Aphrodite's Hat

by Salley Vickers

  ‘In bed, stupid.’

  ‘Oh. Right ho, then.’

  He got back into bed, still in his dressing gown.

  ‘Aren’t you going to be hot in that?’ She was wearing a long cotton T-shirt. Nothing more.

  ‘I thought you would rather …’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ By now she was in the bed beside him. ‘I would have been happy to share. I thought that’s what you had in mind.’

  But at this he protested. ‘Oh no. I never thought you’d …’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s not for ever and ever amen. Just tonight. So we remember the bus ride.’

  In the morning she said, ‘I’m catching an early train. Don’t argue, the ticket’s booked and I can’t change it. But this here –’ handing him a leaflet – ‘is about an exhibition I’m showing some work at soon. Come and visit me if you fancy seeing it.’

  William was back home and reading in the sitting room with the larger tortoiseshell cat on his knee when Helena returned from Paris. She sailed in, bearing a flat white box which when opened revealed some exquisite cherry tarts.

  ‘How was your arty trip?’ She kissed him graciously, still smelling gorgeous, not, in truth, wanting to know.

  ‘Immense fun.’

  ‘Really?’ Helena raised her perfectly symmetrical eyebrows. William could usually be counted on to have a dull time.

  ‘Really. I found a pleasant hotel. Next time you go off on one of your jaunts I might go away again.’

  Helena’s scarlet mouth made the slightest movement of resistance. ‘If the hotel’s that good, then perhaps I’ll come too.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s your cup of tea. I had to have supper in the local fish and chip shop and there was a traumatic bus ride from St Ives. I doubt I shall ever recover.’ He hoped he never would.

  ‘Food in the hotel no good?’

  ‘Not in the circs, no.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound much fun to me.’ She glanced at the book. ‘What are you reading?’ She never usually asked.

  ‘It’s about modern sculpture.’ He closed the book, marking his place with a leaflet. He nodded down at it. ‘There’s an interesting exhibition coming on in Derbyshire. I might go.’

  Helena gave a dramatic shiver. ‘Derbyshire? Brrrr. Chilly.’

  ‘Yes,’ said William, comfortably. ‘I know. That wouldn’t be your cup of tea either.’

  THE SPHINX

  ‘Did you know that Sphinx means “strangler”, and that she strangled travellers who couldn’t solve her riddles?’ Sylvie Armstrong asked a fellow guest during a dull conversation about Egypt at a dinner party.

  ‘I wonder how the bodies were disposed of?’ was the rejoinder.

  Sylvie was impressed. The young man seated beside her was beautiful and she had asked the question expecting a more sentimental response.

  Sylvie’s husband, Phillip, whose son was an archaeologist out on a dig in Egypt and had raised the topic under discussion, shot a look across the table. She knew that look. It meant: please don’t embarrass me in public.

  ‘She ate them, I think,’ Sylvie continued. ‘Though they never explained the “whys” of that sort of thing, did they, the ancients? I mean, why would one mind so much if one’s riddles remained unanswered?’

  ‘Perhaps it was disappointment,’ was the young man’s response to that. ‘Maybe she didn’t know the answers herself and strangled them in frustration when they failed to come up to expectation.’

  A psychoanalyst who had been lecturing the rest of the table on the manifestations, late in life, of addiction to the breast, shoved his oar in at that point. Perhaps it had to do with an infantile fear of being smothered by the placenta at birth? he suggested, somewhat aggressively bringing up the Oedipus complex. But Sylvie was too intrigued by her young man to be led into the misty labyrinth of psychoanalytic theory.

  ‘I expect you’re right.’ Her eyes covertly surveyed his across the table. He had, she noted, the mild china-blue eyes of a certain breed of expensive cat. ‘But you can’t help wondering why someone so powerful needed someone else to supply them with answers.’

  ‘It is of the essence of power,’ the young man equably suggested, ‘to look for a match.’

  ‘And ditch it when it proves unequal …?’ Sylvie asked.

