At Naos all the lights were on, and she stalked rapidly through the rosegardens into the house where we found the sleepy-looking figure of the Count half dozing by the telephone. She handed him the slip of paper, but it seemed that he was already au courant. “Yes, they phoned here” he said, and added “What is to be done?”
“Is your passport visa’d for Turkey?”
“Yes.”
“Then take the car to the Salonika border; it will be easy to get him over if we lose no time.”
The Count yawned heavily and pressed his ringed hands together. “Very well” he said mildly. “Very well.”
Hippolyta turned to me and said: “Will you find Sipple for him? You know where he lives.”
“Sipple?”
“We must get him out of Athens as swiftly as possible. The Count will drive him to Salonika if you can find him and persuade him to pack in a hurry.”
“What has Sipple been doing?”
“I’ll explain everything later.” But she never did.
Banubula took the wheel of the big car after having stowed away a small dressing case, containing I presumed a change of clothing; he would be away a night at least. Somewhat to my surprise he proved a powerful and fastish driver, and it was not very long before we were back in the streets of the capital. We proposed to divide the labour; he would go to Kandili and draw oil and petrol, while I crossed the Plaka and alerted Sipple. We should meet at the Tower of the Winds as soon as may be. It could not be too soon for me, I reflected, for I was very tired and the hour was late. A faint grey pallor on the sea-horizons of the east suggested that the dawn—which breaks very early in summer—was not far off. In the meantime … Sipple. I crossed the Plaka rapidly, using my pocket torch whenever necessary in the unlighted corners.
I had never been inside Sipple’s quarters; but I had had them pointed out to me during one of my walks about Athens at night. He occupied the whole of the first floor of a pretty ramshackle building of a faintly Byzantine provenance. Long narrow wooden balconies looked out towards the Observatory and the Theseum—a pleasant orientation. Two long wooden staircases mounted to the first floor from the street level—and these were a mass of flowers and ferns sprouting from petrol tins. There was hardly a passage to be pressed between them. As I made my way up, however, I noticed that the glass door at the end of the balcony was ajar, and that a faint light shone from somewhere inside the cluster of gaunt rooms. This would offer some encouragement—I should not have to knock and wake up all his neighbours.
The first room was dark and empty of everything except some rickety bamboo furniture. The walls were decorated with esoteric objects like pennons, flags of many nations, and photographs of Sipple in various poses. Two large bird cages, muffled against the light by a green shawl, hung in the window. All this my pocket torch picked up with its vivid white beam. I half whispered and half called his name, but no answer came out of the inner room, and I made my way towards it after a decent interval, pushing open the door with my hand.
The light—dimmer than I had supposed—came from a fanlight which marked, no doubt, a lavatory. In the far corner of the room stood a rumpled and disordered bed. I did not at first look at it carefully, deeming that Sipple himself was to be found beyond the lighted door attending to the calls of nature. Indeed I could hear him breathing. More to mark time than anything I swept the cheap deal table with my lamp. On it stood a half-packed suitcase and a British passport made out in the name of Alfred Mosby Sipple. So he was already packing! I advanced to look at a framed photograph on the chest of drawers, and then something impelled me to take a closer look at the bed. I was not prepared for the shock that followed. I suddenly became aware that there was a figure in the bed lying with its face turned away towards the wall and the bedclothes drawn up to its chin. It was Iolanthe! Or at first sight it seemed to be her—so remarkable was the facial resemblance between her and the sleeping figure. One would have said her twin brother—for it was a youth, his style of haircut showed it. Intrigued, I advanced closer, feeling my curiosity turning to a vague alarm at the silence and pallor of the face—this face of Iolanthe. A glimpse of white teeth showed between bloodless lips. Then, as I touched the sheet, drawing it back, my blood began to curdle for the youth had had his throat cut like a calf. The pallor and the silence had been those of death, not sleep. There was no immediate trace of blood for it had all drained downwards into the bed. The deed then had been carried out in this same position while the youth lay sleeping. I recoiled in horror and as I did so I heard the clumsy bang of the home-made watercloset. A bar of sallow light entered the room through the open door frame in which stood Sipple, doing up his trousers. We stared at one another for a long moment, and I suppose he must have seen from my expression that I knew what had taken place in