“Then why?” she said with a puzzled frown.
“His suicide? But he left a letter listing a number of reasons—mostly trivial ones you would say, even insignificant reasons. Yet taken all together I suppose they weighed something. Good Lord, the firm had no part in the matter.” He looked shocked. She drew a sigh of relief and sat down. “Then?” Jocas went on, frowning, as if trying to puzzle out the matter for himself. “We look at things from the wrong point of view. I mean, how many reasons could you give for wanting to go on living? The list would be endless. So there is never one reason, but scores. You know in a funny sort of way he could never get used to the idea of security—it was almost as if he couldn’t wait for his wife to get her pension.” He burst out laughing in a strange half-rueful way and struck his thigh. “Ah! old Sacrapant!” he said and shook his head. “He will be impossible to replace.” I saw the little figure falling.
A bell rang urgently and someone signalled from the deck house by the bridge. Reluctantly Jocas took himself off, to stand in the sheets of the little pinnace looking up at us with a curious expression on his face—a mixture of affection and sadness. “Be happy” he called across the separating water, as if perhaps he had scented some fugitive disharmony in us after all: and the little craft suddenly reared up and began its glib motion as it raced away towards the land.
“Come,” said Benedicta, taking my arm “let’s go down for a spell.” She wanted to go down to the cabin, to lie about and talk or read—most probably to make love: until the first bell went for dinner. Well, but by dark we were crawling through the Straits again bound for the furthest corners of the world. Columbus Charlock! I do not believe that one can love without analysing—though I know that too much analysis can spoil loving: but here at least nothing but contentment found a place, a luxurious self-surrender which made death seem very far away. That was it, death!
Somewhere there is an album full of photographs of this royal progress—photographs taken, not by us, but by the captain and crew who shepherded us through all the adventures of travel with such docile assiduity. Later a handsome bound volume, with the record duly mounted and in the right order, arrived on the hall table with the compliments of the shipping line. Well then, on the back of bloody elephants bucketing up the holy mountain in Ceylon, wearing weird pith helmets against the sun. Then some tiger shoots in India —Benedicta lavender-pale and slender, with her triumphant little boot upon the head of the beast: the rigor had stiffened its snarl into a silent travesty of the last defensive gesture. Smack! Hong Kong, Sydney, Tahiti—the long ritual led us on, offering no demands upon us.
But these superficial records could not deal with everything, take account of everything. For example, unknown to either of us, Iolanthe was also aboard—or rather her image was, the public one, printed on celluloid. Among the films we were shown as we crossed the Indian Ocean was one made in Egypt, trivial and melodramatic, in which to my surprise Iolanthe had a small part. She swam up out of the screen without warning, moving into close-up which projected her enlarged face with its heavily doctored eyeshapes almost into my lap. My surprise made me sit up with an exclamation and grip Benedicta’s hand.
“Good Lord.”
“You know her?”
“It’s Iolanthe of all people.”