  Although Sylvie found her husband tiresome she had never been unfaithful to him. Infidelity was not her line. She didn’t like complications and sex with anyone but her husband was something she was prepared to try again only in the unlikely event that she might fall in love. She had been in love once and the experience had been painful. The other person had been married and they had agreed to be honourable. In marrying Phillip, she had succumbed to the lure of security – a false one, as she now saw, but the nature which had kept her from stealing another woman’s man also kept her faithful. So when the beautiful young man telephoned at first she pretended not to know who he was.

  ‘Who is it?’ she enquired. And waited.

  ‘If that’s a riddle it’s either very difficult or very easy,’ was the answer. And after that Sylvie stopped pretending with Jamie Ransome.

  Sylvie had always thought of herself as someone who disliked the phone. ‘I can’t think what we find to say to each other,’ she remarked one day when Jamie had called three times.

  ‘We speak the things we would otherwise say only to ourselves,’ he replied.

  There was no doubt that it was flattering to be the object of so much attention from someone so young and so beautiful.

  ‘I am eighteen years older than you, old enough to be your mother,’ Sylvie commented when Jamie exclaimed that a particular hairstyle made her look sixteen.

  ‘An indecently young mother,’ was his rejoinder, ‘and besides, a person’s “age” has more to do with their soul than their chronological years.’

  Sylvie had worried at first that she might fall in love with Jamie; it hardly seemed possible she could avoid doing so. It was not so much his beauty but the wisdom of his utterances which she found compelling. To be understood was a secret yearning; one she had put away after the experience of falling in love had worked out so badly. Phillip understood her so little that it was almost a relief. There was a cool privacy in his non-comprehension which left her free to be herself. But to be oneself is almost always lonely; to be perceived and apparently comprehended was unexpected, and disarming.

  Sylvie hoped that she was not going to make a fool of herself, something, temperamentally, she fought shy of. But as the weeks went by, and she and Jamie became more and more familiar, she was glad to note that while she occasionally wanted to fold him in her arms, she had no thoughts of any greater intimacy with her new friend. Instead, they talked, animatedly, and intimately, several times a day, and went on shopping trips together, where Jamie dictatorially chose her clothes and issued decrees over makeup.

  From time to time, Sylvie wondered what Phillip made of her friendship; but a bonus of living with Phillip was his apparent indifference to how his wife spent her time. That she might be becoming a little dependent on Jamie occasionally troubled her. But she was not a dependent sort and told herself firmly that when, as she must expect, Jamie found more enthralling company than herself she would swallow any hard feelings and be dignified.

  However, Jamie seemed to want no other confidante and, after a while, she began to take her position with him for granted. The dinner they had met at was in February. ‘We’ll have known each other six months next week,’ she reminded him. The six months had passed in the blink of an eye. She could not say where the time had gone; only that it had passed more vividly than usual.

  ‘We must celebrate,’ Jamie declared. ‘We’ll put on our glad rags and paint the town red. Where would you like to go?’

  Before he went off to be killed in the Great War, Sylvie’s grandmother had met the love of her life at Claridge’s and it lingered in Sylvie’s mind as the most desirable place in London to dine. She and Jamie were not a romance, they were som
ething else – unique, as he was always saying – but nevertheless, she felt almost timid when she suggested the celebrated hotel as a possible venue for their own celebration.

  ‘It’s rather luxurious,’ said Sylvie – which was not like her. On the whole she took for granted the fact that luxury was her due.

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Jamie. ‘For people like us no corner should be cut.’

  Sylvie spent an unusual amount of time shopping to buy her outfit for the celebration evening. She found the experience enervating. Unconsciously, she had come to rely on Jamie’s decisive judgement over what suited or didn’t suit and deprived of this firm touchstone she found herself unusually dithery and at sea.

  In the end, she bought a dove-grey frock, a smart pink suit and a little black dress, to add to the many similar ones already accumulated in her wardrobe. She arrived home fatigued, with quantities of bulky carrier bags, to a brief message from Phillip on the answer phone.

  ‘Hugh’s back from Egypt. He’ll be arriving this evening.’

