) But my goodness, the responsibility she had taken upon herself was frightening. She lived by the terms of this mock-art, lived a travesty of a life passed in public: as much a prisoner of her image as any of us to the firm. She couldn’t walk down a street to post a letter unless she was disguised. I saw in the flash the sad trajectory of her new life, the life of a priestess, with a clarity that no further information could ever qualify. It was all there, so to speak. Even what she told me herself afterwards added only detail—even the worst things, like having to dress up and “really act” when she wanted to be alone, out of the glare of the following pressmen. For example, even to visit their securities in the bank vaults twice a year—a ritual the husband insisted upon: it lulled his sense of insecurity. Then about how one day the child gets locked in a safe, suffocated, brought out dead—all that stuff; and running down the street from the hospital in tears there comes a snap from a street-photographer and a tendered card. “Your picture, lady?” He did not notice the tears under the dark glasses. Well and then pacing a long low-ceilinged room with her new camera-shy walk, so painfully learned from a ballerina, she says piteously: “Why should I not love this life, Felix? It’s the only real life I have known.”

  Indeed. And then Hippo saying savagely: “If it were an art-form she would be really great. Thank God it isn’t. I should be even more angry.”

  “How can we know?”

  “Why it’s aimed at the mob.”

  “And?”

  “And!”

  Then later over repulsive tea and buttered toast in some small café she explained in more detail. “You see, the majority must always be denied the higher pleasures like art etc. which in our age it feels entitled to. It’s not a matter of privilege, my dear. Just as literacy doesn’t confer the ability to really read—so biologically the many are unfitted for the rarest pleasures which are travestied by Iolanthe; love-making, art, theology, science—they each contain whole lives, silver lives, encapsulated in a form. They exist for the maker and his few subjects. She exists for everyone. When we speak of the destruction of an ethos or a civilisation we are describing the effect on it of the mob-discovery of it. The mob wants it, but it must be made palatable. Naturally the efficacy becomes diluted. There you have Iolanthe.”

  I was not sure at all about this. I had spilt butter on my tie. But inside I simply ached with vexation at never having met Iolanthe.

  But there was no news until the day before Christmas when Nash rang up very chirpy. “Well, here she is at last” he said with his false-sounding heartiness. “All safe and sound.”

  Flowers! In my benign way I had always thought of her returning to Mount Street; but Nash dispelled the illusion. “No, she’s in the country. She wants you to bring Baynes down to her if you will—you will go down this evening won’t you?” I said I would, though I had to disguise a distinct pique that Benedicta had neither bothered to inform me of her arrival before the event—nor telephoned me to tell me of her whereabouts. However I swallowed the toad-like thought as best I could, and went out to buy such presents as might be deemed suitable to the season. It was sleeting, the taxi-driver was kindly garrulous; there was, as usual, nothing that I could give Benedicta, for she had everything—nothing, that is, of any real value or worth; things such as paintings or books would not have felt to her like presents. It was going to be an unbridled yuletide. The shops were all lighted up with a ghastly artificial array of colours and forms which signal the triumphs of commerce over religion. Loudspeakers everywhere were playing “Silent Night”, pouring the spirit of the Christchild over everything with this amplified crooning of organs and xylophones: into the frosty streets with their purple-nosed crowds of milling hierophants, busy buying tokens of the miracle—poor pink-witted, tallow-scraping socialist mobs. It was cold. It was biting cold. I was angry. The latest jazz hit sawed at the frosty air, with its oft-repeated refrain:

  She’s as sweet as a tenderised steak

  And I’ll conquer the world for her sake.

  In all this tremendous tintinnabulation Charlock walks, the “self-inflicted man” of Koepgen’s fable, wondering what he might buy as an offering to the season. There’s something wrong about a philosophy which doesn’t offer the hope of certain happiness. Despite man’s estate (tragic?) there should be at least a near-guarantee of happiness to be dug out of the air around us. In Selfridges the air hovered and lapped us, impregnated with the heat of our bodies and breath. Pressed in sardine fashion on all sides I let myself drift slowly down the carpeted streams. Our predispositions reveal themselves very accurately in our moeurs. Never mind. I bought some expensive gifts and had them elegantly wrapped; then swollen with these acquisitions waddled back to the doors like a woman at term, c
rushing up my paper as I went. The crowds milled and swirled. “Freed from the economic whip, we will not steer your bloody ship.” Nor could I find another taxi. I had to walk almost all the way back to the office where the duty car was waiting for me. At Mount Street Baynes was waiting, he had already packed for me. I looked around to see if anything had been overlooked, gasping a bit, like a goldfish fallen out of its bowl on to the carpet.