It was not much of a part, it lasted barely half a minute. But it was enough to glimpse an entirely new person grafted upon the one I had known. After all, the smallest gesture gives a clue to the inner disposition—a way of walking, position of hands, cant of the head. All right. Here she had to cut up food and put it on a plate; then to walk with the plate across a strip of sand, to bow, to serve. In this very brief repertoire of acts and gestures—some so familiar from which I recalled the old being—I saw a new one. “It’s a common little face” said Benedicta with distaste and a contempt that extended itself with justice to the whole ridiculous film, with its sheiks and dancing girls. “Yes. Yes.” Of course she was right; but how much less coarse, less common, than the original Iolanthe I had known. On the contrary these photographs suggested a new kind of maturity; her gestures had become studied, graceful, no longer impulsive and uncoordinated, fluent. Some of this I tried to express to Benedicta but she did not follow; she turned her cryptic smile upon me and pressed my hand confidingly. “But she is being directed and rehearsed by the metteur-en-scène, my dear: and he probably sleeps with her as well to get her to do things his way.” Of course this was true and yet … entirely factitious? The change seemed to hold a whole range of significance for me. I was puzzled; more mysterious still, I felt wounded in an obscure sort of way—almost as if I had been tricked. Could I perhaps have missed the most interesting part of my little mistress by the merest inattention? I was nudged into surprise by that short insignificant scene. Moreover, in order the better to analyse my own response to it, I asked for it to be played over again the following afternoon while Benedicta was taking her siesta. No, the astonishment remained. The coarseness, the street-arab knowingness, had found a point of repose where it could manifest itself calmly as naked human experience. This gave point to a new angle of the head, to the resurrection of a smile which I knew on lips which I knew—but which I had never noticed. Or had they not then been there? Iolanthe! Heavens! I saw the rust-stained marbles rising against the keen skies of Attica. I rummaged, so to speak, among my stock of memories, to find correspondences to match this new personage—in vain. The screen-figure corresponded so little to the original that I felt as if she had somehow hoaxed me. My mood of puzzled abstraction lasted until dinner time, when Benedicta noticed it—for she missed nothing. “I hear you have been visiting your girl friend while I was asleep” she said with a rather cruel smile, her lips curving mischievously up at the corners. “Isn’t it rather early in the day to start being unfaithful to me?” It was a joke, and should have been taken as such.
But I wanted to be serious, to explain how confused and puzzled I had been by this parody of nature. O yes I did. Benedicta would have none of it. “You can have all the women you want provided you tell me about it in detail” she said, and a sudden new light, a little grim this time, came into her eye. It was rather annoying for this was hardly the point. Besides nothing could be more distasteful than to provoke the sort of middle-class tiff common to middle-class couples in the suburbs of loathsome capitals. I was outraged by her vulgarity. “It was only a joke” she said.
“How idiotic to quarrel over a strip of film.”
“I am not quarrelling. Felix, look at me.”
“Nor am I.” I obeyed. We kissed but with constraint. What the devil was wrong? But we finished the meal in silence and after it stalked up on deck to sit side by side in deck-chairs, smoking and musing. “How much do you know about this girl?” she asked at last; somewhat peevishly I replied. “Certainly more than I know about you, even after all this time.” Benedicta’s eye narrowed with anger, and when she was in this mood she set her ears back like a scared cat.
“I will answer any question you put to me.”
“I have never insisted on you answering questions.”
“How could you insist?”
“Or even ask. I want you as you are, exactly as you are at this moment; I don’t care if you are still a bit of an enigma.”
She turned her hard blue eye upon me with a new expression which I had not seen before and which I might describe as an amused contempt, and yawned behind her brown fingers. “My poor Felix” she said in a tone which made me long to strike her.
I took myself off to bed with an improving book, but when the clock struck midnight and she had not put in an appearance I dressed again and went on deck to find her. She was sitting alone in the deserted bar, leaning heavily upon it, dozing. “Thank God you’ve come,” she said incoherently “I can’t stand up.” She was in fact dead drunk. It was all the more surprising because she was ordinarily a very modest drinker. I helped her laboriously along the deck to the cabin where she sat on her bunk, swaying sligh
tly, holding her head in her hands. “On Thursday we touch at Macao” she said. “That is where Max died of typhoid fever. I do not want to go ashore.” I said nothing. She went on: “He was a musician, but not a good one. But he had invented something which didn’t exist until then—a copying machine for scores, for parts. It wasn’t complete, and it took some of the best brains in the firm to develop and market it. Anything else you want to know?”
“Did you have a marriage settlement with him?”
Her eye lit with a sulphurous gleam, the embers of a queer triumph shining through the whisky daze.
“No” she said; but the tone in which she said it permitted me to construe the words “There was no need.” (I jumped with guilt at so treacherous a thought.)
Then she held up her cupped hands pleadingly and said: “But even if he had been alive I’d have left him for you.”
It was not possible to resist her when she was in this mood—sitting like some forlorn collapsing edifice, foundering among its own distresses. I felt crushed under the weight of my self-reproaches. I soaked her patiently in hot water, helped her to be sick, and towelled her back to some semblance of sobriety; afterwards she lay, pallid and exhausted, in my arms until daybreak when she was able once more to whisper the little phrase which had become almost a slogan for us. Always after making love she would say: “Let’s always, Felix.”
