The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

He smiled and shook his head: “I wish you wouldn’t use that word” he said softly. “It always suggests something old and primitive and creaking, studded with levers and buttons. Not something sophisticated, something of our decade. By the way, when she is launched will there be any way of controlling her?” It was my turn to stretch my aching legs, and prop B.’s head with a pillow. “That’s the whole point, Julian. Once launched there is no stop-go button or rewind or playback; she is as irrevocably launched as a baby when you hit it on the bottom and force it to utter the birth-cry. I had to confer full human autonomy on Iolanthe, don’t you see? Otherwise our whole experiment would have been diminished; I could not have given her the mnemonic range if we had had to allow for cutting out the current every ten days, rewiring, recharging—as if she were a model train or yacht, run by remote control. We simply leaped over all these considerations; and when she rises from her bed of sickness and roams abroad in the world there will be no calling her back! We’ll have to take her as she is, for better or for worse, in sickness or in health, in fair weather or foul. But that is how you wanted her, isn’t it?”

  “God, of course!” he cried softly but passionately. “I wanted her absolute in every way.” I heard the words with a pang, so charged were they with love, with desolation, with hunger. “She’s breakable, of course, and ultimately wear-outable I suppose, but probably less than you or I. She will outlive us all, I dare swear, if she isn’t smashed or run over by a car. The organisation is pretty delicate but the substitutes we’ve used for bone and cartilage and vein-paths is a hundred times more durable and dependable than what God gave us poor folk. And of course she won’t age, relatively speaking; her hair and skin will keep their gloss longer than yours or mine.”

  Benedicta said suddenly, without opening her eyes, “Julian, I’m afraid of this thing.”

  “Of course. You must be” said Julian, his voice full of a vague reassurance. “Nothing like it has ever been done.”

  “What good can come of it?” said Benedicta. “What will you do with her—she cannot breed, she’s just a set of responses floating about like a box-kite, answering to every magnetic wind. Will you just sit and watch her?”

  “In holy wonder,” said Julian greedily “and with scientific care.”

  “Benedicta, there hasn’t ever been one” I said mildly.

  She lay there still, my wife, her head supported by the cushion, her eyes closed, but with an expression of intense concentration on her face—as if she were fighting off a painful migraine.

  “No” she said at last, almost below her breath, with a tone of firm decision. “It won’t do. Something will certainly go wrong.”

  Julian looked at his watch and whistled softly. “My goodness it’s getting late and I haven’t yet come to the real subject of my visit to you two; of course I was worried about that phone-call but really there was something else on my mind. It concerns my brother Jocas in Polis.”

  “Jocas.”

  The wind rose suddenly and skirled round the house. I had not thought of Jocas for ages now; and the memory of him, and of Turkey, had faded like an old photograph. Or perhaps it was simply that in this rain-and snow-swept countryside it was hard to evoke the bronze-stubbled headlands where the sturdy little countryman rode to his falcons, calling out in that high ululating muezzin’s voice of his as he urged his favourite bird in to the stoop. Jocas existed now like a sort of coloured illustration, an illuminated capital, say, in some yellow old Arabic text; yet he was after all in Merlin terms all of Africa, all of the Mediterranean. “First of all Jocas believes he is dying, and perhaps he isn’t wrong, although the information comes to him from his Armenian astrologer—a very acute man I must admit, who has seldom been at fault. Well, anyway, there he is, for what it’s worth. He has several months ahead of him, he believes, in which to prepare himself, and is apparently doing it in customary Merlin style, in the high style, that is to say. In my own case, this new turn of events has sort of blunted the edge of the lifetime of enmity I have borne him—I can confess it freely only now. It had ebbed away now, the hate, leaving only respect and regret for the man.”

  “Julian!” cried Benedicta sharply, opening her eyes and staring angrily at him. “I don’t like you in the mock-humble mood. It is false. You cannot stop being a demon now just because Jocas is dying, just because you will get your way at last. You have been at each other’s throats ever since you were born.”