  Hugh was Phillip’s son by his previous marriage. Sylvie had tried her best with Hugh, but the relationship had remained strained. Hugh was an only child; his mother was a confirmed hypochondriac who, despite the fact that the marriage had ended long before the advent of Sylvie, made it plain that the source of any continuing infirmity was the usurping second wife.

  Sylvie rang Phillip. ‘I’m out tonight – what do you want me to do about Hugh?’

  ‘I’ll be tied up till late,’ was the unpromising answer. ‘Can’t you cancel?’

  ‘No,’ Sylvie said, ‘I can’t.’

  Phillip’s obliviousness to her arrangements was matched by a blank insistence over his own which angered and occasionally depressed Sylvie when she came up against it. ‘You’ll have to organise something – I can’t get back and he’s no key.’

  ‘I can leave a key with Marje.’ Marje was their cleaner. But, no, she couldn’t, she remembered: Marje was off with her sister for a week in Lanzarote. ‘Can’t he get here before I leave?’

  ‘I don’t know when he’ll turn up,’ said Phillip. ‘I told him you’d be in. I’m sorry, I’ve a meeting to get to now.’

  Sylvie tried on the dove-grey dress, disarranged her hair as she pulled it off again, smudged mascara on the pink silk suit, snagged her tights as she changed them for a second time and finally settled for the little black number, not the new one, but another she’d had in the wardrobe unworn for an age. She settled down with a large gin and tonic to wait for Hugh and tried to calm herself. A part of her suspected that Hugh knew about the dinner and sensed that it was important to her: he had the uncanny intuitive flair of the ill-disposed.

  At ten to eight, Sylvie, defying burglars, left a note on the door. ‘Will be at Claridge’s. Come there for key.’ She did not quite dare to defy Phillip enough to leave Hugh wholly abandoned.

  The taxi she called at the last minute was late, and by the time they reached their destination the evening had turned humid and she was sweating in the little black number which appeared to have acquired moth holes in the skirt. She almost lost the third pair of tights as a woman in killer heels nearly trod on her foot as she hurried from the taxi.

  But there to greet her in the cool, dimly lit dining-room was a welcoming Jamie, kissing her cheeks and commenting appreciatively on her scent – ‘Chanel 22, no?’ – as he helped her with attentive hands to her seat at their carefully placed table.

  She had chosen her starter, and was laughing in relief at his wicked observations over a very cross couple dining in silence at the other side of the room, when she heard a voice behind her.

  ‘Jay!’

  ‘Hugh!’ Across the table, the opaque cat’s eyes she knew so well were alight with a strange feverish fire.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m dining with a friend, Sylvie Armstrong. Sylvie – my very, very old friend Hugh …’

  Sylvie found herself tongue-tied during dinner. The conversation about Hugh’s Egyptian dig dominated the evening and it was late when Jamie called her a cab. He brushed her cheek and thanked her for the ‘enjoyable evening’ and promised to be ‘in touch’ in the next few days.

  Sylvie was still up drinking when Phillip arrived home. He asked for Hugh and she delivered the message. ‘He sends his love and says to tell you not to worry. He ran into an old friend – he’ll be staying with him for a while.’

  THE INDIAN CHILD

  (for Samuel Raphael)

  ‘But what, beyond the world, does she want with a human child?’ the visitor enquired.

  ‘His mother was a votaress of her order,’ Rowan explained.

  The explanation struck her, as she voiced it, as lame. The connection hardly seemed strong enough to justify the scenes which had raged over the little Indian boy whose mother, a friend of the queen’s, had died in childbirth.

  ‘One of your idle fancies, acting the saviour,’ the king had chided. A pretty poppet, at least by mortal standards, Rowan thought, but no match for the queen’s terrible beauty or the king’s awe-inspiring features. The plainest of us, she considered as she eyed the visitor, is more remarkable than the round-eyed dust-coloured man child. And yet the queen doted on him, still took him into her bed at night wrapped in costly Indian shawls – the only surviving relics of his mother – and played with him each morning, quite as if she were a mortal and he her own offspring.