So Macao passed, and with it some of the weight of her private preoccupations; her mood lightened and made room for a new gaiety, a new responsiveness. We had become used to the ship by now and familiar with the habit of life. It was almost as if we had never lived land-life. And as we neared our final port of disembarkation we even started to take part in the absurd dinners and fancy-dress dances which we had found so distasteful during the first weeks of the voyage. In fact the night before we reached Southampton we went the whole hog and borrowed fancy dresses and masks from the extensive wardrobe of the vessel. I was Mephisto I think, with eyebrows of jet; she was a nun in a great white coif of starched linen. It was while she was making up her face in the mirror that she said, in an almost terror-stricken tone: “You know Felix I may be pregnant —have you thought about it? What shall I do?”
“How do you mean?”
About the blood and all that. It was not very consistent.
She was sitting there in front of the mirror staring into her own wide eyes with an expression of silent panic. Then she gave a long trembling sigh and shook herself awake from the momentary trance, turning away towards the door of the cabin with the air of someone leaving the condemned cell. And all that evening she hardly spoke; from time to time I caught her looking at me with an expression of inexpressible sadness. “What is it, Benedicta?” But she only shook her head and gave me a tremulous smile; and after the dance, when we reached the cabin, she tore off her coif and shook out her golden hair, turning upon me with a sudden air of agonised reproach, to cry: “O can’t you see? It will change everything, everything.”
That last night we lay side by side unsleeping, staring up into the darkness, our strange voyage almost over.
We stepped ashore in a mist of grey watered silk, to find the car waiting on the dockside. Someone had already been aboard to take charge of the luggage; we had nothing to do except to negotiate the gangplank and take refuge under the black umbrella the chauffeur held for us. “Welcome back!” We sat in the back of the car, hand in sympathetic hand, but quite silent, watching the ghostly countryside whirl away around us. Gusts of wind stirred the tall trees; heath moulded itself away into heath, dotted here and there by statuary of soaked forest ponies. At last we came to the big house, which seemed no longer full of people; but there were fires going everywhere, and the muzzy smell of oldfashioned central heating filled the air. A lunch table had been laid for us. It was a queer sensation to be on land again; I still felt the sea rocking in my semicircular canals. Baynes was there to greet us with his air of lugubrious kindness; he had mixed one of his excellent cocktails, Benedicta took hers upstairs for a while. I heard the telephone ring, and saw Baynes switch the extension lever sideways so that it would sound on the first-floor landing. I heard Benedicta speaking, her voice sharp and animated. When she came down she was all smiles. “It was Julian. He sends his love to us. He says that you’ll have a pleasant surprise when you next visit the office. We’ve had a big success with your first two devices.”
That afternoon I motored up to London to my by now unfamiliar desk, to be greeted with good news that Julian had promised me. Congreve and Nathan brought me the whole dossier, including all the advertising and promotion. “It’s a landslide, Charlock” said Congreve happily, washing his hands with invisible soap. “You sit tight and watch your royalty scale; there seems to be no ceiling—the German and American figures aren’t even complete and look at sales.”
All this was extremely gratifying. But at the back of the dossier was another folder somewhat cryptically labelled “Dr. Marchant’s adaptation of the filament to gunsighting”. Neither Congreve nor Nathan could enlighten me as the meaning of it. When they left me I picked up the phone and asked the switchboard to try and unearth Julian for me; this took some time, and when at last I did locate him his voice sounded a good way off, as if he were speaking from the depths of the country. I cut short his conventional greetings and congratulations and at once broached the subject of the dossier. Julian said: “Yes, I was meaning to talk to you about it. Marchant runs our electrical side down at Slough. You may have met him, I don’t know. But when we were going into production he at once seized upon your device and applied it to something he himself was working on—a vastly improved gunsighting system. It looks very promising indeed; the Services are most excited by it. We have not moved properly into prototype as yet, but in a month or two we’ll have a trial shoot with the Army and see what we’ve got. I don’t need to emphasise the importance of the contracts we might get; and of course your patent is fully protected. It would mean a terrific jump in your royalties. I hope you are pleased.”