  Julian paled, his dark eyes flashed briefly like precious stones before hooding themselves once more under their heavy lids, to give his whole face an expression of massive and contemptuous repose—like an Inca mask, I thought. He paused for a long moment and then went on in a quiet voice, ignoring her and addressing himself to me, as if he were seeking a sympathy or comprehension which I was more likely to accord him than she. “I shall leave myself out of the picture, then, and simply sketch in the details of the matter for you, supposing that the business of his death is a fact, and actually takes place a few months from now. It will raise of course the question of his replacement in the Eastern field; and I have no doubt, Felix, that the senior boardroom will be extremely keen to have you take over the responsibility from him. It doesn’t surprise you, does it? Of course the decision is yours and hers, Benedicta’s. That is the first point.”

  “My God” I said with a mixture of wonder and distaste, never having visualised myself as occupying any position of administrative power in this octopus of a firm. “As I say,” went on Julian, a trifle sardonically “all that is contingent upon the movement of a few planets across the natal chart of Jocas. When and if it does happen you will have to think about it. But for the moment all Jocas wants is to see you again; he wants you to visit him briefly. I leave the question of timing to you. Obviously you won’t want to abandon our experiment before it is complete, I mean Iolanthe. But once she breathes, once she walks, you might feel like taking Benedicta for a short visit to Turkey. Or perhaps before. It’s how you feel.”

  The thought itself was full of the meretricious dapple of unfamiliar sunlight—seen through the long grey corridors of an eternal English winter; one forgot the damp, one forgot the scorching winds on the uplands, the miasmic stenches of the great capital at evening. … No, all that remained was this travel-poster sunlight with its enticing glint. Benedicta looked once more sunk in thought. “The timing is up to you,” said Julian again softly “but I shouldn’t leave it too long. As a matter of fact we are sending out a small party of people at the end of the month—we’ve chartered a plane. You know some if not all of them: Caradoc, Vibart and Goytz, for example.”

  “Caradoc! Why?”

  “He’s coming back to us again on the circular staircase. Jocas has been on for some time about building himself, indeed all of us, a mausoleum—if that’s the word. He wants to unite the remains of my mother and … father.” A funny little contortion travelled over his features as he uttered the word. It was as if the word itself cost him something to bring out. He repeated it in a whisper. “My Father” as if to secure a firmer purchase on it; to possess it more thoroughly. “I think perhaps Caradoc is the man to talk to him about it; I have no views one way or the other. As far as parents are concerned I am hardly aware of having had any; my father was something quite different—he was simply Merlin. I owe him everything good and bad that has happened to me in my life. I am not a sentimentalist like Jocas—more particularly now he is growing old, and feeling, I suppose, his childlessness. Anyway, that is roughly the picture as he has sketched it for me. O and by the way, according to the soothsayer I myself don’t outlive him by very long. As if I cared….” His weariness, his sadness rang out clearly in the silence of the little room, and the phrase hung fire, remained unfinished. “When I was young, and could not sleep at night, Benedicta was sent to read or recite to me to calm my spirits. I can still remember one of the poems you recited—perhaps you have forgotten?” In his soft negligent tones, so fluent and at the same time so full of charm, he re
peated the lines:

  “Merlin, they say, an English prophet born,

  When he was young and govern’d by his mother,

  Took great delight to laugh such fools to scorn,

  As thought, by nature we might know a brother.

  His mother chid him oft, till on a day,

  They stood, and saw a corse to burial carried,

  The father tears his beard, doth weep and pray;

  The mother was the woman he had married.

  Merlin laughs out aloud instead of crying;

  His mother chides him for that childish fashion;

  Says, Men must mourn the dead, themselves are dying,

  Good manners doth make answer unto passion….”

  He hesitated for a moment, hunting in his memory for the next line; but Benedicta took up the strain and finished the poem in a voice which seemed charged with a queer mixture of pride and sorrow.

  “‘This man no part hath in the child he sorrows,

  His father was the monk that sings before him:

  See then how nature of adoption borrows,

  Truth covets in me, that I should restore him.

  True fathers singing, supposed fathers crying,

  I think make women laugh, that lie a-dying.’”*

  Julian smiled and said: “Thank you. That’s it. And it’s a fitting note on which to wish you an apologetic goodnight. Felix, make your own decisions about Jocas. I shall be away anyway if you decide to go now. And another thing, could you give Rackstraw a glimpse of your handiwork—I fear he is really completely useless for my purposes, he’s too far gone? I would really like him out of the way before the others come into the picture. And so good night to you. My God, it’s nearly morning.”

