Marchant had his bath, though except for damp hair awkwardly combed back towards his ears one would hardly have guessed it. We joined each other for a drink by the fire; and he asked if he might play the piano for a moment before taking himself off. He attacked several of the more complicated preludes and fugues of “the 48” with great assurance, but with a total lack of sensibility, working at them like a woodpecker or a cobbler at his last. “Poor Bach!” I said. “I know,” he said cheerfully “I know.” But he seemed to derive great enjoyment from this somewhat awkward operation; he wagged his head about as he played. When he stopped to light a cigarette I said: “You have never been married, have you, Marchant?” He looked at me slyly, his hands poised to resume playing. “Good Lord, what a question. No. Why?” I refilled his glass. “An idle question” I said. “I was wondering why not.” “Why not?” he repeated, as if trying the question, so full of novelty, upon himself for the first time. “I’ve never felt the need. I doubt if real scientists ever do—the need for these charming articulated mummies. At least, I think we belong to a dispossessed tribe, all our affective life is passed in the head; and then, again, after forty you begin to feel out of date and out of sympathy. Do you care for this age particularly? I mean, once our hero was a St. George doing in a Dragon to free a damsel; but now our hero seems to be a spy doing in a damsel in order to escape the dragon. The genius of suspicion has entered the world, my boy. And then, what do you make of the faces of the young? As if they had smashed the lock on the great tuck-box of sex only to find the contents had gone mouldy. Sex should be like King’s drinking, not piglets at teat.”
“My goodness” I said, delighted. “You are an oldfashioned romantic, Marchant. I would never have guessed.”
“I was once in love with a little female butcher, a pretty widow. But you know with all the handling of the meat her little paws had got the fat worked into them. White little plump mortuary fingers. When she touched me I could feel her handling those swinging carcasses. I was cured, but not before I had made some very valuable scientific observations on her. You know the pharmaceutical boys down at Lund’s working on the firm’s perfumes. I was able to turn out a cream for old Robinson which is second to none for rough or chapped skin. But I had to leave her all the same, the girl in question.”
“A sad story.”
“Perhaps; but it illustrates another extraordinary fact about this game. Your best discoveries are always accidental by-products of a search for something you never find; you set out to hunt something and presto, along comes something else, something quite unexpected. Did I tell you about our bottled sweat project—we call it that for a joke? It’s still experimental which means non-existent. It’s interesting in a farcical sort of way. Toller works on perfumes, as you know; well, Nash came up with some Czech psychiatrist’s notion that all perfumes contained a kind of built-in echo of human sweat, and that some types of sweat, male sweat, contained a sort of paralyser which women could not resist—like cats with valerian. It was a complicated and wordy essay this, but it advanced the idea that the irresistibility of Don Juan was not due to looks or charm, but due to his smell. All Don Juan types are ugly and stunted, says this chap, who had run over a few psychoanalytically. But they all had a smell which spelt out danger. It sounded silly of course, and the team busy making things for women’s armpits got a hell of a laugh out of it. But Toller and I ruminated a bit; we started to do a leisurely survey of sweats, every kind of sweat: a woman with her period, an athlete after a race, sun sweat, fear sweat. You will hardly believe how much smell changes according to circumstance, temperature and so on. For years we played about this notion; I can’t say we were entirely serious. It was a by-product of the scent-business. It was a rest and a change from worrying about what smell makes women irresistible; what, we asked ourselves, makes a man irresistible?
“The actual chemistry, the analysis, was fearfully complicated, a real challenge; we had to devise a sort of scent-log. And for a long time we were at sea. We used what we knew of the rest of the scent range—from garlic to magnolia blossom. Then one day I had a glimmer; fundamentally women want to be raped I think, taken by force; things haven’t changed much since the Stone Age. On the other hand, as the biological left hand of the partnership responsible to the tribe for childbearing, they had developed a heavy load of conscience about it. In order to really give in it had to be in a fashion which unequivocably excused the lapse. In other words they had to be frightened almost to the point of insensibility before they could clear themselves with their own consciences. Our hypothetical Don Juan, then, had this paralysing gift. He could scare them into surrender by his scent. All right, laugh; but sometimes these crazy ideas have a point. It was a sort of rape-mixture we were after. Where to find a laboratory of smell? It suddenly occurred to me (do you know the smell of schizophrenes, of epileptics?) that all of the kingdom’s top rapists are locked up in Broadmoor! Nash arranged for us to send in a small team to hunt around among them, and see what we could find. Well, after four years’ work we have, very tentatively, isolated something which might break down into this vital secretion. Women beware! From the sweats of paranoiacs we have husbanded something which will permit your lasciviousness full play and your consciences rest! It has no name at the moment and the quantity is small; but we have put it out on test for a try-out.”
“Do you mean you have a lot of London bobbies walking around smelling like goats and making women drivers turn dizzy at the wheel?” Marchant gave his characteristic giggle. “Of course not. They would never get near enough to do the damage; what I have got is a willing experimental team of fifteen provincial hairdressers, women, who have agreed to wear nothing but this stuff for six months. Now they are always bending over their clients. Moreover there is always fug to help things along. We shall see what effect if any that has. Might start a wave of Lesbianism in the blameless purlieus of Norwood or Finchley. Then we should feel our little extract was the real thing.”
