The Revolt of Aphrodite

by Lawrence Durrell

  Julian was there at this briefing, if I can call it that, sitting very still with his hands in his lap, listening intently, looking somehow diminished, somehow like a schoolboy. He too had been showing signs of strain from all this cruel anticipation—symptoms more suited to a young bridegroom than to a grown man playing games with a dummy. Yet there it was: changing his clothes several times a day, studying himself with sombre attention in mirrors, fussing over the freshness of the carnation in his buttonhole. I could see that he was going to choose his clothes for the first meeting with the Ur-Iolanthe with great care, for all the world as if it mattered. Yet perhaps after all it did to him. (She would hold out long phthisic fingers towards his, smiling, saying nothing.)

  We had chosen the evening as the best time for her to start; it enabled us to see if our settings were right, by her reaction to nightfall and bedtime and so on. Iolanthe used to wake punctually at six every morning, and was usually in bed by eleven at the latest every night. Henniker had promised to re-enact her usual role of nurse-secretary and friend with all the fidelity she could command, and I presumed that she would soon get over her initial worry and take everything naturally; she would familiarise herself with the new Iolanthe in the long run. It was just a question of the initial awakening. If the dummy was as “real” as we expected its memory-reaction code would instantly throw up the whole of Henniker’s history together with “her own” past—every damned thing. Yes, from the simple point of view of memory, she would simply be coming back to life after a critical illness—the gap created by the real Iolanthe’s death would be filled in the memory of the false one by vague intimations of an illness, an operation, an absence. Her life henceforth (though we had not made out any elaborate schema to cover the range and scope of her activities: how could we?)—but her life henceforth would be a sort of long convalescence. At least so we thought. She was not “coded” or “programmed” forwards. She was, so to speak, free.

  The little villa in the woods was unobtrusively surrounded by a tall wire fence and entered through a gate. It was very pretty, set upon a deeply wooded knoll. The garden was a riot of wild and tame flowers; behind ran a brook and beside it lay an apple-orchard. It was if anything prettier and more comfortable than the house in the woods which I myself occupied with Benedicta. Inside this elegant little place Henniker had arranged all the possessions (they were astonishingly few for such a rich woman) of Iolanthe senior; laid them all out in familiar dispositions to re-engage memory, yet also haphazardly to suggest perhaps that she (who had lived out of suitcases for half her life) was simply on location for some film or other. But it was beautifiil, it was peaceful, the little house. A fire sparkled in the dining-room with its new novels and bibelots; the Renoir hung upon the wall. On the small upright piano stood the sheet music of a film-score and a volume of Chopin’s Études. Eh bien, the sheets had been aired. On the bedside table were two novels she had been reading when she, the real one, had suddenly lapsed into death. (Some underlinings in one.) Everything in fact conspired to produce a normal setting and atmosphere for this softly breathing Other, lying under her aeroplane silk. I touched her fingers. They separated easily, flexibly. They were warm.

  Marchant had timed it all very accurately. We unpacked her body softly and slipped on the blue silk nightgown while Henniker brushed out her hair with long strokes (she sighing luxuriously the while). Then we lifted her to bed. She smelt the newly-ironed freshness of the sheets with appreciation, wrinkling up a newly-minted nose. There were also the faint wisps of odour from the lighted joss-sticks which burned in a small Chinese vase. It was time; there was nothing to do but wait. Marchant hung over his watch like a demented crystal-gazer, his lips counting silently, a smile upon his face. “A minute” he whispered. And then “Ahhh” with a long delicious inspiration the lady woke; the two eyes, bluer than any stone, inspected first the clean white ceiling, and then travelled slowly down to take in our own surrounding faces; recognition dawned, together with that famous mischievous smile which was so warm that it had always suggested a marvellous intimate complicity, even when projected on a screen. The slightly husky and melodious voice said: “Is it over? Have I come back, then?” While she addressed the question to Marchant her long slender arm came out and touched me, grasped my fingers, giving them a tender squeeze of recognition as she whispered in Greek “Hullo, Felix.” Marchant was bobbing and ducking his affirmative and vaguely going through a repertoire of Chinese gestures, shaking hands with myself, as if to congratulate himself for this feat—this living and breathing feat of science, with her china-blue eye and scarlet, rather ravenous mouth. “It’s all over” he said. “A great success; but you must rest for a while, quite a long while.” She yawned as naturally as a cat and whispered “I feel wonderful Felix. Doctor, may I go to the loo?” She had not as yet recognised the blenching Henniker, but now as she turned back the sheet in order to stand up she did, and gave a sharp delighted cry like a bird. “But it’s you—I didn’t see!” In some curious way the very naturalness of this embrace seemed to allay the emotion and anxiety of the older woman. Perhaps a sense of verisimilitude, of the reality of the flesh and blood, the gesture, released her from a very natural fear—I don’t know. But all at once she looked unafraid again. “I’ll come with you” she said, and accompanied Iolanthe to the bathroom, smoothing her hair with her hand as she sat on the lavatory and gave her little mechanical shiver of pleasure. “Is it really all over?” she asked Henniker. “Are you sure?”

