The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

  “In the meantime” said Julian “I want you to spend a few days in Paris.” He gave me the details of some negotiations which were going on; I duly noted them down on my blotter. “Very well” I said. “Very well.” And that was that; he sounded as if he were speaking from Dublin or Zürich. I returned to my fire and my cigar, full of a certain mild surmise. (To bow or not to bow, that is the question?) Before going to bed I sent a night letter to Mrs. Henniker, asking her to phone me at the office on the morrow.

  But it was Iolanthe’s voice which came over the wire, heavy with sleep. “Henniker is off today so I thought I’d ring you…” she began, and then switched into Greek, in order, I suppose, not to be understood by the casual switchboard operators. “I want to give you a number to ring when you come—I hope you do. I am here for another month at least. I’m so looking forward to it. When do you think you will come? Friday and Saturday I have free.” So the appointment was made, aided and abetted by the chance which was to take me to Paris anyway. My spirits rose at the prospect of a short change from snowgirt London—even though it would mean lodging at the Diego which was owned by the company and where everything was free. I know. Everyone hates the Diego—its spaciousness confers an infernal anonymity upon its residents. But then I had some trivial details about patents to discuss: and this was the ideal place to discuss them, for it boasted of elegantly appointed conference rooms smelling of weary leather and Babylonian cigars. Threading and weaving about its great entrance halls with their flamboyant marquetry were grouped all the traditional denizens of the international world of affairs—Arab potentates with black retainers poring over maps of oilfields, gamesome little bankers from the USA moving on hinges, forgotten kings and queens, gangsters, revivalists and fleshy brokers. The never-stopping hum of critical conversations, anguished bids, political lucubrations, arguments, disagreements, hung heavy on the air. All this variegated business fauna pullulated. The Diego buzzed with a million conflicting purposes, schemes and schisms.

  I conducted my business with despatch and moved into the fourteenth where I had once lodged as a youth; it was still there, the old Corneille, though it must have changed hands a hundred times since. Still the same high reputation for general seediness and defective plumbing; but modestly priced, and with rooms backing on to insanitary but romantic courtyards, and tree-tufted. Also there was my old room vacant. It was in reality Number Thirteen, but in deference to public superstition it had been renumbered Twelve A. The old telephones creaked and scratched, half transforming the melodious laugh of Iolanthe when at last I reached her. “Listen” she said “you know my problem about being mobbed—she told you? I daren’t show my face except over a cop’s shoulder. And so I have to dress up a bit to enjoy any sort of privacy.” She sounded however as if she enjoyed it. “And this apartment is useless, here I am watched.” I groaned. “O God,” I said “not you too. Must we then meet heavily veiled or in false beards? And who watches you anyway?” I groaned again. “Julian!” I said with bitter certainty. She laughed very heartily. “Of course not. It’s my husband.” Out of the window Paris was in the grip of a magnificent early spring thaw, gutters running, trees leafing, birds loafing. The scent of pushing green in the parks, the last melted drops running from the penis of the stone Pan in the public gardens. “Well what, then?”

  “I am going to act Solange” she said gaily.

  “Solange?” I was startled. “What do you know about Solange?”

  “Your little girl” she said. “Everything you told me about her has stayed in my memory like a photograph.”

  “I told you about Solange?” This was really surprising; Solange had been a little grisette with whom I had lived for one brief summer—actually part of the time here, in this room. But when could I have mentioned her to Iolanthe?

  “You have forgotten” she said. “You told me all about her, making unfair comparisons with me. I remember being depressed. She was so this, she was so that. Besides I didn’t realise that it was all Paris snobbery. In those days everyone simply had to have a love-affair in Paris or risk being ridiculous. But I didn’t know that—you took advantage of my ignorance. Nevertheless I listened carefully, always anxious to learn. And I have never forgotten Solange. And what is more, I shall prove it to you. At eleven-thirty. The Café Argent isn’t it?” As a matter of fact it used to be the Café Argent all right; then back here for those tender little manoeuvres which by now I had so completely forgotten that I had to make a real effort to recapture the fleeting expressions on the white peaky face of my little Parisienne. “Good God” I said. It seemed an extraordinary thing to bring up; one never knows what lumber one has shed like this—lumber which has been preserved in somebody’s memory. Tons of this detritus thrown off by a single life, flushed away one thinks: but no, someone has recorded it—sometimes a chance remark, sometimes a whole case-history. “Very well” I said with resignation. “Come and act her then.”