He banged down the piano lid and stood up, groping for his briefcase in order to produce a dirty handkerchief wherein to blow his nose. “I’d offer you some,” he said “but you wouldn’t need it, being a married man of consequence and place.” There was no hint of bitterness in his tone—it was simply a light-hearted sally: but to my surprise it stung me. Taken unawares by an overwhelming sense of futility and inadequacy I heard myself saying: “Yes. I am Mr. Benedicta Merlin, no less” in tones of savage irony. Marchant looked at me keenly and with a new sympathy. “I didn’t mean anything by what I said,” he told me apologetically “truthfully.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“Good.”
I poured him a stirrup-cup to show that there were no hard feelings. “Listen,” I said “I wonder if later on you would let me pick your brains a bit; indeed you might help me build it. When I’ve sorted out my library of voices—it will take ages. I wanted to build a sort of sound-bank based on phonetics. I can already build up voices from a sort of sound-bank—based on the vowel-sounds. A sort of embryology of language. Just like Cuvier deducing his whole animal from one bone; some time I’ll get around to developing it, but I’d need help on the practical side—the electrical wave-mechanics side. For the moment I’m snowed under with other projects.”
“So am I. But of course I will.”
“But this is something of my own, outside the firm. I wouldn’t, for example, tell Julian about it.”
He walked slowly towards the door, brooding. “I wonder Charlock” he said “if you aren’t under the same misapprehension as I was; I mean in imagining that he runs the firm. He doesn’t you know. He has to fight tooth and nail sometimes for his own ideas about how things should be done, and very often he is overruled by his own boards. No, nobody runs the firm, strictly speaking; it’s a sort of snowball with its own momentum now, the bloody organisation. I pity Julian, in fact; to be so powerful and at the same time so powerless.”
“Truthfully I am beginning to dislike hi
m” said I.
“Ah! the father-figure” he said cryptically. “I think that’s a waste of energy. You are in it now, you are part of it, rowing with the rest of us. Myself I would have got nowhere without the firm; they picked me out of a provincial university. I would have spent my life in a senior common room babbling about Rutherford forever had it not been for them. As it is I am marvellously free to give of my best; once they even gave me three years off to travel. No, Merlin’s is a godsend—at least for me.”
So might it have been for me, I thought, had I not made the mistake of marrying into it. Or was that really the reason? The whole problem of Benedicta rose like an overtoppling wave and engulfed me. I shook my head doubtfully. “Well,” said Marchant shaking my hand “thanks for being decent; and count on me when you want anything.”
I watched his slight figure disappearing down the street, with its queer slanting stride. The telephone was ringing. The telephone was ringing.
* * * * *
We always think that we are thinking one thought at a time because we have to put them down one under the other, in a linguistic order; this is an illusion I suppose. Here I was talking to the office while my hands riffled the coloured pages of a weekly magazine which dealt with Iolanthe’s new conjugal life in a turreted Hollywood mansion bearing a fair resemblance to parts of “Cathay”. Her swimming pool, her bedroom, the expensive scents, the loaded racks of clothes, the press-cuttings, the emptiness of the mirror-world. She herself looked pale and tired, clad in riding boots. Expression of a frail oldfashioned devotion which no longer had any place in our world, but which the screen still perpetuated as a herd-echo. Her husband looked palatable and superficial. I wished her luck. O yes, I did.
Summer passes, autumn comes; and with it the news that Benedicta had produced the intentional man-child, who was to be called Mark. (I was not consulted on this point among others.) Shoals of telegrams like flying-fish, cases of champagne. Moreover she was planning to return for Christmas. Nash pronounced her in excellent health, but advised me to make no move, to let her do things at her own rhythm. “It is maddening and worrying for you, I know that” he added with sympathy. “But it will come right, I am sure, with time.” In the meantime there was only one thing to do—to become absorbed in my work, the classical response. My list of trophies mounted gradually, one success following another, but with an ease and rapidity which somehow had the hollowness of an illusion. Entangled in its coils I felt a sort of heartbreak as I found myself harking back nostalgically to the promises which the past had once sanctioned—Istanbul huddled among her veils of mist. All the more poignant because distance in time had cast all these events in the brilliant colours (memory-induced) of half-fictions. Small fragments broken from the bright screen of days passed with a different sort of Benedicta, a woman who might seem forever unreal to me now; naturally with fear comes misunderstanding, with anxiety the sense of separation, of drifting apart. Unless. Unless what? An outside chance of reversing the immortal process.