  Henniker reassured her gravely and then escorted her back to bed, puffing up the pillows behind her head and smoothing the sheets with her hard scaly hand. Yes, she had ceased to tremble now. Marchant played the doctor damned awkwardly, swinging a stethoscope in his hand. “Well” he said. “It has all been a great success.” She turned her smile on him and expressed her gratitude by taking his hand in hers. “I am so grateful” she said gravely. “I had given myself up for lost, in a way.” We studied her gravely, amazed at what we had done, and wondering a little if she would keep up this extraordinary performance of an understudy who had so thoroughly mastered an intricate part. I could well understand Marchant’s unease, his desire to get away. It was like the first impact of falling in love—one paradoxically wants to get away, to be alone, in order to ruminate upon the feeling. His love was scientific, that was all. Dolly worked! Iolanthe was saying dreamily: “When you come out of the anaesthetic it’s with a soft bump that you land in the middle of consciousness—like those lovely flying dreams one has when one is a child.” Marchant stood on one leg and then the other. Finally he took his leave promising to call on her in the morning. “Henny,” said Io, yawning profoundly “O Henny dear, can I eat something? Something small, a boiled egg?”

  “Of course, darling.”

  Henniker retired to the kitchen and left us staring at each other with amusement, yes, affectionate amusement. It was a very unreal feeling indeed. “I must just see” she said at last “what they have managed to do about my breasts—that was what really worried me and brought on the other, I think.” She got out of bed with a swift lithe gesture and turned her back to me to enable me to help her divest herself of her blue nightgown. Naked she walked towards the full-length mirror at the other end of the room. She gave a little crooning cry of relief as she caught sight of the beautiful new breasts the doctors had given her, cupping them in her palms, head on one side like a parrot. Then she leaned forward and stared intently into her own eyes as if to make some critical assessment of her own looks; then, sighing, turned to me as naked as sunrise and put her arms round me to kiss me lingeringly on the lips. It was the old affectionate, concerned kiss of Io, quite unbearably real yet utterly without any new sexual connotation. It was as sister to brother, not as lover to lover; but I was thrilled to have a chance to put my arms about her, to test the smooth flexion of her muscles, to stroke the pearly haunches of my darling, proud as any sculptor to have confided such a thing to nature. She giggled as she got back first
into her nightgown and then into her bed. “You look so serious” she said. “Still the same old Felix, thank goodness. How is Benedicta?” she added with a faint frown of concentration as if she were trying to summon up an image of her face. “Happy at last” I said. “And me too. Everything has changed.” She shot me a cool and rather quizzical look, as if she were in doubt as to whether I was being ironical, or pulling her leg. Then she said “If it’s true, then I’m glad. It was about time, I must say, that you had a decent break.”

