The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

  He seemed disinclined to let anyone see it, and we did not press him; but it contained no news of her whereabouts. It was simply about their relationship—so much he vouchsafed in a low voice. I must say that since her disappearance Julian seemed to have aged very much; he walked with a stoop, his hair seemed whiter, and his suave swarthy features appeared more deeply lined; this touched something profound in Benedicta, and her sympathy for his … well, his plight … made her demonstrate a new warmth and affection for which he seemed deeply grateful.

  Ipswich, Harrow, Pinewood: these visitations were all characterised by the same deftness, the same unerring choice of time; the same cool disappearance. There seemed nothing to be done. Perhaps we would never find her again; she had so perfectly integrated with reality, one supposed, that there was hardly any need. Was there nothing to be done, was there nothing which might lure her back? Julian! He had been told to write to her, but she gave no address, so he was constrained to imagine that she meant him to put a notice in The Times which he dutifully did, imploring her to come back to him. But she contented herself with ringing him up once from Dover to say that she was going to Paris. That she was very happy. That she missed him, and all of us. That she would come and see us all after she had experienced a number of unspecified events which were of great importance to her. She visited a producer in Paris for a moment, and telephoned to Nury the film star, who thought she was a madwoman impersonating the other Iolanthe. By the time we heard of this she had vanished again.

  Then one evening, one dark and rainy evening I found myself in Chatham, in a dockside street, walking back from some appointment or other in the harbourmaster’s office. A sordid drizzly evening with the bluish street lamps casting a greasy glow in the darkness like disembodied heads. I was picking my way through the slime and wet of the broken pavements when the swing doors of a pub flew open and a woman walked out on the arm of a young sailor; in the bar of light thrown by the open door I saw them turn, and I was at once struck by some small singularity of pose in the way the woman turned her head. “Iolanthe!” I gasped with delight, with ecstasy I might say; for when she turned her head I saw that it was indeed she. But she screwed up her face into a vile simian expression and pretended not to recognise me. I advanced towards her in my usual naive and ineffectual way—feeling tolerably sure that when she recognised me she would at least greet me. What to do? Somehow I must try and capture her, make her see reason; perhaps if we had a talk…. I took off my dark hat so that she might recognise me the more easily. But still she wore this common expression, and then in broad cockney she said: “What the ’ell do you want, sonny? I don’t know you.” The impersonation was so good that for a moment I almost doubted; she had blacked out a front tooth which gave her whole face a gap-toothed lopsided look. I hesitated and made as if to put my hand upon her arm; whereupon she cried again in this baroque cockney accent, “Lemme go, will yer?” And the young sailor turned all gallant and stepped in between us to deliver a blow which hit me between the eyes and knocked me flying. They walked on unhurriedly, arm in arm; at the end of the street she paused under a street lamp to look back and give a coarse little laugh. Then they turned the corner and disappeared from view. I scrambled together all the papers which had flown out of my briefcase on to the pavement, and nursing my jaw followed them. But by the time I reached the corner they had vanished. I did not tell Julian about this unsuccessful encounter, I don’t know why; but yes I do. In the afternoon paper of the following day I came across an item which reported the discovery of the body of a young sailor in Chatham; there was nothing very unusual about it except that it was standing up in a doorway. But these things happen almost everywhere, and all the time.

  Then late at night Julian suddenly appeared at the cottage, holding in his hand the buff telegraph form which announced the death of Jocas. We sat for a long time in complete silence, staring in the fire. I don’t know what hopeless regrets, what formless memories, stirred in the mind of Julian, but for me it was as if we were looking down the long curving vistas of the Turkish capital towards the origins of Merlin’s—towards the blue waters of the gulf, the masts, the walls, the coloured kites floating and tugging against the sky. I was reminded of someone saying something about each death marking a whole epoch in one’s life. Was it Benedicta or Hippolyta? So Jocas had gone! The thought had a heavy resonance; even when one had forgotten his existence or had passed months without consciously thinking about him, he had always somehow been there, a swarthy presence that represented the weird complex of colours and sounds which made up the patchwork quilt of the Eastern Mediterranean. An old benign spider, sitting at the centre of the Merlin web. How pale Julian looked, and suddenly how vulnerable! “Zeno was out in his prediction, but only by a couple of months” he said with a kind of melancholy zealous calm. “Things are changing around us” he added. “And all this business about Iolanthe—that has been a blow, I don’t deny.”