that soiled and rumpled bed. His face seemed to float in the yellow light like a great yolk. Traces of greasepaint still clung to it, grotesquely outlining one eye and his chin. His fingers depended from his wrists like cubist bananas. He gave something between a sob and a giggle; then taking a step towards me he held out a pleading hand and whispered: “I swear I didn’t do it. He’s mine, but I swear I didn’t do it.” We stayed fixed in this tableau for what seemed an age. Somewhere a clock ticked. The dawn was advancing. Then I heard the first sleepy chirping of Sipple’s birds under their covers. My throat was parched and aching. Moreover something else had begun to play about the corners of my mind in disquieting fashion. In lifting the sheet I had noticed traces of something, just a few grains here and there, scattered on the sheet and pillow; I thought at first of powdered graphite which can give off a sheen. And then I was reminded of the black nail varnish of Iolanthe, the dark shellac mixture which set hard and glossy, but also chipped easily. It was not a thought or observation I pushed very far—my mind was like that of a startled rabbit. But it stayed, it nagged. Meanwhile here before my eyes was Sipple, apologetically shortening his braces and pouting at me, like a man who has been wronged and feels upon the point of tears. Behind him the sky was whitening over the sleeping city. Far off came the buzzing tang of a semantron from the Theological Seminary, calling the students to early prayers. The birds stirred, half asleep. Sipple said brokenly, but under his breath, talking purely to himself, “It’s leaving the birds that really hurts.” Now I heard the whimper of the big car climbing the steep slope by the temple, and reversing into position.
The tiredness which had been overwhelming me had been banished at a stroke. I walked about the city for more than an hour, drinking a raki or an ouzo in the few taverns which opened at dawn in preparation for the market carts rolling into the city with their produce. I could not get the picture of Sipple’s empty bedroom with its silent recumbent figure in the corner, out of my mind. I even returned and circled the quarter like a criminal returning to the scene of his crime, gazing up at the silent windows, wondering what I should do, if anything. Finally I fell asleep on a park bench and woke when the sun was up, stiff with rheumatism from the heavy dew which had soaked my clothes.
I limped back to the hotel, relieved to find the clumsy front door already open; the porter Nik, still in his underclothes, was brewing coffee in a little Turkish coffee spoon. He jerked his head sleepily—a gesture which had become formalised both as a greeting and as an indication that Iolanthe was at present upstairs in Number Seven. Yawning with fatigue I shuffled my way up. The door of the room was ajar, and so was the door of the bathroom. Her handbag and clothes were on the bed, but I could hear her stirring next door. She had not heard me come in. I walked to the half-open door and once more my heart turned a complete somersault. She was lying in the dry tin bath covered from head to foot in fresh blood—for all the world as if she had been brutally murdered and cut to ribbons. I almost cried out but abruptly caught sight of her rapt and happy face. She was crooning to herself in a soft nasal tone, and I could just catch the words of an island song which was very much in vogue at that time: “My father is among his olive-trees.” As sh
e sang she was dabbing the vivid menstrual blood on her cheeks, her forehead, her breasts—literally painting herself in it. I recoiled before she caught a glimpse of me, and retreated on tiptoe into the corridor whence I re-entered Number Seven, this time making a characteristic noisy entrance. I heard her call my name. The bathroom door was abruptly closed, and with a swish the bath-taps went on.
I took off my shoes and lay half drowsing on the bed until she had finished. She emerged wearing my old green dressing-gown, her face radiant with a kind of defiant elation. “I have news” she said breathlessly. “Look!” She took up a key from the mantelshelf and held it up, tapping the air with it. “The key of a villa!” She sat down by my feet, bubbling over with joy. In the absurd phrasing of newspaper demotic she added: “At last! I have been solicited by a great personality! Think, Charlock! A salary, clothes, a little villa in the Plaka.” For the girls of her persuasion this was the ultimate dream realised—to find oneself the mistress of a rich man. My congratulations seemed to her somewhat tepid—though in truth they were heartfelt enough; it was simply that I was dazed, half asleep, and with my mind swimming with the events of that evening. She put a sympathetic paw on my thigh, misinterpreting my lukewarmness, and went on: “Mind you, I would have stayed with you if you had really wanted. If you had spat in my mouth and said you owned me…. But it is better that we should be good friends like we are, is it not?”