  She did it to such good effect that for a moment I did not quite believe it—of course she could not look exactly like Solange: and there were quite a few young women sitting along the terrasse even at that time of day—laid up like trinkets in some pedlar’s tray. But then Solange! It was only when the waiter brought me a little slip of torn newspaper with a question mark on it, indicating the sender of the missive by a jerk of his head, that Solange burst out of the tomb and into that warm spring sunlight. Solange of the powder-blue skirt badly cut, the dove-grey shoes much worn, the yellowing mackintosh, colour of an uncut manuscript: cheap beads, crocodile handbag, mauve beret. Rising she came towards me with that heavily whitewashed face and over-made up eye, with that flaunting yet diffident walk. (The diffident part was Iolanthe herself.) “Je suis libre Monsieur.” Among those shy students, Germans, Swiss and Americans, the little monotonous whining voice, the dire sadness covered by the deliberately pert smile. “Iolanthe,” I exclaimed “for goodness’ sake—what next?” She burst into a characteristic peal of common laughter as she sank into the wicker chair beside mine, putting her handbag on the table between us. She clapped her hands to summon a waiter and demand a coupe in her marvellous tinfoil tones. “Go on,” she said “tell me I can’t act. The Times says I can’t act.” But the brilliant impersonation of Solange held me spellbound. Of course she was wigged—brown bobbed hair with two points at her dimpled mouth. Certainly she would never be recognised like this. “You see?” she said, clipping her arm through mine as we sat. “So we can be free to talk. Tell me everything that has happened to you.” I should have answered perhaps that while much seemed to have happened in fact catastrophically little had. Where to begin anyway? I tried my hand at a brief sketch of my fortunes; there was much that she already knew. She listened carefully, attentively, nodding from time to time as if what I said confirmed her own inward intuitions. “We are in the same boat” she said at last. “Both rich, celebrated and sick.”

  “Sick, Iolanthe?”

  “In my case physically.”

  “And mine?”

  “You’ve taken the wrong road—I knew you would even then: always in your cards I found it: and then yourself—you always saw real people as sort of illustrations to things—glandular secretions. I felt that you’d never get free, and then later when I heard you had joined Merlin’s my heart went down and down. I know what it has cost me to free myself from them. I knew you’d never do it.”

  “Why should I?” I said sturdily. “It suits my book very well.” She looked at me with dismay, bordering on disgust; and then her expression changed. She realised that I wasn’t telling the whole truth. “Merlin’s made me what I am” I said sententiously, feeling quite sick to hear myself talk such twaddle. Now she began to laugh. Ouf! It seemed as if the whole conversation were going to take a wrong turning. “Come, let’s walk” I said. As we passed the Café Dome she insisted that I entered it to see if there was any message from Solange on the postboard. Sure enough there was, in typically bad French: she had had it planted by Mrs. Henn
iker. “This is going too far” I said with poor grace. “Now we better go back to the hotel and….” An expression of sadness came into her eyes for a moment and then was swallowed by her smile. Taking my arm once more she fell into step. So in leisurely fashion we crossed the park, quizzing the statues, talking in low voices now, inhabitants of different worlds. “And so you are free, as you call it? What does it mean to you Iolanthe?”

  “Everything; I just needed it. But it has cost me a great deal—in fact my company is hovering on the edge of bankruptcy all the time—thanks to Julian of course. He could not bear to see me free.”

  “Do you know Julian?”

  “I saw him once—just a single look we exchanged, a look to last a lifetime. I knew then that he loved me—indeed in a perverse way all the more for crossing him, for breaking free. With my first money I set up my own firm, chose my own parts. Julian has tried to break us because—again perversely—his only way of getting me would be by owning me, having shares in me.” She laughed, not bitterly but ruefully. “If you men didn’t prey on women where would you be?” she added smiling. “But Julian’s expression was so strange that I even tried to learn to draw in order to reproduce it.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “We didn’t; our audience research people said that there was one of my fans who was always there, never missed a single film, often saw them over and over again for weeks. They wanted to make a newspaper story of it; but the journalist was told by his proprietor that Julian had had the story stopped. Then they pointed him out to me at a Fair.”