  “Has she written again?”

  He shook his head slowly and said softly, “Neither has she phoned me. Goodness knows what has become of her.” Benedicta said suddenly, surprisingly, “She has been here, you know. I was away yesterday, and Baynes says that she came in and said she would wait for me to come home. He went up to the house to try and tell someone, to try and phone to Felix; but when he came back she had vanished. She may have got into a sudden panic at the sound of a car, as it seems that Nash drove up to the house about that time.”

  “But how can you be sure it was she?” Benedicta crossed the room to the cocktail cabinet and extracted from it a woman’s handbag—a rather chic new handbag; she turned it out before us on the carpet, and among the visiting cards and other trivia which identified the visitant was something which gave us all a start. It was a small pearl-handled revolver. I thought at first it was a stage prop, but no. It was a real weapon and was fully loaded. We looked at each other with surprise, perhaps with consternation. “What on earth could that mean?” said Julian at last. “Who could she be afraid of?” But I had another idea. “Who could she hate enough to …?” For the first time we felt that Iolanthe was starting to behave right out of character. It was late when we went to bed that night, all of us very preoccupied by these mysteries.

  * Lawrence Durrell.

  VII

  Boom-treacle … Boom-treacle …. The big bell was punctuating the ruminations of the organ which succeeded in weaving an almost tangible curtain of sound across the great doors of the western face. Om mane padme boom. The spendthrift monotony of the Gothic soul trying to realise itself, to anchor itself in the infinity of darkness created by the ample dome. Clock of ages cleft for me, let me in thy tick reside. The cars and buses had disgorged their freight of workers—practically the whole of Merlin’s London staff had turned up. In my own case I had had a drink or two—I must admit it—which gave me, according to Benedicta, an air of melancholy sincerity. It was not perhaps the time or place to feel gay, with the thoughts of Jocas on the edges of the mind. So few of us had seen him. But I could now, and very clearly. I wondered what thoughts hovered like dragonflies above the now placid surface of Benedicta’s mind. This was what he had wanted, and here we all were full of the fragile self-deluding hope that somewhere he might be listening to us, perhaps smiling under the mask of gold. Here in this old petrifact which crowned London town. The organ growled and prowled about among the shadows, about the narrow fallopia of the naves, dull and repetitive as the Saturnalia of Macrobius. Long long ago, somewhere in Polis Benedicta recited to me some children’s verses about the sound of bells—a touching onomatopoeia which came back now to me under the hammer strokes of the heavy clapper. The small bells in Turkey exclaim Evlen dirralim over and over again, while the big ones intone on a slower note Soordan, Boordan, Boolaloum.

  What was he dreaming about, old Jocas? Surely not about this rainswept London where the fat blue pigeons ruffled and crooned about the statue of Queen Anne? No, but of the islands of Polis, of Marmara threaded throu
gh by its fishy migrations, of Smyrna, of the famous wharves stacked high with merchandise. Of the slow plains with their black herds of goats and horses and fat-tailed sheep. In fields and arbours where the jackals come out by moonlight to scavenge the muscat grapes; or in glass-penned coffee houses suspended over flowing water where the hubble-bubbles clear their throats in rose water…. Something like that I suppose. Well, here I was at last in St. Paul’s reflecting on the vehemence of great art and regretting that Caradoc had missed his plane and stayed behind in Turkey.