  ‘I wonder what the child makes of it all?’ The visitor was of the king’s party but had long ago given up taking sides except to convey the appropriate official demonstrations of loyalty. From time immemorial, the two households had been an unstable liaison, sometimes at it hammer and tongs and then, as suddenly, falling into recapitulations of old affections, only to set off again before long on some new quarrel. It made him weary to think of it. Truly, immortality was a doubtful blessing. ‘Mind if I take a look at the boy?’ he asked.

  Rowan frowned. ‘What for?’

  ‘Interest only,’ the visitor said nonchalantly. ‘In all this time I’ve not set eyes on him and naturally one becomes curious.’

  Since the child was in the next room, it was an easy matter to grant the request. Rowan had rather warmed to the visitor. Her own order of males were a dull lot – pansies and dragonflies – and she was, without knowing why, attracted by the sense of simmering danger the visitor had about him.

  She moved towards the door behind them and opened it warily, for in exposing the boy to potential predators she was disobeying orders.

  A flight of stairs ran down to a high-vaulted room. At its centre a young boy squatted, his glossy head bent. He was drawing something on the sandy floor and seemed wholly absorbed.

  ‘Manu,’ Rowan called. ‘We have a guest. Come and say hello.’

  The boy got up and padded towards them. He had, the visitor thought, for a mortal an expression of considerable calm. He extended a long silvery hand to the child.

  Manu held out his own plump brown one in return and bowed his head slightly. ‘I am delighted to meet you,’ he said gravely.

  The visitor also bowed. ‘Likewise. You are well?’

  ‘I am well,’ said the little boy, ‘if a little bored.’ He spoke with a pure diction as if, which was not exactly the case, this was not his own tongue.

  The visitor turned to Rowan and raised his eyebrows. ‘Bored, is it?’

  ‘Are you, Manu?’ she asked, a little flustered. The child had shown no previous signs of discontent.

  ‘Oh, always to be safe and happy is dull,’ the child announced. As if to demonstrate the truth of these words, he took off, sprinting away round the large room with his arms held wide and beating the air. ‘I can’t fly,’ he announced, coming to rest before the visitor.

  ‘No one flies here,’ Rowan said, embarrassed.

  The visitor looked sideways at her with narrow sloe-blue eyes. ‘But we can if we choose,’ he murmured.

  ‘But,’ said Rowan flustered still more, ‘it
is thought …’

  ‘Vulgar?’ the visitor suggested and laughed, showing two double rows of pointed yellow teeth.

  There was something disturbing in this which made Rowan move protectively towards the boy who was gazing up at the visitor entranced. ‘Can you fly?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, we all can,’ the visitor, whose name was Monkshood, replied. ‘But it’s not done.’

  ‘Why not?’ The upturned face, which still showed traces of childish pudginess, had the look of a being far older – a Buddha maybe.

  ‘Lord knows,’ said Monkshood. ‘Etiquette is always obscure in observance and hard to explain. The lower orders fly, of course. But among our kind …’ he waved a mauve-veined hand at the end of which the nails curved dangerously.

  ‘I would like to fly,’ Manu stated.

  ‘Ah,’ said the visitor, now a little bored himself. ‘I dare say.’

  It was in fact about the boy that Monkshood had come. He had been sent as an ambassador from the king to reopen the negotiations for the child to be sent across to his kingdom. Monkshood was a practised diplomat but he was obliged to admit that so far they had got nowhere. Quite why it was that both these powerful beings had such a passion to have this child under their sway was beyond his understanding. Seeing the boy in the flesh had made Monkshood none the wiser. The brat was attractive enough, to be sure, for a human; but there was nothing obviously special about him. As the boy himself had remarked, he couldn’t even fly, as the meanest of their kind could.

  However, Monkshood was there to further the king’s business, not to question its merits. He adjusted his usually unforthcoming expression to one of sincere but mild appeal. He knew he had been chosen as the emissary least likely to irritate the queen.

  ‘Your majesty,’ he said, bowing low on entering her presence. ‘It is most gracious of you to agree to see me amid so many more pressing demands.’

  The queen slightly inclined her neck. They both knew that she had nothing to do since all the usual activity within her province was on hold while the dispute over the child seethed. ‘Gracious is as gracious does. What is it you have come to ask?’ As if I didn’t know, her manner as good as added.