The Revolt of Aphrodite

by Lawrence Durrell

  I had written to Iolanthe, promising to exorcise her house provided she came with me; but the letter arrived too late and she burned it along with many others. All this comes of a strange meeting I was to have with Mrs. Henniker on the Zürich plane. Her face had been hollowed out by suffering, scaled and pared to the bone by the sleepless nights she had spent at the bedside of Io. The tall steel bed against a window full of Alpine stars and tumultuous grass. One candle burning before an ikon—no need to say which. Shaken by a kind of involuntary sobbing which contained no more tears—she had used them all up. At first nobody knew except Julian of course. Whenever she was ill she was registered at three different clinics in order to enjoy some peace and anonymity at a fourth. Well, there by candlelight reciting her past and peering with those wild enlarged eyes into the fastnesses of the future, the pinewood coffin. Tunc.

  It was so slow, the simple declining into the final pens of sleep, without too much pain, too many numbed regrets. Rolling down the green slopes of death, moving faster and ever faster, turning through the slow spirals of consciousness towards the heart of the fire opal. All night long now Mrs. Henniker sat beside the bed, her stone-coloured eye fixed upon the face of the white woman who had become her daughter; all night upright in an uncomfortable steel chair, the whole building silent around her, save for the shuffling shoes of the night-nurse—one for the whole floor. From time to time the patient’s eyes would open and wander about the ceiling as if seeking for something. Her lips might move a little, perhaps even tenderly smile. I would have liked to think—I did think—that she was picturing both of us crossing to her father’s island in the blue fishing-boat. A church, cypresses, sand-coloured jetty, box-dwellings of coloured whitewashes, the pink-toed pigeons crooning. Up and ever up to the abandoned barn where his whole life had been lived, had completed its simple circle. The well overgrown with moss now, the marble well-head grooved by the cable which for centuries had drawn up the sweet water. One loose stone extracted revealed the hiding-place of the key. Let us suppose we entered on tip-toe—entered the smelly gloom of the apple-charmed room full of unbroken cobwebs—the room he died in. Somewhere along the line, at this exact point, everything about my life threatens to become successful; everything takes a turn for the better. A fresh wind fills the sails—so Abel tells me, but always adding the rider “a delusion like so many others, that’s all”. Then the field goes blank again and the hints about suicide come up. It would not last, you see: could not last.

  Well, on and on she sits, Mrs. Henniker with her hanky screwed up in her hand, her red horse-face gleaming with sweat. If I could convey with how much dazzling longing I gazed upon the face of Iolanthe dead—why everything would burst apart, catch fire, disintegrate. The little green book which fell from the bed had no underlining in it to serve as a guide-line to her last thoughts—perhaps she did not have many. Henniker carried it away for me, together with a lock of that famous hair—the sentimental relics which human children so cherish: the evidences of memory which are supposed to endure as long as the last unshed tear. Her eyes, did they fall upon the passage which I was now reading out, my own lips moving stiffly along the lines? “Vous êtes liê fatalement aux meilleurs souvenirs de ma jeunesse. Savez-vous qu’il y a plus de vingt ans que nous nous connaissons? Tout cela me plonge dans les abîmes de rêverie qui sentent le vieillard. On dit que le prêsent est trop rapide. Je trouve, moi, que c’est le possê qui nous dêvore.”

  Perhaps it was the eyes of Julian rather which traced and retraced these faltering lines written in the hand of the ageing Flaubert; for Julian inevitably was there. He came in silently, unannounced, just after midnight, softly putting his briefcase on the floor. In her confusion Henniker saw only a batlike figure in a black suit and a soft black hat. He motioned her to silence and indicated that she might leave the patient to be guarded by him. Without a word all was understood. With a sigh Henniker crossed to the low divan and plunged into a deep sleep. One thing only she noticed. Iolanthe did not open her eyes at all, but all of a sudden her face quivered and her hand came softly across the white sheet towards Julian’s small, childlike hand. So they sat silently with her feverish fingers resting upon his. Of course I asked how he looked, but her answers were vague; she had received a dozen conflicting impressions. Terribly tired and old, an ashen face, the crater of an extinct volcano; or else some great quivering bat of pain clinging by his wings to the steel-tubed chair. Or else…. But it is useless, useless. Whenever it is really necessary Julian appears, and one knows it: but often only after he has gone.

  The night wore on and on into the milky opaqueness of dawn; the white fangs of snowscape glittered in all their fruitless splendour. All nature dozed and even Julian felt his head drooping. It must have been after one of these transitory cat-naps that he woke to feel the full massiveness, the charged weight, of her changed status. Death had made her fingers so heavy, it seemed, that he almost had to prize his own out from under them. Just that. He did not move any more. Mrs. Henniker snored faintly. He continued to stare intently at the white profile she presented to him with such motionless intentness. Even when a drowsy fly settled on the eyeball he could not move.