  I had bought a shilling guide to the monument and put it inside a prayer-book, fearing a long sermon. Thus in the intervals of standing up and sitting down I was able to inform myself (I imitated Caradoc’s voice in my mind) that the nave is narrow (forty-one feet), while the exterior length of the church (without the steps) is five hundred and fifteen feet, and the height of the church to the top of the Dome approaches three hundred feet. Doubtless all this was of the utmost esoteric significance, if only I could grasp it. A hundred feet above our heads was the Whispering Gallery, and above it again the gamboge cartoons of Paul basking in the white light of twenty-four windows of clear untinted glass. Characteristically in this house of Paul, this Paulhaus of ours, there was no Lady Chapel. Well, Felix whispered an irreverent prayer, touching elbows with his pale girl in black: “O Lord, deliver us from the primacy of the Mobego whose genetic silhouette is the Firm, and its closed system. Suffer us to wander like rational men in the fair psyche-haunted fields of Epicurus, inhabiting our own fair bodies. If you can’t do this, Lord, you should say so clearly and resign.”

  Somewhere about now the terrible thing began to happen. Julian was quite a way up front flanked by numb-looking members of the senior boardroom. Though the service was in progress the broad side aisles of the church were still full of Dutch and German tourists, buying postcards and making the sort of noise that people only manage to make when they are trying to be respectfully quiet. How everything echoed, every scrape of shoe or thwack of hassock! I was in my usual bemused dream when Benedicta prodded me with her elbow and said in a shocked whisper, “Look over there. Isn’t that her?” At the far end of the aisle a tall girl was just turning away from the postcard stall having purchased some sort of souvenir; she was hemmed in by the press of tourists which clogged all movement, and for a moment she disappeared from view so that I could not get a clear look at her. Then, as the shuffling crowd moved forward she reappeared once more and I saw that it was indeed she, my one and only Iolanthe; yet somehow subtly transformed. She looked flushed, as if she had been drinking, or had had some strange inner revelation. Her wig wasn’t quite snug, and looked badly in need of cleaning, as indeed did her whole person. The heels of her shoes were worn down to stumps. A torn raincoat. There was a small gash in her left calf which had been mended with a piece of surgical tape. She limped.

  For a long moment I stood frozen into a statue of surprise, and then I started out in her direction; and as I did so I saw another figure detach itself from the front pews and start to glide towards her, as cautiously as a child trying to catch a rare butterfly. Julian had seen her! We were still quite a way off when all of a sudden she turned her eyes (they seemed to blaze with a fierce and somewhat distraught glare) upon the congregation. It was her turn to feel surprised—for the whole of Merlin’s was there! How common she looked now, like some down-at-heel whore; her features had gone drawn and ugly. But recognition was swift. She started so sharply that she dropped her handbag. In a flash she retrieved it and tried to struggle back into the crowd, to regain the west door; it was pure panic, for we were moving with relative freedom while she was clogged in the mass of visitors. Baffled in her attempt to penetrate the solid mass and thus gain the street, she suddenly changed her tack, and tried to lose herself in the crowd ahead of her—the crowd which was trickling forward into the church. Here there was less resistance and she was able to get herself pushed and shoved forward. But we were now close behind her, and her desperation was obvious from the way she looked this way and that, hunting for an escape route. “Iolanthe” I hissed in a bloodcurdling stage-whisper but she did not turn round; she simply burrowed more deeply into the sheltering crowd. Julian was ahead of me, crouching like a wrestler as he pushed and shoved his way towards her. We were both expelled at the end of the aisle, like cartridges from a gun, by the sheer press of human bodies. And here to our dismay we lost her to view. A moment of despair held us motionless and then Julian gave a little cry and said: “Up there Felix.” She had darted up the spiral stairway in the south side. We could hear her panting as we started after her. Everything began to get blurred in my mind now; what, after all, were we going to do, pinion her? I don’t believe Julian had really thought about it; he just wanted to grab hold of her and never let her go …. We heard the footsteps running across the gallery of the south triforium. We galloped after her, panting, dishevelled, incoherent—and so up into the famous Whispering Gallery which my guide had just told me was a hundred feet from the floor of the church; if you stand where we now stood, glaring hungrily at her, panting, pale as hunters, you can hear with perfect clarity the whisper of someone opposite you 107 feet away…. But she had come here to hide, not to whisper; nevertheless she was whispering now, talking to herself under her breath in the most affecting way. I heard: “O please God don’t let them get me. Don’t let them take me back. I’ll do anything, anything.” It was bloodcurdling this little whisper. She did not address a word to us as we stood there trying to catch our breath. It was to herself she was whispering; and in the midst of the whispered appeals came little clicks like sobs out of focus, and little clucks like a tiny chick. There was no need for us to concert our plan—the design of the gallery made it automatic. Julian went one way round, while I took the other; there was, at last, no escape for poor Iolanthe. But now her rage and despair had once more transformed her features into those of some sick demon let loose from the lower floors of the Inferno. Now at last she began to gabble and click and whistle at us, to deride us, to defy us. Never have I heard on the lips of a woman such obscenities as she uttered now. Julian was faster than I, and she spat and spat again into his white face as he approached her with the expression of a sleepwalker. Indeed, we both felt caught up in some waking nightmare so unreal did it seem. Below the leather-bound booming and crooning made an almost solid sea of sound, washing back and forth; above the bright white light illuminated the cartoons in grisaille which pointed up the main events in the life of Paul. And here we were on this echoing catwalk, holding on to the low golden balustrade in order to grapple with a raging steel maenad. “Iolanthe!” I cried in despair as I approached.

