The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  Yawning, she went to the telephone, unlocking the door en route; Baynes answered hoarsely from the kitchen. She ordered him to bring some champagne in a bucket and to tell the office that she would use her box at the opera. “Do you agree?” over her shoulder. “It’s my first night in London for so long? And Baynes bring us The Times. We must see what’s on; and a car, please.” A patrician simplicity, both authoritative and endearing. I consulted my watch. There was lots of time. She began her lingering toilet, slipping through the secret panel into her own mirrored rooms. Soon Baynes came, bringing all these trophies of a fashionable life, and I scanned the paper absently. “Ah!” I said. “An obvious mnemon by Caradoc! I wonder where he is now.” And I read out: “Continental type orgy sought by plain living British family, Hornchurch area. No agents.”

  “Ask the office; they’ll tell you” she said, and then in the same breath “You know they want to send us round the world for our honeymoon? Think, round the world.”

  “Who do?”

  “The firm. Julian. Everyone.” I reflected on this a moment. “Isn’t it a marvellous idea?” She eyed me.

  “Yes” I said, but rather doubtfully, and my tone seemed to puzzle her, for she stopped in front of me as she combed out her hair. “Well, isn’t it?” she insisted. I lit a cigarette and said: “Yes, enormously kind of them. But, you know, I was rather hoping we’d sneak off all alone, by ourselves, like a couple of students. I know a dozen little places in Italy and Greece where we could be quite alone, quite out of touch—even with the firm. Besides, why put them to the expense? Think of the cost!”

  “Cost?” she said on a chilling note of interrogation, and with a singular expression on her face. “How do you mean—‘cost’?” I would perhaps have laughed had her strange expression not struck me so forcibly. All this became clearer later on when, after the marriage, I made the intoxicating discovery that we had no real income whatsoever against which to calculate our costs. I mean that there was no ceiling, no budget, no margin. She simply drew money as one draws breath. Any one of the four banks owned by the firm honoured her cheques; notes of hand—the merest scribbles on the back of a postcard or on a page torn from an address book—were honoured by Nathan, the administrative secretary. She never saw a bill in connection with any of the houses she owned. This contributed a vertiginous singularity to her dealings with money. And now that our fortunes were merged by the Shadbolt document I woke up to find that I too was in the same situation. I had no money of “my own”—yet what the devil does the phrase mean? At first it was intoxicating, yes, of course, not to have to reflect on costs; but later (I am talking of the period of the crack-up) I began to feel this as a major factor which contributed to her general confusion of mind. She was capable of buying a bracelet for ten thousand pounds and of leaving it in a taxi. When I grew alarmed about her general state of health, and found myself unable to see the elusive Julian face to face, I remember writing a long eloquent memorandum to him which finally wound up on Nash’s desk. I emphasised that even the Queen had a budgetry ceiling voted by Parliament, yet Benedicta had none. The confusion and waste were simply due to her total lack of knowledge as to what money might conceivably mean. Julian merely replied to my memo with another, neatly typed and signed in that inimitable hand: “Her doctors have been consulted, and also the principals of the firm. No change need be contemplated for the present.” But at this moment I only saw the childish, endearing expression of puzzlement on her face and longed to kiss her. What is more endearing than the capriciousness of a rich woman? O, it is lovely. I might answer the rhetorical question very differently today I suppose. And heavens, I have had eight years or more in which to ponder the matter, along with more recondite subjects—Charlock sitting at his massive desk in Merlin House, drawing on his blotter with the golden pen which lived in a fat agate slab. Scribbling on a blackboard in coloured chalks.

  She turned her white shoulders to me with a sigh. “Do me up at the back, would you please?” And for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, I did, stooping to touch the white skin with my lips. So hand in hand we sauntered downstairs casting admiring glances at ourselves on every landing. Baynes had made up a brown paper parcel of my prehistoric clothes, baggy grey trousers and tweed coats with leather elbow-patches and so on: the uniform of the poor sage! He asked me reverently what he should do with them. I was about to tell him to offer them to the nearest jumble sale when Benedicta intervened with an air of crisp decision and said: “Burn them in the furnace, Baynes.” Baynes bowed to the heavenly will, and so did I, though I opened my mouth as if to speak. What did it matter? He had found an old French briar in one of my pockets, and this he had set aside. I was glad to see it again, though it was pretty much burned out; yet under the cool glance of Benedicta I found myself strangely incapable of reclaiming possession of it. I thought of the sweet-smelling box of cigars in the drawing room. From now on nothing but the choicest Juliets would touch the lips of Charlock. There was a conveniently placed leather case, already filled, upon the mantelpiece. “I think it had better go—it’s pretty used up” I said treacherously to Baynes. He bowed again. “The boots and shoes I have given to the gardener” he said. “They fit him.”

  So we equipped ourselves with coats and wraps and floated through the front door to find the office Rolls—flatus symbol of the new Charlock—lying at anchor, waiting for us.