  But they were not to be spared the final indignities which the press reserves for events such as these. Somehow the secret of her whereabouts had leaked out. The clinic was ill-equipped to protect itself against sixty such persecutors, especially at such a time of day. They burst through the swing doors with all the vulgar assurance of the tribe, overwhelming the dazed duty nurse, deaf to all protest. Some even climbed over the balcony from the garden. The candle-lit silence of the room was filled now by their hoarse reverent breathing, the shuffle of their feet, the hiss and splash of their bulbs. Even now Julian did not move; he sat exhausted in his chair. And in some singular way they did not notice him, for not a single glance or question was addressed to him; and in all the photographs which smeared the dailies of the world there was no trace of his presence—the chair seemed to be empty. Why go on? The planned obsolescence of the human body etc. Mrs. Henniker slept right through it and was only woken by a banged door. Julian had gone. “The unlucky thing” he said later “was her loving you; it was completely unsuitable, and anyway you did not care.” I cannot answer these charges any more. A fearful horror and exhaustion seizes me. I am guilty of nothing—in fact that’s really what I am guilty not of. Then later in the gutter-press to read of her grave being robbed. They said that fans had done it—it is true that fans will stop at nothing. At any rate it could hardly have been Julian; nor ordinary robbers, for her jewelry had not been touched. Hair, though; there is a high market value for the hair of a goddess. What she sought was not love but the frail combining of hopes with someone—but how was Henniker to know this? She had choked me with a phrase and I sat there staring at her feeling as if I had swallowed a toad. It is very still here. Om. I said Om.

  * * * * *

  VII

  It has been wearing, this brief period of lonely inertia in Athens, waiting for Koepgen to appear. I don’t know why I felt I ought to see him before… before getting on with it. I kept an eye on the favourite tavern; that too is much the same. One window has fallen in, and the vine had got mildew. The widow is dead, but her son carries on. I have been walking about a good deal at night…the brutal velvet Athenian night with its harsh rancorous music and game-smells. I can’t record thoughts any more, the spool seems to have run out. The whole bloody thing has begun to seize up in my head like an engine. And then, bang, tonight I ran into him—the pocket Silenus in the monkish gear. A streak of brindle in his hair. But no surprise at seeing me. We sat silently for a while devouring each other with our eyes; I noticed he was rather drunk and hastened to join him in that blessed state. “I knew you’d come.” Nodding owlwise and tipping the blue tin can. “You want to hear about me, my story.” I did actually. A vague nervous curiosity had possessed me, for in spite of my fairly extensive data upon Koepgen I could hardly get anything out of Abel exc
ept fictitious-sounding aphorisms. “The ikon and all that..your farty fairy-tale.” His eyes danced, he leaned his back against the whitewashed wall of the tavern. “My God, Charlock,” he said “I am really free. I took ages to earn it, but I stuck it out and got an honest discharge. Free, my lad!”

  I raised the wine can and almost let him have it on the crown of his head—so sick was I of the meaningless four-letter. “They’ve treated me very well” he said. “But that isn’t the strangest thing. Yes, I found my ikon at last—and what I took to be some sort of mystical awakening waiting for me turned out to be the most prosaic thing imaginable.” He laughed very heartily. “My father’s will was gummed into the back of it, together with the deeds for our property in Russia—if ever they decide to give it back to us.”

  “Where, though?”

  “Another fantastic thing—Spinalonga.”

  “The leper island? The one off Crete?”

  “The very same. I got the Church to post me there when Jocas told me and sure enough I found it there. It was the damnedest thing. And it wasn’t all. There was a little old man, one of the lepers, who was dying and I was asked to help send him down with all the usual formalities. But he took ages to die; and in his delirium he talked away whole nights. You know, he was English; he told me—what next? He told me he was Merlin himself.”

  “The devil he did.”

  “It was certainly his name; but how could I tell if he was THE Merlin or just someone of that name? Eh? But he knew a great deal about us all, about Benedicta, about you; and indeed he twice sent you a message through me. I am not lying, Charlock. Wait a second and let me recall.” He guzzled some more wine with its bitter twang. Wiped his lips with bread and went on. “He said ‘The firm only exists to be escaped from. Tell Charlock.’ What do you make of that? Then on another occasion he said: ‘There are two kinds of death open to the living. Tell Charlock.’” I sat looking incredulously at him, but feeling somehow cheered up in a confused way. We clapped hands for another beaker of the thought-provoker. “In his view he said the firm was something different for each of us; it was something like memory for you—its banked funds too great to be exhausted by promissory notes.”

  “To the devil with it all.”

  “I know what is in your mind” said Koepgen seriously. “But you ought to visit the little house before you decide. And you ought to realise that such an act——”

  “Shut up, Koepgen” I growled, baring my fangs.