  But by now, with the falling evening temperatures everything had become stringently real—for heavy creamy snow was falling, showers of white inhaling the white lights of cars, fluttering like confetti from an invisible proscenium of heavenly darkness. Speed and visibility got into lock-step; we slithered down Putney and away into the spectral ribbons of main road which led us ever deeper into what now slowly became an enchanted forest—a medieval illustration to Malory. To beguile the time I played over some prints of recent voices which were destined for my collection; it was strange to sit watching the snow while Marchant’s somewhat squeaky voice… “The war, my boy, meant all things to all men; full employment, freedom from the wife and kids, a fictitious sense of purpose. Blame your neighbour for your own neurasthenia and punish him. It was all real, necessary and yet a phantom. The reason why everyone loved the war was simple: there was no time to think about the even more pressing problem namely: ‘Why am I making a mess of my life?’ I had had the time, but not the good sense. I threw myself into this delicious amnesia which only wholesale bloodspilling can give. Thirsty Gods! What hecatombs of oxen. Hurrah!”

  It was late when we arrived, hush-hushing down the white avenues towards the strange house, where every light seemed to have been lit and left to burn on in tenantless rooms; who went round and turned off all those lights, and at what time? The lake had frozen iron-stiff and here a great fire of oak-logs sparked and hissed in the centre of it, near the island; several dozens of muffled figures skirred about it on skates. There was even a coloured marquee with fairy lights where some were drinking steaming coloured drinks—presumably hot lemonade, since it was past the drinking hour, and even considerations of Christian charity could not be expected to sway the habits of mind of lazy bureaucrats and publicans. Nevertheless it was a grateful and heart-warming scene in this desolate property to have a few villagers amusing themselves. From time to time would come a pistol crack from the ice, and a fissure would trace itself with soft rapidity, like someone running a stick of charcoal across the whiteness. Shrieks and laughter greeted these warnings. Baynes shook a sage head and muttered something like “It’s all very well, sir, but a few minutes’ thaw and they’ll all be in the drink.”

  The car drew up, the doors opened. The hall and all its galleries were hung with dusty bunting left over from other festivals; there were a few servants about, engaged on unobtrusive tasks, but not many. Yet from the light and the decorations you would have said that Benedicta expected a great company to descend on us. No such thing. Moreover she had gone up already. No glittering cars disgorging madonnas in evening gowns, no monocles glittering, no sheen of top-hats.

  I mounted heart-beat by heart-beat. The bed she lay in was like some fat state barge with its squat carved legs and damascened wings of curtain drawn back and secured with velvet cords. The light fell upon the book she was reading, and which she closed with a snap as I entered the room. The child lay in a yellow cot by the chimneypiece—a small indistinct pink bundle, thumb in mouth. We stared at each other for a long moment. Though her regard was sad, almost humble in its directness, I thought I could detect some new quality in it—a new remoteness? She was like some great traveller who had come back finally after many adventures—come back to find that his experiences overshadowed the present. Sitting at the foot of the bed I put my hand upon hers, wondering if she were ever going to speak, or whether we should just sit like this for ever, gazing at each other. “The snow held us up” I said, and she nodded, still staring into my eyes with her sad abstracted eyes. She had made herself up carelessly that evening, and had not bothered to take the make-up off; the pale powdered face looked almost feverish in contrast to the thin scarlet mouth. “You know” she whispered at last “it’s like coming back from the dead. It’s so fragile as yet—I hardly recognise the world. So tired.” Then she took my hand and placed it upon her forehead saying: “But I am not feverish am I?” She trembled as I embraced her softly and went on. “But you know there is something else to be got over now between us. It’s very clear. How patient can you be?” She drew down her frowning brows over those wide-awake eyes and stared keenly, sternly at me. Then she pointed at the cot in the corner. “Have you seen?” To temper the ominous intensity of this monologue I crossed the room and stared dutifully at the child. She had turned sideways upon an elbow now, and her concentrated gaze held a strange hungry animal-like quality. She resumed her full voice to say—with a sort of dying fall. “He has come between us now, don’t you see? Perhaps for ever. I don’t know. I love you. But the whole thing must be thought over from the very beginning.”