  Henniker came back with the long-legged bed-tray on which lay her boiled egg, some nursery bread and butter, and a glass of milk. I watched with anxiety, for all this she would eat only in her imagination; the plate, the glass, would seem to her quite empty, though all she had done was to cut the food up and mess it about a bit. But ideally the reflex hand-to-mouth action would satisfy her sense of participation in a natural ritual; one could hardly have denied her that. (I was reminded of the slow imaginary meals of Rackstraw in the Paulhaus.) She did her act and leaned back pushing the tray away and wiping her lips. “Gosh, I’m full” she said, and then “Felix, is there an evening paper? I want to see what plays are on.” I found one and she consulted the theatre pages with attention, her lips moving. “I don’t know a single one of them” she said, and then looked at the date. “How long have I been here, Felix?” I parried this with talk about long sedation and memory lapses and so on. She wrinkled her brow and wandered through the headlines of the paper before abruptly putting it aside.

  “By the way,” I said “Old Rackstraw is dead.” She looked at me with wide-eyed regret for a moment and then turned away to fold up her napkin. “It’s probably for the best” she said in a low voice. “He was so ill it was to be expected I suppose. And yet everyone who dies takes a whole epoch with them. Racky was a saint to me, an absolute saint. Sometimes quite recently when I thought how contemptuously I had let him sleep with my body—not my me, my you, so to speak—I felt shocked and disgusted with myself. In a way I owe him everything; he made my name with his scripts. Felix, do you ever think of, do you ever remember, Athens?” The words came over with a kind of wild pang, saturated with a sort of forlorn reserve. “Ah yes, Iolanthe, of course I do.” She smiled and shaking out her hair said: “I tried to reconstruct us in a film at one time, you and me. It didn’t work. Racky was doing the writing and couldn’t get it.”

  “I’m not surprised” I said. “But then why?”

  “Because. I do things backwards. Experiences don’t register with me while they are happening. But afterwards, suddenly in a flash I see their meaning, I relive them and experience them properly. That is what happened to me with you. One day by a Hollywood swimming pool the heavens opened and I suddenly realised that it had been a valid and fruitful experience—us two. We might even have christened the thing love. Ah, that word!”

  “I took it as it came, with perfect male egoism.”

  “I know; I suppose you thought we were just … what was your pet expression? Yes, ‘just rubbing narcissisms together and making use of each other’s bodies as mirrors’. Cruel Felix, it wasn’t like that; why you got quite ill when I left. Well then, I got quite ill too, but retrospectively, by that Hollywood pool, and within the space of a second; people wondered why I suddenly burst out crying. Really it is absurd. Then later I tried to build a film about us in Athens in order to cauterise the memory a bit; but that didn’t work. So I just had to let it dwindle away with the years. How absurd. Yes, the film got made, but it was rotten.”

  She had spilt egg on her nightgown. It was so natural, so babyish. I wiped her with my handkerchief, clicking my tongue reprovingly the while like a nanny. “Now Iolanthe, please be a good girl, won’t you, and obey Dr. Marchant to the letter? No originality, no tricks, no bright ideas. You have got to take it easily for some weeks at least.”

  “But of course, my dear. But will you come and see me often, just to talk? Bring Benedicta if you wish.” She hesitated. “No, don’t bring Benedicta. I haven’t got rid of my dislike for her as yet. It would make me shy.”

  “Come. Come.”

  “I know. Sorry! But still….”

  I stood up and removed the tray from the bed. “I’ll tell you more about Racky” she said, settling herself more comfortably in the bed. “I’ll tell you anything, everything. Now I feel at ease. Now my career is finished, the company bought out. I feel a new sort of relief. I have a little time in hand to do the things I want. See Bali properly, read Proust, learn to play the tarot….”

  I didn’t want to ask her but I had to. “Tell me, do you feel the capacity for happiness inside you? Happiness!”

  She considered. “Yes” she whispered as I stooped to kiss her forehead. “Yes, I do. But Felix everything will feel indeterminate until I meet Julian, the author of all my professional misfortunes.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m exaggerating of course, but he hangs over me like a cloud, always invisible. Have you ever seen him up close?”

  “Yes, but only recently.”

  “How is he? Describe.”

  “He is coming to see you tomorrow.”