  Julian had reached her now and they began to reel and struggle like drunkards. And now, just as I came up, the horrible thing happened. She gave a sudden leap like a high-tined stag over the balustrade; in a flash Julian had caught at her frock and held it, himself hanging over the rail. For what seemed a hundred years they hung thus like some human snail, and then the cloth began to tear. Julian made a desperate grab to increase his purchase, but in vain. They fell together into the echoing nave; in a wild and shattering moment of vision I saw them flatten out like arrows as they fell. But the scream I uttered deafened me to the noise of the crash as they hit the marble floor with its black brooding hexagonal stone. Hardly knowing what I was doing I lurched back across the gallery and down the spiral stairway. Like the rings made by a stone in water the impact of their fall had deflected the crowd. From the corner of my eye I thought I had seen something small and white fly from Julian’s body as it hit the floor; strange how in moments of utter panic some small observation gets registered with the utmost fidelity. I could not see the body of Julian, there was a crowd round it; but I crossed to the pew and verified that the white object had indeed skimmed there. I picked it up. It was the little white rabbit’s paw he always carried on him—the gambler’s mascot.

  But if I could not get to Julian Iolanthe presented no such problem; she
had, so to speak, cleared her own space. At this moment, this very moment, she was slowly turning on her axis and making a low humming sound. Sometimes when a motor bike falls on its side with its engine still running it turns in an arc in just this manner. I felt the tears rise in my eyes. Everyone was there, the confusion was raging like a cataract: Baum, Marchant, Benedicta, Banubula—all shaken out of their wits, white with surprise and horror. But it was really Iolanthe who had broken my heart, as I had hers. And the danger now was that she was “live”, could electrocute someone. I suppose I should have used a thermal lance, but all we could raise was a boy scout’s sheath knife. “Felix, for Godsake careful!” shouted Marchant above the din of voices, but somehow I didn’t care. I crawled into the magic circle she was tracing with that lovely body of hers, and plunged my knife into her throat. I knew just where, in order to stop the whole works. And that is the story of the Fall, and how I slew my darling more in sorrow than in anger, more in sickness than in health. Iolanthe! Benedicta cried, “Felix. Don’t cry like that”, in a voice of anguish; but what’s a poor inventor to do?