  Over and above the numbness I felt only a sudden rage; like a wild boar I could have turned to rend the world. Benedicta gave a sob, a single sob, and then all at once was smiling again: a smile disinterred from forgotten corners of our common past, full of loyalty and fearlessness. She shook two pellets out of a bottle. They tinkled into a shallow glass which she held out for me without a word. I filled it from the tap in the bathroom. She watched them froth and dissolve before drinking the mixture; then, putting down the glass, she said “The main thing is that I am really back at last.” A church bell began to toll from the nearby village, and the clock by the bed chirped. “I must feed it” she said—it seemed to me strange the use of “it”. I turned away, muttering something about going downstairs to dine, and then crossed the room with a sudden purposeful swiftness to take up the child. I left her sitting crosslegged in the armchair by the bed, holding “it” to her breast, absorbed as a gipsy.

  Downstairs the grizzled Baynes was waiting for me; he had organised my dinner, knocking up a couple of servants from the deeper recesses of the kitchens. I could see he was dying to question me about Benedicta but resisted the impulse like the perfectly trained servant he was. I settled down to this late repast with a sense of anticlimax, but to put a good countenance upon it all—the long solitary table I mean with its coloured candlesticks, the absence of Benedicta—I made some rough notes for a speech I would soon be having to deliver to the Royal Society of Inventors.

  Afterwards I betook myself to the log fire in the hall; and while I was sitting there before it, half asleep, I heard the traditional cannonade upon the front-door knocker, followed by the shrill pipe of waits whose voices were raised quaveringly in a painful carol. It was a welcome diversion; I went to the front door and found a small group of village children standing in a snow-marked semicircle outside. Their leader held a Chinese lantern. They were like robins, pink cheeked and rosy. Their infant breath poured out in frosty tresses as they sang. I sent Baynes hot-foot for drinks, cakes and biscuits, and when the first carol ended invited them into the warm hall with its big fire. It was bitterly cold outside, and they were glad to huddle about the blazing logs with small bluish fingers extended to the flame. The teeth of some were a-chatter. But the warm drinks and the sweet cakes soon restored them. I emptied my pockets of small change, pouring it into the woollen cap of their leader, a tough-looking peasant boy of about eleven: blond and blue-eyed. As a parting gesture they offered to sing a final carol right there in the hall and I agreed. They began a ragged but full-throated rendering of “God rest you merry, gentlemen”. The house echoed marvellously; and it was only when they were halfway through the melody that I saw an unknown figure stalking in military fashion down the long staircase; a tall thin woman with grey hair, clad in a white dressing-gown, which she clutched about her throat with long crooked fingers. Her narrow face was compressed about a mouth set in an expression of malevolent disapproval. “You will wake the child” she repeated in a deep v
oice. She came to a halt on the first landing. “Who are you?” I said. The waits came to a quavering halt in mid bar. “The nurse, sir.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Mrs. LaFour.”

  “Can you hear us upstairs?”

  She turned back without a word and began to remount the staircase. There was nothing for it but to disband the carol-singers and wish them goodnight.

  When I reached my room some time later it was to find pinned to my pillow one of Benedicta’s visiting-cards; but there was no message on it. I slept the sleep of utter exhaustion—the kind of sleep that comes only after a prolonged bout of tears; and when I woke next morning everything had changed once more—like the shift of key in a musical score. A new, or else an old, Benedicta was sitting on the foot of the bed, smiling at me. She was clad in her full riding outfit. Every trace of preoccupation had vanished from this smiling reposed face. “Come, shall we ride today? It’s so beautiful.” The change was breath-taking; for once it was she who leaned down to embrace me. “But of course.”

  “Don’t be long; I’ll wait for you downstairs.”

  I hurried to bathe and dress. Outside the country snowscapes were bathed in a brilliant tranquil light. There was no trace of wind. Occasionally a tall tree let fall a huge package of whiteness which exploded prismatically on the roofs of the house. And now even the house itself seemed suddenly to have woken up‚ to be full of a purposeful animation. There was a servant actually humming at her dusting; the hall tables were piled with telegrams and packages. This was more like it. The horses were at the door sneezing white spume. Benedicta was giving some last-minute orders to Baynes about lunch. “Julian rang to wish us everything, and so did Nash” she cried happily as she pulled on the close-fitting felt hat with its brilliant jay’s feather. She seemed to have restored, with a single smile, a hundred lost familiarities. It was hardly conceivable.