  He had slipped into his coat and muffled himself up in his white scarf; the brown paper parcel with its trophy was tucked under his arm. He hesitated at the door for a moment, as if he were hunting among all his available expressions for one which might seem perfectly suitable to this leavetaking. “Don’t worry” he said at last, lamely, to Benedicta, and to me, “Until very soon.”

  Thus he outlined himself for a second upon the spectral snowscape and then was gone, softly closing the door behind him. An effortless disappearance as always.

  There was a long silence; Benedicta stood drooping with fatigue and staring into the fire. “He is no Greek” she said at last, grimly. “Our Julian does not know the word hubris; he thinks you can give life as easily as you can take it—and you are following him blindly, perhaps into a trap, my poor foolish Felix.”

  “Come” I said. “He is transformed since we gave him back the hope of an Iolanthe. He’s a new person!”

  “You don’t know him” she said. “His form of ambition is so absolute that he could crush anyone in his path without a thought. I have been his victim once. I could tell you a strange enough tale of his alchemical experiments on me, his powers over matter—a long sad tale of false pregnancies, mock-miscarriages, even the birth of a changeling with the head of a … thing! Murder, too, if you wish. But it was all sanctified by the fact that these were scientific experiments conducted not from evil motives but purely in the name of alchemical curiosity; rather like your scientific self-justifications for the torture and vivisection of animals and so on. He has abandoned all that now—or so he says.”

  “I don’t know what you are getting at.”

  “I am only saying that whatever his final intentions are he is masking them from us; he is using you as usual.”

  “Of course. What is wrong about it? I am doing a job for him—but a job after my own heart as well.”

  Suddenly she turned round and put her arms round me. There were tears in her eyes as she said: “Well, I am so happy to have escaped him, to have freed myself. I can’t tell you the relief. I should be the one to put red roses on Iolanthe’s tomb every day as a thank-offering. Free!”

  Nevertheless that night, for the first time for ages, I surprised her sleepwalking; rather, I woke to find her standing at the window, having drawn back the curtains. I thought she was watching the wonderful snowfall of the early morning, but when I moved to her side and put my arm round her slender shoulders I saw with surprise that her eyes were shut. And yet, not entirely, for she felt my touch and turned her sleeping face to mine in order to say: “I think we must really go and see Jocas. I think Julian is right. We should go and see Jocas as soon as possible.”

  “Wake” I said shaking her. She came to abruptly and shook herself. “What have I been saying?” I kissed her and said, “That we should go and visit Jocas. It was exactly what I was thinking. But you were sleepwalking, an ominous sign.”

  “Fatigue,” she said “nothing more. Kiss me.”

  * Fulke Greville.

  V

  Some ten days later, having made my arrangements with Marchant and Said to keep Iolanthe “feeding”: that is to say “charging”: and to fill in the time by working on the male dummy Adam until my return … having done all this, I drove a patient Benedicta down to Southampton, our point of embarkation for the journey to Turkey. A freezing rain fell upon a muted landscape of rime-stiffened hills and clay-pits—the winter at its beastliest. Perhaps it was a trifle wicked to allow the heart to lift with every thought of a spring-pierced Mediterranean, with its oranges glowing on far-away islands and its lofty March seas … but lift it did. Only she was thoughtful while I whistled to myself cheerfully to drown the skirling of the tyres upon the black wet roads. Moreover it was impossible not to feel that this would turn out to be some sort of holiday—despite, I mean, the sobering news of Jocas and his death-oriented preoccupations. A holiday feeling was in the air, and it was accentuated when we at last ran Caradoc to earth in a dockside pub on Pier 3 to which, for some mysterious reason, we had been directed. We were not going by sea, were we? I would have preferred the old Orient Express with its long romantic rumble across the heart of Europe. But we were in the hands of the firm’s travel people. Everything had been arranged, as usual.