My silence must have disabused him of the idea, because he repeated the last phrase somewhat more anxiously and went on: “Of course I should perhaps have consulted you—but then you were somewhere on the high seas and Marchant was eager to get going with this infra-red electrical device….” His voice tailed lethargically away. “I feel” I said “as though my invention has been wrenched out of my hands.” It was marvellous the way he managed to convey the notion of a sympathetic smile over the phone, the kindly touch upon the elbow. “O don’t take it like that, Charlock. It isn’t the case. It’s your device differently applied, that is all.”
“Nevertheless” I said stubbornly, spectacles on nose. “Nevertheless, Julian.” He clicked his tongue sympathetically and went on with redoubled suavity. “Please accept my humblest apologies; I should have asked. But now the damage is done, so please forgive me won’t you?”
There was in fact nothing to be done but bow to it. “Where is Marchant?” I said. “He is on his way up to you now” said Julian, his voice suddenly fading into a thicket of scratchy interruptions. There was a click and we were cut off. I looked up to find Marchant standing before my desk with the air of an aggrieved collie, tousle-haired and shortsighted behind steel-rimmed spectacles of a powerful magnification, basted with insulation tape. He held out a long limp hand with fingers heavily stained by nicotine and acid. “It’s me” he said in his whining disagreeable voice, without removing the wet fag end from his lower lip. “Of course we’ve met.” “Sit down” I said with as much cordiality as I could muster. His whole appearance spoke of the stinks labs of some provincial university—much-patched tweed coat and grey bags: extremely dirty and crumpled shirt with missing stud. He threw a bundle of drawings on to the desk and drew up a chair in order to explain them, pointing cautiously with a silver-hilted pencil. His tweed smelt of wet. I was disposed to adopt an attitude of somewhat boorish resentment towards him, but one glance at his papers showed me the marvellous elegance
of his application; he had made full use of the new sodium-tipped contrivance and applied it, with slightly modified mountings, to the conventional sighting screen of a weapon. I listened to his lucid explanation with unwilling admiration. “But then weapons!” I could not help saying at last. “How disappointing. I was hoping my toys would help the human race, not … well, contribute to its quarrels.” He looked me over, coolly, critically, and with some contempt. Then he lit a cigarette and said: “It’s quite the opposite with me. I hate it. Anything I can do to make things harder for it I will, so help me.” He exposed a row of uneven yellowish teeth in a ferine grin.
“Anyway” I said with unconcealed distaste “I must congratulate you I suppose.”
“It’s too early” he said. “Wait till we have our first shoot and see if this blindsighting device works out. Nor need you repine too much, Charlock; compared to some of the things the firm is working on, this is … why, virtually harmless.” The little intercom panel below my desk lit up and buzzed. Nathan’s quiet voice said: “Mr. Charlock, more good news. Mr. Pehlevi says to tell you that the mercury contract is secure; we can substantially reduce our price on the new costings.”
Marchant was quietly wrapping up his plans and preparing to slide them back into the cardboard tube. His cigarette dangled from his lip. “Marchant have you ever seen Julian Pehlevi?” I asked curiously; I found I was addressing this question to more and more people these days. Very few could say yes—Nathan was one of the rare ones to have had the privilege. Marchant depressed his cheek in a grin and shook his head. “Can’t say I have” he said. “He keeps in touch by phone.”
He hovered for a moment, standing on one leg, as if everything had not been said on this particular topic. “I must say,” I said with a laugh “his damned elusiveness is getting me down—he’s like some blasted ghost.” Marchant scratched his nose. “Yet” he said, surprisingly “he must exist somewhere—look at your paper today.” There was a daily paper lying unopened in my in-tray. Marchant took it up and hunted for a moment before doubling it back at the financial page and handing it to me to read. Julian had made a speech to the Institute of Directors which was reported in full. “You see?” said Marchant. “Several hundred of those bloody directors must have listened to him for an hour yesterday.”
The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam Page 22