Her sincerity was so disarming that I almost began actively to regret the intrusion of this “great personality” upon the blameless youthful life we had enjoyed in Number Seven. I saw, so to speak, rapidly thrown down upon one another—or fanned out like a pack of gaily coloured cards—the thousand and one glimpses I had obtained of Athens entirely through her kind offices. I saw her buying fish, or Easter ribbons, or coloured chapbooks containing the shadowplay texts, or swimming in a cove with towed hair fanned out behind. “It’s really excellent news.” She crinkled her laughing eyes up, relieved. “And it may lead to other things. This man has great influence.” I could not then imagine what other things such an assignment might lead to.
“Who is he? Do you know?”
“Not yet.” This was a lie, of course.
The trouble with memory, and its prolix self-seeding process, is that it can always by-pass the points of intersection at which we recognise, or seem to recognise, the action of a temporal casuality. Is it a self-indulgence to want to comb it out like a head of hair? Reminded of the severed heads of Turkish traitors prepared so scrupulously for exhibition—the hair washed and curled, the beard pomaded, the eyesockets massaged with cream by terrified Greek barbers. Or the shrunken heads in bottles of spirit which still fetch great sums as talismans in the High Taurus. Well, and among these fugitive snapshots I found a faded one of Io on her island, helping her old father with his small crop of maize. At one blow she could shed the city with all its spurious sophistications and revert to the healthy peasant. Once on holiday I had seen her barefoot walking the deep dust of the road, bronze-powdered from head to foot, with a poppy between her teeth. Given the means this would have been her idea of advancement—to help the little man with his walnut-wrinkled face on some burning hillside, among the banded vipers. The key to the stuffy villa in Pancrati was the sesame which might lead her homewards, though not before she had endured all the vicissitudes and privations which come from exclusive ownership. Months later appearing, dressed like a typical adulteress in a voluminous scarf and dark glasses, to announce that she was going away—traded presumably to some wealthy client on the Nile. But no, something better, far better. Then in a tone appropriate to the comic side of Athenian life—its Aristophanic simplicities. “Ouf, I can hardly sit down; he has a taste for the whip, this one.”
I did not go back to Naos until I was summoned, a week or two later; nor, by some curious chemistry of the unconscious, did I mention anything at all about Sipple, or about my visit to his rooms. Neither did Hippolyta. Nor, most perplexing of all, could I find any reference to the matter in the newspapers which I so diligently perused in the Reading Rooms of the local library. Not a word, not a breath. It was to be presumed then that the whole thing had been a bad dream? Hippolyta was alone in the rambling house, lying almost waist-deep in newsprint, her cheeks pink, her voice crackling at the edges with triumph. She embraced me with a curious reverential, a devotional tenderness—the precise way that the Orthodox peasants salute an ikon. “Graphos” she cried, the tears rose to her blackbird’s eye. “O do look. Have you read it?” I had not. The press was plastered with it. “It is the greatest speech he has ever made—all Athens is thrilled. He has found himself again.”
These esoteric matters concerning the vicissitudes of Athenian political life were of no concern to me; or so it then seemed. “But you don’t understand. His party is reformed at a single blow. He is certain now to carry the autumn election and that will save the day.”
“For whom? For what?”
“For us all, silly.”
She poured me a drink with shaking hand, wading through the bundles of newsprint with their vivid many-coloured letterpress, all bannering the name of Graphos, all carrying cartoons of him, photographs of him. “He wants to see you, to thank you. He will receive you whenever you wish.”
And receive me he did, in one of those high-ceilinged rooms in the Ministry with polished parquet floors and beautiful Baluchistan carpets—receive me moreover at a magnificent rosewood desk containing nothing but an empty blotter and his own silver cigarette lighter. It was the sort of desk which is only used to initial an occasional treaty. He was paler, thinner and a good deal sadder at close quarters than I had imagined him to be—but the thin man gave off a sort of excited candence. It was gratitude partly, but also mixed with curiosity. Touching his ear with a tapering finger he asked if anyone knew of my inventions, and whether I had taken any steps to profit by them. I had only thought vaguely of the matter—the first thing was to perfect the idea…. “No. No” he said emphatically, standing up in his excitement. “My dear friend, do not lose your chance. There may be a great fortune in this for you; you must protect yourself somehow.” His rapid and fluent French conveyed better than English could have done the temper of his excitement; I suppose I must have presented myself badly, vaguely, for my apparent indifference piqued him. “Please,” he said “I implore you to let me express my gratitude by putting you in touch with my associates who would be glad to help you put the whole thing on a proper basis. I am determined that you must not lose by this thing. Or must I plead with Hippolyta to convince you? Reflect.” I confess I thought he exaggerated somewhat, but what was there to lose? “You could at least examine their proposals; if you agreed with them you would find yourself well protected. There could be a great fortune in this device.”