Hippolyta came to London somewhen about now to nurse a broken ankle. Sitting before the fire, crutches beside her, she was staring bitterly at the face of Iolanthe which adorned the cover of a glossy magazine. It was startling how much she had aged—perhaps the crutches by association made it seem so? No, there were great meshes of white at her temples. Crow’s foot, reading glasses and so on. Nor was she the only one for “Charlock, you’ve changed” she cried: and breaking out, as if from a mask of witch-hazel, her face flowered once more into that of the impetuous inquisitive Athenian. Yes, of course. I had been putting on weight, my hair was badly cut, lustreless and dandruffy, my suit unpressed. “Longer cigars, shorter wind.” But we embraced until she winced from the pain of her leg. “Wiser! Sadder? Have you seen this new face?” She pointed ruefully at the star. (“The body dries up, the mind becomes toneless, the soul reverts to chrysalis; the only providing power lives on and on, independent of a dogmatic theology. The only thing that does not wear out is time.” Thus Koepgen.) She smiled up at us like a mummy, and tapping her face with her glasses Hippo said, with the same downcast expression, “I get more and more jealous of less; she gets better and better, Felix. She is a real personage now. Have you seen her new film? I’ve come over for it specially. I shall choke with rage, but I must see it, I must see them all. It’s become an obsession. I hunt among her expressions for the traces of Graphos.”
“Graphos!”
“Yes. And to think that all that time I didn’t know that this common little fiend enjoyed the real thing.”
She lit a cigarette with steady hands and blew a great plume of smoke like a denunciation. “And now he’s dying slowly, out of reach of everybody. Nobody knows as yet, he is still active. But he knows.” She poked up the fire with one of her crutches. I said “Graphos” on a sort of grace-note. She smiled. “He explained it to me. You might say it was hate at first sight—the only form of love they could know; they had the same values, were both frustrated in the same affective field. But they did not have to pretend to each other. It lasted like that, for ages and ages. And, to my humiliation, I did not know. Does one ever? I rebuilt his career, poor moonstruck me.” She used some very bad language in Greek; brief tears came into her eyes. “And now I am obsessed with her because of it. But never mind, she has made her mistakes, even though she now wears her sex like an expensive perfume. Aha, but the man she married creaks, creaks. I am glad. There is no joy to be got from him. It’s malicious, but I can’t help being pleased.”
“No. That’s not you, Hippo.”
“It is. It is. And what galls me worse is that she is articulate now; I stole some of her letters to Graphos. You see how low one can sink? I can remember parts by heart, like where she says: ‘As for me, having been in a sort of clinic of love, a captive when young, and forced by circumstance to take on everyone, young or old, I missed the whole point. My understanding remained unkindled. The sex act misses fire if there is no psychic click: a membrane has to be broken of which the hymen is only a parody, a mental hymen. Otherwise one can’t understand, can’t receive. So very few men can do this for a woman. You, Graphos, did this for me. Though I never could love you I’m grateful.’”
She banged her crutch on the floor and turned the journal over on its face, her face.
Well we dined there, by the fire, plate on knee; and there was a kind of luxury to talk about the past which for me had become prehistory—yellowing snapshots of the Acropolis or Byzantine Polis. After dinner Pulley and Vibart put in a short appearance, and though our talk gathered a superficial animation we could still feel the hangdog death of Caradoc looming over us. It was a deeply felt physical presence—not only because all his papers were stacked up there on the sideboard. It would only have increased the sense of constraint to have played out his voice upon my machines, so I did not try to. But there was news of Banubula who might be coming soon to London to have his prostate looked at. “In the morning he still retires to the lavatory for an hour with a churchwarden clay pipe and a bowl of soapy water. There he sits in silent rapture blowing huge iridescent bubbles and watching them float out over Athens. In harmony with himself. Only he still moans a good deal about not getting into Merlin’s. Otherwise no change.”
Vibart had just returned from a visit to Jocas who was also recuperating from a fall and a fractured hip. Picture of him bedridden before a huge fire taking castor-oil out of an oldfashioned soup-spoon; having his toenails trimmed for him by the eunuch. Almost mad with boredom, and unable to read, he had hit upon a solution—a model railway. His little trains ran all round the house, and around half the garden. Carried from point to point in a sedan, he passed his time agreeably in this fashion.
But at last talk lagged; Caradoc ached on like a bad tooth. The decanter was empty. They took their leave, reluctant to leave the evening unachieved, yet realising they could not revive it. Hippo stayed on to gossip and meditate. “Will you come with me? I have located four other films in the provinces in
which she plays. I am here for a week—all too short for London.” I agreed, feeling curiously stirred by the idea; apart from the brief glimpse on board the vessel of love I had seen nothing of Iolanthe. She pressed my hand; we spoke of other things, and I mentioned the dead boy in Sipple’s bed. Who was finally responsible, both for the deed and for hushing the matter up? She did not know; and I could sense that she was telling the truth. “Sipple had threatened to do it because the boy was going to blackmail him. Fifteen all. But later he said it was done while he was out. Thirty fifteen. Yes, it was a brother of Iolanthe, and her father, who was in Athens that week end, had also threatened to punish the boy. Thirty all.” She gave a little groan and patted her head. “There seem to be a hundred reasons to account for every act. Finally one hesitates to ascribe any one of them to the act. Life gets more and more mysterious, not less.”
“I must say I thought that she herself might have….” I gazed in abstracted fashion at the doe-like face of the world star. “I wonder if the firm knows.”
The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam Page 25