  She sat bolt upright in bed, clasping her knees, and said “Good. At last.” Then she clapped her hands and laughed. Henniker came in to draw the curtains and remake the bed and I took the opportunity to take my leave. I was glad to. This first encounter make me feel weak; my knees felt as if they would buckle under me. I stumbled out into the garden with a feeling of suffocation and relief. On the way to the car I had a moment of faintness and was forced to lean against a tree for a moment and unloosen my collar.

  On the way back home, at a deserted part of the road over the moors, I came upon the black Rolls laid almost endways across the road in a fashion that suggested an ambush or a hold-up. As I hooted I recognised Julian’s car; his chauffeur replied with a warning ripple of horn like a wild goose sounding. What the hell? Julian was in the back of the car. I got out and opened his door; he was dressed as if he had come from some official reception. A black Homburg lay behind him on the rack, and in his hands he held a pair of gloves. The funny thing was that he was sitting with his head turned away from me, stiffly, hieratically. I had the impression that he may have been trying to avoid showing the tears in his eyes. Probably false—it was just a fleeting thought. But he swallowed and said: “Felix—for goodness’ sake—how is she?” The intensity of the question was such as to bring on my shakes. I climbed in beside him and told him—I fear with growing incoherence—all about her awakening, her naturalness. “We’ve done the impossible, Julian. They talk of portraits taken from the life; but this is liver than any portrait. Liver than life. It’s bloody well her.” I was shivering and my teeth began to chatter. “Have you any whisky Julian? I’m shaken to the backbone. I feel as if I am getting ’flu.” He pressed a button and the little bar slid out of the wall with its bottles and bowl of ice cubes. The telephone rang but he switched it off with an impatient gesture. I drank deeply, deeply. It was nectar. He watched me narrowly, curiously, as if I myself were a dummy, astonishing him by my lifelikeness. “Julian, you wanted this creature and we’ve produced her, it, for you. I wish you the densest happiness in the words of Benjamin Franklin. Her sex is more in the breach than the observance, though technically she could make love, Julian.” It was extremely tactless. He struck me across the mouth with his gloves. I didn’t react, feeling I had deserved it.

  “You are babbling” he said contemptuously.

  “I know. It’s pure hysteria. But I tell you Julian that on the present showing the damned thing is as real as you or I.”

  “That is what I’d hoped.” Now his little white fingers were drumming, drumming upon the leather arm-rest. “How much does she recall?” he said. “Did she mention me at all?” I laughed. “You still don’t realise, Julian; she remembers all that Iolanthe did and more perhaps; we won’t know for a while until she has a chance to develop her thoughts. So far though….” His eyes looked queer, vitreous; h
e hooded them with his heavy lids as he turned them on me, sitting there with his brooding vulpine air. He sighed. “When shall we meet, then?” he asked in a low resigned voice, as if he might be asking the date of an execution. I finished my drink. “Tomorrow, at tea-time. I told her you would be there.” I got out and banged the door on him. He put down the window to say: “Felix, please be there; remember we have never met. This is the first time.”

  My nerves reformed by the whisky, I got back into the car, and felt a sudden wave of elation mingle with my exhaustion. I don’t know when I have driven quite so fast or taken so many risks. I was in a hurry to get back to Benedicta, for better or for worse, in slickness or in stealth….

  It was so natural—Benedicta before the fire reading, with a sleeping kitten beside her, it was so familiar and so reliably real that I was suddenly afflicted by almost the same sense of unreality I had had in talking to Iolanthe. The comparison of two juxtaposed realities like these gave me the queer feeling that might overwhelm a man who looks in the mirror and sees that he has two heads, two reflections. But she didn’t ask, she didn’t question; I simply slumped down beside her, put my head on my arms and went straight to sleep. It was dinner time when she woke me. Baynes had unobtrusively set out a tray in the corner of the room on a table which we moved into the firelight. By now of course I was as ravenous as a pregnant horse and bursting with euphoria. She looked at me quizzically from time to time. “I can see it’s gone well” she said at last.