  As for Caradoc, he looked both flushed and incoherent, as much with pleasure as with alcohol; but it was quite appalling the physical state he was in—his clothes dirty and torn, his new shaggy beard ungroomed. “I know” he said, taking in our consternation. “Don’t look now; I’ve been camping in Woodhenge and Stonehenge—damn disagreeable month I can tell you, living like an ape under a bush. But the firm is sending me down a couple of suitcases of decent clothes and shaving kit. I’ll soon be worthy of your respect.” He made a hermetic gesture which the barman instantly translated into three double whiskies. “I’m back in the firm” he said suddenly, jubilantly, laughing a harsh ho-ho. “Once more into the breach, dear souls. For the moment I’m being forced to work in the graveyard section it seems, laying out cemeteries, designing mausolea and all that; but Julian says if I’m a good boy I can work my way back through public conveniences and council-houses towards some real architecture. For the moment it’s a sun-oriented mausoleum—once more Jocas has called for a funeral monument! It may be my last really free job—but who am I to worry? Two more Mnemons in today’s paper, have you seen?” He was beside himself with self-congratulation.

  “And now to cap it all,” he added, jerking a thumb “look what the firm has hired. Just look.” The mystery of our presence in the dock-area was at last explained by the old grey flying-boat which lay at anchor in the swell, snubbing the light craft surrounding it, and presumably waiting for its passengers and crew. My misgivings were only to be allayed when we finally did go aboard by tender and found out just how spacious and comfortable it was with its two decks, its bars and conference room where we were to dine and pass most of our time. It was a good choice, really, but as a craft she was slow, slow as the devil; moreover I gathered we would have to touch down almost everywhere to refuel—Marseille, Naples, Bari, Athens. … Ah, but that was something else in its favour for we could stop overnight anywhere. Perhaps in Athens we could look in on the Countess Hippolyta, Ariadne? I conferred
with Caradoc and despatched a telegram warning her of our threatened descent upon Naos, her country house.

  What was not easy was the take-off, however; we leeched up and down the sound trying to get up sufficient speed to free ourselves, to get airborne, but in vain. We were stuck to the water as if to a flypaper; the great engines groaned and screamed, the spars shuddered, the hull vibrated under the thwacking of waves. But at long last, after a run which seemed to last an eternity she suddenly broke free, tore herself loose from the shackles of the water and swayed up into the free air, turning in a long slow curve over the land with its toy houses and gardens and infantile piers and railway stations—turning her prow towards the tall blue spring sky which waited for us somewhere off Corsica. And all at once the noise diminished and speech became possible; from everywhere stewards appeared with drinks and sandwiches. A few light pantomime clouds puffed around us in glorious Cinerama giving us the illusion of speed and mastery. Our spirits rose.

  There was so much room that each of us had a choice of different corners if we wanted to read or work or doze. Vibart, for example, he had gone off to the far end of the saloon to sit alone, briefcase on knee, gazing out of the window. We had hardly had a chance to exchange a nod. He had arrived at the last minute in an office car, and had been forced to gallop down to the tender and crawl aboard with scarcely enough time to exchange a wave with his friends and colleagues. But he looked sad and somehow withdrawn in his dark city clothes and broad-brimmed Homburg. Goytz on the contrary looked splendrous but completely relaxed. One might imagine him to be perhaps a great violinist on his way to fulfil an engagement abroad. He had a mysterious leather box which, though somewhat like a gun-case in shape, could easily have housed a master’s Stradivarius. Spectacles on nose he benignly if sleepily leafed his way through what looked like a large seed catalogue—though the illustrations were of corpses in various states of prize-winning splendour. But if Vibart looked unhappy and withdrawn how much more so did Baum, the firm’s overseas sales representative? He looked as if he were listening intently to his own inner economy and trying to ascertain whether he was going to be sick or not. I went to pass the time of day with him, for he was very sensitive, very Jewish, and quick to imagine that neglect by a senior might be a slight. I found though that his preoccupations, though unusual, had nothing to do with air-sickness. “I am worried about England” he said broodingly, gazing down at as much of it as swam into visibility through the low cloud. “I am worried about the young, Mr. Felix. They are all studying economics. They are all taking degrees in it—you can get them anywhere now. Now you know and I know that economics isn’t really a subject at all. But the mental evolutions necessary to study it can easily fix one at the anal stage for the rest of one’s life. And people fixed at the anal stage are a danger to humanity, Mr. Felix. Is it not so?” It was. It was.