  For some reason I felt jealous of this.

  Across the Luxembourg, the children’s play-pit and so on, slowly down, drawn by the inexorable strings of our Athenian memories. There was much to surprise me; it was like coming upon a bundle of letters one had read in cursory fashion and thrust aside into a cupboard corner—and now on re-reading discovered to be full of things which had escaped notice. For example: “It puzzled me afterwards very much to think how much I thought I loved you then. I did love you, but for singular reasons. Ultimately it was your lack of understanding which enabled you to occupy this place in my mind—your very indifference in a queer way. Since you could be objective, cool, and consequently considerate.” (O dear, this is the mere vermiform appendix of love.)

  “At times I thought you quite contemptible as a man, but I never wavered. You don’t know, Felix, how little a woman hopes for in life—for an iron ration only: consideration. We haven’t enough confidence in ourselves to believe that we could ever be loved—that would be butter and jam on the bread. But the bread itself? A woman can be won by simple consideration, she will settle for that when she is desperate. Look, you took my arm in the public street, though all Athens knew I was a street-girl. You dared to be seen with me, opened doors for me. What chivalry, I thought! Everyone will believe us to be engaged. But of course later I realised that it had no special connotation for you—it was pure absent-mindedness and ignorance of the mentality of small capitals.” She laughed very merrily; I turned her friendly face round to embrace her, but she groaned with pain, and said her wounds were not yet healed. “You used to talk about going from the unproven to the proven in your work; but later I realised that with each new discovery the so-called proven is falsified. It collapses. The whole thing is only a funk-hole process—necessary because you are weak.”

  I didn’t care about all this, inhaling the warm Jupiterian air, the leaves, the crunching passers-by who walked as if upon a tilting deck, or else were dragged widdershins by huge dogs on heat. Intuition can become a conditioned reflex? “And then” she went on “I heard what you’d done, and I crossed my fingers for you. I half believed that you might decide for independence one day like myself. But when I saw your face the other day I knew that you hadn’t made a serious effort. You had the same funny stillborn look you always had; I was tempted to kiss you very hard, very triumphantly, simply because Julian was there in the crowd.”

  “Julian was there?”

  “I think it was Julian.”

  I kicked some pebbles about for a moment wondering if I shouldn’t become angry. “I don’t much like this sort of curtain-lecture coming from you,” I said at last “with its boastful idea that you have done something very special; you who supply a surrogate mob-culture with vulgarised versions of classics watered down by pissy-witted cinéastes….” Iolanthe looked at me with delight. She said: “It isn’t the point; even if it had only been a small dressmaker’s shop in the Plaka instead of a film company. It means living without deceptions, awkward secrets, living in the round. The real freedom. My own.”

  I laughed contemptuously. “Real freedom?” She nodded briskly. “Inevitably you would ask yourself how real you were; you would think that it isn’t just the firm which confers an illusory reality upon you. O I’m not saying the firm is anything but benign, it helps you towards what you want to do, to achieve.”

  “Then why all this quaker-maid nonsense?”

  “I’ve angered you” she said sadly. “Come let’s talk about other things. You know Graphos is dying; now he would have been worth the love of some great-hearted woman if his health had not spoiled his mind. It’s typical of the cynicism of fate that he should imagine he loved me, and still does. And I like him too much to deny that he does. After all, he educated me, taught me to see—in spite of his perverse habits and tastes.”

  We had come to the doors of the old hotel; I took my key and we mounted slowly, arm in arm. She chuckled as she gazed round her. “It’s typically your sort of room” she said. She went to the grimy window and stared out into the foliage. It was raining now, quite a storm of rain. “Do you remember the spoiled picnic on the Acropolis when the sky seemed to come down in whole panes of molten glass and our footsteps smoked on the marble?” She kicked off her shoes and lay down beside me, setting a pillow in the nape of her neck, lighting a cigarette. It needed only a lighted candle and an ikon. … Ikons, the portfolio of the collective sensibility. I imagined them as I dozed. (“There is no God and no plan: and once you accept that you can start to identify”?) She lay quietly with her eyes half shut. I had penetrated again the cardboard, the outer cerements of the worshipped mummy. Above all, one should not make a mythology out of one’s longing.