I thanked him and agreed. “Let me take it upon myself to send you to Polis for a few days to meet them and discuss with them. No harm can come of it; but at least my conscience will be at rest. I owe you a debt, sir.”
I was indeed a little puzzled by my own hesitation in the matter. Certes, I had vaguely thought of patenting the device one day and licensing it perhaps; but several reasons came into play here. First, it seemed to spoil all the fun, second I could not be sure that other devices of the same order had not been thought of—the principle was spade-simple. But these considerations seemed to carry little weight with Graphos who brushed them aside with the remark that within a week he could find out and have the matter put upon a professional basis. Well, I let it go at that, but before leaving congratulated him somewhat sychophantically upon the speech which I had not read. He winced and became shy, and I suddenly saw what an effort it must have cost this shy, reticent and orderly mind to launch itself into public affairs. He had the soul of a grammarian, not a demagogue. When I spoke, for example, of the poetry I pretended to discover in it he held up thin hands to his ears and protested. “Rhetoric, not poetry. You could not convince with mere poetry. Indeed there has always been something a
little suspect about the latter for me since I read that Rimbaud insisted on wearing a top-hat in London. No, our objectives are limited ones. If we get in again it will be to try and prove only that the key to the political animal is magnanimity. A frail hope I agree.” And he smiled his pale sad smile, moistening his lips with his snaky tongue. His fine small teeth were turned inwards, like the spokes of a lobster-pot. “So you will agree to let me send you?” I nodded and he sighed with unfeigned relief and rose to shake my hands with a surprising gratitude. “You don’t know how much pleasure it will give me to send you to see my associates; even if nothing should come of it I shall feel I have discharged my obligation to you. Certainly you will have nothing to complain of from the firm.”
The blue sunlight of Athens seemed so firm and stable a back-cloth to my restless ideas that I was not conscious of having made any kind of decision, far less a momentous one. Hippolyta slept in her cane chair under a fallen triumphant newspaper, showing a tip of tongue, smiling like a javelin-thrower who has scored a hit. Caradoc, beside her, put a finger to his lips and smiled. It was still early, the bees dew-capped from the flowers they visited. “An olive-branch nailed to the inn-door of the world.” Far away in the harbour the sirens went bim and their echoes bim bim to slap the buttocky waters of the sound, scattering from one steel surface to the next. “I am going to Turkey.” Caradoc gestured. “Shh!”
So we sat, hushed in sunlight, until I felt a drowsiness creeping over me—compact with fragments seeded from recent memories of conversations jumbled and jostled—switching points like express trains as they roared through deserted junctions. Hippo, for example, in a reported speech: “I cannot sleep alone, yet no-one pleases me. It is a real dilemma.” The turntable spinning away into sleep, lips parted. Then with equal suddenness some articles from Sipple’s rooms which I was not conscious of having noticed at the time: cold prunes and custard in a chipped soup-plate, a blue enamel teapot, and a large pair of dressmaker’s scissors. Then some unidentified naked woman from the Anthology, “of delicate address and lovely insinuation”. Dead notes on a classical keyboard—or might it have been already Benedicta? Here is a love-letter. “Benedicta, I love you. The collection of delta spacings for several radiations permits the identification of spurious peaks resulting either from target contamination or incomplete filtration of K alpha radiation. Your Felix”. Yes, on some mutinous machine like Abel, will dawn one day the cabyric smile. Idly drifting, thistledownwise came Koepgen with his “promissory notes drawn upon reality”. Monks with impetigo, their heads shaved, arousing his pithy sarcasm with their great leather-bound octavo farts. “Must one, then, negotiate with God?” he exclaims oddly; hunting as if for a thorn one can’t quite locate—this is not in my line. Some tiny tufts of north wind rise now and shuffle the roses. Caradoc is trying to keep awake by writing a Mnemon, as he calls it. We have promised to collaborate on a macabre pantomime to be called “The Babes in the Food”. As sudden but less distinct comes the scorching rain of white roses in Faust—whole epochs of redemption or desire. Caradoc saying with much severity about K: “He has been slumming among the Gnostics, selling his birthright for a pot of message. He will end by becoming an Orthodox Proust or a monarcho-trappist. All monks are grotesque lay figures—figures of funk.”
The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam Page 9