  Memory refuses to recover the rest of that evening in any detail—behind the stripes and bars of Busoni’s music; only towards dawn, lying exhausted beside each other, I awoke with a jerk to find her talking Turkish in her sleep—the strange crooning bubbling tongue which I had once heard her use to her hawk. She was feverish, tossing and turning in bed like someone trying to throw off, in her sleep, the imaginary bonds of some painful dream. But by morning the shadow had fled with the fever, and she was in sparkling spirits again. I walked half the way to the office across the spring-fermenting city with its frail sunlight, revelling in the green of the parks, the light rime of hoarfrost on the grass. Well, I was dense with happiness—the poor scientist could have trumpeted his joy like an elephant. Jevons the commissionaire was on duty as usual, stamping and chomping with the fresh cold, clad in his green coat with polished brass buttons, his billycock hat; his huge umbrella lay beside the directors’ lift. He lavished his customary hearty pleasantries upon me, and even went so far as to tip me a conspiratorial wink as I passed him with my own black umbrella. It is amazing how quickly one can develop the condescending wave of an umbrella which somehow goes with city clothes. And a bowler! In stately fashion the lift bore me up to the third floor, to the silent and comfortable office from which one could glimpse a corner of St. Paul’s far away to the left of the invisible river line. My despatch-box had already been brought up by Miss Tee, its contents neatly arranged in the metal tray for my perusal. The memorandum of the latest meeting upon the subject of the new light bulb project was already here, duly annotated by the absent Julian and signed by his secretary in his absence. How did he do it, I wondered? I supposed that the minutes were sent to him by Telex. “I am extremely eager to see this project realised,” he wrote heart-warmingly “as it seems one of the most imaginative we have ever undertaken. Please keep it upon the secret list until production department is ready to market. Only one consideration comes to mind. We must remember the prohibitive price of mercury at £150 per 75 lb flask when costing. In this context however I hope shortly to have good news of negotiations going forward in Moscow for supplies of mercury. If we can capture this new market and thus sidetrack the chlorine plants which are responsible for the shortage and high price of this element we should be well on our way towards a signal success. Please press ahead with the first five hundred prototype bulbs.”

  I rang the manservant in the buttery and told him that for the eleven o’clock break I would very much like a bowl of strawberries and cream with a glass of the finest sherry. Corbin was perfectly used to requests of this kind; he woul
d despatch an office boy at once in search of the strawberries. I put in a call to Slough to find out how the engineering department was dealing with the new filament and what the first tests had demonstrated. All was well; there was no deterioration in spite of the tremendous load. It was almost too good to be true, things were moving with such speed and smoothness. There was no meeting today and hardly any paperwork, so I opened the newspaper and sank into a pleasant daydream about Benedicta and the future—a daydream compounded of such various elements that it would not have been possible to sort them all out into a coherent pattern. At any rate not then.

  Later she rang up and said she missed me. She missed me! I was overcome. And as far as Benedicta was concerned I found that I liked her all the better for knowing so little about her; this factor contributed something enigmatic to her—to her strangely withdrawn personality which flourished in privacy like some heavy-perfumed magnolia. Everything therefore was a surprise. Had I felt that she was deliberately keeping secret things she might have shared it would doubtless have been different; but her prohibitions and retreats into panic did not suggest this at all. She had thrown up simply the defences which over-sensitive, perhaps even rather neurotic, people throw up consciously against experiences too deeply felt to be the subject of open discussion. Of course at first the tabus were a little bewildering—but then why should someone not wish not to discuss their fathers or past husbands and so on? It was perfectly defensible; doubtless as we got to know each other better these defences would melt and give way to new understandings. (The strawberries were watery, the sherry indifferent, but I did not care. I was tied to a comet’s tail.) And when I arrived back at Mount Street in the evenings there was no shadow of doubt about the warmth and eagerness with which she threw open the door, forestalling Baynes, to run down the steps and embrace me, almost ravenous for my embrace. Thus arm in arm to the warm fire crackling on the hearth, the winking bottles and decanters, and the prospect of a whole evening spent alone together. “Julian telephoned today and told me to send you his warmest greetings.” Everybody loved me.

  I had noticed that even in the first few days a flock of white envelopes addressed to her had landed like doves upon the hall table. In the morning the office sent her a social secretary to deal with such correspondence, so that when I arrived back I found an equally massive bunch of envelopes stamped and addressed for despatch. I sifted somewhat ruefully through them. “Heavens, you seem to know everybody worthwhile in London.”

  “Those are all refusals” she said. “Besides, I don’t see people any more. I want you to myself. I haven’t for ages. Besides you don’t want to go out and about do you?”

  “Good Lord no.”

  “And then after April I shall be in the country where nobody ever comes. Do you see? And you will drive down for week ends or whenever you get a chance. We’ll be married there, too, if you agree. Julian has arranged it. Just the two of us I mean, with nobody.”