  My hand sought out hers and pressed it; we were half dozing, reconstituting like archaeologists with every drawn breath, a past which had long since foundered. The arcane clicks and whistles of the little owls; mountains of gauche leaves blowing in the parks. The firm was like one of those great works of art which perish from over-elaboration. (“The greatest happiness of the highest few is what nature aims at, the great aristocrat.”) The white mice I have cut up, starved, tortured on behalf of science—as Marchant might say; some people one can only convince by drawing blood. I kissed the nape of her neck softly and lapsed into inertia, dozing by her side while she quietly talked on and on in sweet leaden tones. “It’s a terrible thing to feel that one has come to the end of one’s life-experience—that there is nothing fundamentally new to look forward to: one must expect more and more combinations of the same sort of thing—the thing which has proven one a sort of failure. So then you start on the declining path, living a kind of posthumous life, your blood cool, your pulse steady.” She pressed my finger to her slow calm pulse. “And yet it is just the fruitful point at which some big new understanding might jump out on you from behind the bushes and devour you like a lion.” Small sighs, small silences, we were like people drugged; without any sexual stirring we had reverted to the prehistoric mode of an ancient intimacy.

  “It’s a sort of curse, you might say, for I’ve brought little comfort to anyone; and some I have gravely harmed. Not voluntarily, but simply because I was placed at an axis where all their lives intersected. That Hippolyta—I had to act to deceive her. And others, like that poor Sipple. Whenever I am in Polis I look him up as a sort of expiation, though we never mention my brother.”

  “What on earth
about Sipple?”

  She rose yawning and stretching to seat herself at the mirror; she took off her wig and began to comb it softly. “I thought you knew about that boy; he was my brother; I was obliged to kill him.”

  It was like a pistol shot fired in the quiet room. She turned round to me smiling, with an air of patient fidelity. “And poor Sipple has had to bear the odium. He is going blind, you know. He has become a perfume-taster. They dab those little flippers of his with scent and he tells them how to mix their perfumes. He is studying to be received into the Catholic Church, of all things.”

  “But why, Iolanthe? Why on earth?”

  “That’s the sad thing—in order not to let my father take it upon himself; he was a very rash, violent little man, and he had vowed to punish Dorcas. To the Virgin, you know. I knew that he would be obliged to do it, if only because of his vow. I could not let him go to the grave with that upon his conscience—a man of sixty-five. So I stepped in to shield him; and Graphos had it all hushed up. I suppose the idea of atonement is a lot of conceit really—who can say?”

  “As arrows fit the wounds they make!” She crossed to the bed and placed a lighted cigarette between my lips; so we stayed silently smoking for a long while, staring at each other.

  Then she began to speak of her father’s death. He at least was unaware of what she had done for his sake. The scene rose so vividly before my eyes—the little house with its cobwebs, its table and three chairs before the fireplace. A dying peasant wrestling with a death by tetanus, closing up slowly like a jacknife. “Have you heard someone scream with their teeth firmly locked together—an inhuman screaming like a mad bear?” And stumbling, knocking over the furniture. He would not submit, fought death every inch of the way. And the rigor setting the body in such strange shapes. He was like a man wrestling with riding boots too small for him. And then the candles smoking; but even dead he wouldn’t lie down. Up he came each time they pushed him down like a jack-in-the-box. The piercing lamentations of the villagers. But it was no go, he wouldn’t fit. Finally the village butcher had to be summoned to break up his bones like a turkey in order to coffin him properly. But now there was sweat on Iolanthe’s brow, and she was walking slowly up and down at the foot of the bed. They tied a ribbon, a green ribbon, round his arm before the barber bled him. There was so much blood in that withered old arm. “He wouldn’t give in, you see.” Then she paused and went on. “The little house is still there, it’s mine, but I daren’t go back. I left it just as it was, the key in the hole by the coping of the well—but you remember, don’t you? If ever you go that way will you visit it and tell me about it? I’m sufficiently Greek to feel that I might return one day when I am much older—but how? Someone must exorcise it for me. Felix, if you did that I should be grateful. Will you?” She was so earnest and so beseeching that I said yes, in my futile way, yes I would. And of course now it’s too late, as it always is.