  “I know, I apologise. The free should never moralise to the bound. Let’s talk of something else. Let me tell you about a stroke of luck I have had; you remember the translations you helped me with? Of my poems? I sent them in anonymously to an agent. They have been accepted without any piston whatsoever. Straight off. Like that! I received the contract today. Look!” I took the wad of paper from him and glanced at it. Then I looked at him in slowly dawning horror. The firm was Vibart’s. The contracts were signed by Vibart’s partner. Was it possible that the fool did not know? I stared keenly, reverently, tenderly into the eyes of the poor foolish little man and swallowed my Adam’s apple a number of times. Should I tell him? “No” cried my alter felix. “Not a word.”

  “Well, we must drink another one on this”, and Koepgen echoed my clanking pledge with his own, his eyes full of the tears of fulfilment. We sat until very late, until the violet sky went lilac and started to bleed; until the waiters were snoring on window-sills. Then we clambered down the hill past the Acropolis.

  Well, I had made my decision. I would visit Io’s house before deciding how and when.

  * * * * *

  Nash was always at a loss to account for the depression which welled up in him as his car turned slowly along the axis of the hill, along the double avenue of elms. But the man in the dark suit who sat beside him looked at it all with a studied coldness; Julian had been relatively silent for the first part of the journey down. But in the last few miles he had begun to muse again after his usual fashion. “It isn’t beautiful” he said, as if reading Nash’s thoughts. “I agree. The grandeur is too Byzantine. It could never be a home for anyone, I suppose.” Nash changed gear, shaking his head. A frown anointed his cock-robin’s face. “It’s not her fault” he said. “She has made a wonderful recovery, you must agree; in spite of so much bad news, the death and so on.”

  Julian lit a cigar and said: “Presumption of death isn’t quite the same thing. Without a body to show for it. You need as much body to die as to live. In the case of Charlock—we will have to wait upon the evidence. At any rate the Mediterranean always gives up its bodies. I think we’ll find him, if he is to be found. It’s only a matter of waiting awhile.” He coughed and settled himself deeper in his seat. They had come down to inspect the curious toy in the musicians’ gallery. (“An abacus of the intuition—can you make one?”) That and other little matters had to be gone into. Julian went on softly “It’s like those legends of the Hesychasts—to die and leave an empty grave. One must beware of Charlock.”

  “Oh dear, I don’t know” said Nash and Julian replied coolly.

  “You are not expected to know; you are expected to exist, to be.”

  “That’s the whole trouble.”

  The lake was of dark and dirty jelly. The swans floated about like white lanterns. The paint had peeled along the benches. Under this lowering sky the skin of wet leaves lagged his tyres. Nash was fastidious as a cat when it came to his car; he could not bear things sticking to his paws. He found a stick to poke at them while Julian stood in the drive, debating heavily. “We will deal with the child first” he said softly. “He may know how the thing is booby-trapped, as obviously it must be. At least we can ask.” Nash grunted. He had found a bracelet on the gravel, which he put into his overcoat pocket. The manservant let them in with a silent inclination of the head and they passed together down the long corridors and up the spiral staircase to the room where Julian proposed to interrogate Mark. Nash thumped heavily along behind him, puffing a little on the landings, with a curious air of fugitive derision on his face. “I’ll go and see Benedicta, then” he said, and turning left where the landings intersected, marched away towards the bedrooms.

  As usual Julian, that master of effect, had chosen a place of interrogation worthy of a practised inquisitor. It was an old cobwebby box-room with a single uncurtained window looking out across the park. Here an oldfashioned high-backed chair had been placed facing the window—a chair with so tall a back that when Mark did come hesitantly into the room all he could see of Julian was a pair of white hands lying softly, negligently on the arms of the chair. Nothing else. The high back hid even his head. Mark had been marched down the corridors of the east wing by a nurse and introjected into the room at a given signal. He stood now, anxious and pale, with his feeble countenance made whiter than usual by the daylight outside. “Yes, Uncle Julian?” he said when his name was uttered. “Yes?”

  Julian put on his slow, sauve reptilian voice, letting the words uncoil by themselves, musingly. “Mark, you helped our dear Felix build Abel, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there a booby-trap of any sort in it: something that might explode and injure someone?”

  Mark began to breathe very heavily and his face took on an unwonted expression of determination, of awkward resolution. The man in the tall-backed chair stayed heavily, ominously silent as if he wished to give time for some reaction to these inappropriate emotions to set in.

  “I won’t tell you. I promised” said the boy at last.

  “Then if someone should get hurt you might be to blame?”

  “I promised.”

  “Then if someone should get hurt you might be to blame?”

  Mark watched the slow spirals of cigar smoke rise in the eddyless air of the musty room. “I am asking you” said Julian suddenly in a voice so sharp that the boy started. “I am asking you.” Mark hung his head. He was hovering on the edge of tears now. Julian resumed his suave impartial voice. “Mark
,” he said with infinite slowness “you know the story of the Princes in the Tower?” Mark nodded and breathed out his “Yes” into the silent room. “Very well,” said Julian “I’m glad you do. It’s not a pretty story. Now, Mark, I am going to ask you something else. Is there any safe way of dismantling the trap?”