  “So you didn’t want to escape with me?”

  “It wasn’t that, Felix. It’s just that I can’t just disappear like that. I have to stay in touch, you know.”

  “With whom, with what?”

  She looked at me curiously, as though the question were an unexpectedly foolish one: as if she had not expected it from me. “I mean” I went on “you are not working for anyone; you don’t have any real obligations, have you?”

  “None at all.” She gave a small sharp laugh, a sad laugh as she sat down on the hearthrug before the fire to rest her chin upon her drawn up knees and stare into the burning coals. Then it occurred to me that it might be something to do with her doctors, and I kicked myself for a prying fool, kneeling down beside her to put my arms about her shoulders. “I’m sorry Benedicta” I said. She had a trace of a tear in the corner of her eye, but she was still smiling. “It’s of no importance. Come, sit beside me and tell me what you have been doing for the firm. Will you? I want to share everything.”

  This was more easy to do, and most congenial to my mood; and yet, as I started talking about the three first devices which Merlin was to put into immediate production, I could not but feel a sort of helpless despair that they were not more interesting and revolutionary than they were. They were only mechanical contrivances which, however useful, provided crutches for people in need. In the back of my mind I was thinking along more abstract vectors, groping towards something of which Abel is still only a shallow prototype. A behaviouristic abacus of patterned responses which might respond to the very oscillations of the nervous system—something which might both prophesy and retroprophesy…. Nothing was clear as yet; there was so much as yet to be done on the theory of mathematical probability. It made me dizzy thinking about it. But meanwhile my alter felix continued his lucid exposition of the toys for which the firm were to be responsible, and all the time Benedicta listened avidly, as if to music, her head thrown slightly back, eyes closed. And when I had finished—when I had even shown her one of the tiny filaments as some people will show the relics of an operation, a calculus in a bottle—she sighed deeply and put her arms round me, pressing herself to me as if all this prosaic recital had been almost sexually rousing.

  “It’s going to be marvellous” she said. “You will see.”

  There was no doubt of it in my mind; nor anything but overwhelming gratitude to this extraordinary golden creature whose head had sunk now to my knees, half fire-tranced. “I’m determined you are going to be happy” I said. “Happy and not scared.” Put down that goblet, Felix!

  She jumped up at once, startled, and said: “Who said I was scared?” She made as if to walk towards the door but I captured her hands and drew her gently back to the fireplace. “Did Julian say anything?” she said sharply and I answered in the same tone: “Nobody said it; besides I have never met Julian. I thought sometimes you seemed worried, that was all. But it’s over now for good. You have got me to rely on.” I caught sight of my face in the mirror and suddenly felt foolish.

  For good! My clumsy advocacy worked at last; she seated herself beside me once more, relaxed and calm again. Beside the bed that evening I found a couple of books of essays, beautifully bound in green morocco. “I borrowed them from Julian’s flat” she explained. She didn’t say when. Each bore a pretty bookplate with the owner’s initials entwined and a rebus—an ape climbing a pomegranate tree. Here and there passages of the books had been underscored, presumably by the owner. “Out of the present we manufacture the future; what we dream today becomes tomorrow’s reality. All our ills come from incautious dreaming. Trivial or impure dreaming literally rots the fabric of the future. But the dreams of a rarefied psyche help to resolve tensions and build up good sources.” I yawned, she was already asleep, curled up beside me with her head under her wing. Drifting now in her direction with half-shut eyes I dreamed I was addressing the politely subservient members of my board on topics of the greatest moment. “The sails of fancy, gentlemen, swell with the following wind of good fortune.” I was learning how to raise my voice, to suit gestures to the words, to perorate….

  So the brightly etched days rolled by. Julian had apparently returned from his trip abroad, but still put in no appearance at the boards, though his comments upon our lucubrations were as prompt and cogent as ever. I gathered that he did much of his work at home and was hardly ever in his office. It seemed to me strange that he did not make personal contact, if only to shake my hand. In fact I rather looked forward to meeting him. I even suggested to Benedicta that she might ask him to dine with us, but she shook her head doubtfully and said: “You don’t know Julian. He is tremendously shy. He hides himself away. I’m sure he wouldn’t come. He’d just send a huge shelf of flowers with a last minute excuse. You know, Felix, hardly anyone in the office has so much as seen him. He prefers to speak to them on the phone.” It was intriguing to say the least, and at first I was inclined to think that she was exaggerating; but not so. Then one day he phoned me to discuss some point or other—but from the country. Hi
s voice had a thrilling icy sauvity. He spoke slowly, gently, in a dreamy way which suggested more than a hint of world weariness—one imagined Disraeli dictating a state paper in just such a disenchanted tone. I expressed my eagerness to meet him and he thanked me, but added: “Yes, all in good time, Charlock. We certainly must meet, but at the moment I am simply worked off my feet; and you have so much other fish to fry—I refer to your marriage to Benedicta. I can’t tell you how happy that makes us all.”