The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  No, I had never seen it before. “Ah well” said Pulley with resignation. “That was what he had been building for himself. It would prove nothing to anyone else, but to someone who knew Caradoc it would be conclusive. You see, he just could not resist making mnemons and building houses. Try as he would. And he’ll always be found out because of it.” He paused for a while, finished his drink, and said “I don’t know whether I told them all this, I couldn’t judge. All that Julian said when he was thanking me was ‘Well, the case is closed, then.’ But did he mean it, that’s the point? Ah! That’s the point.”

  The case is closed. “I don’t know” said Pulley. “Perhaps we should act out ourselves more.” He strolled about fiddling with things on the tables and mantelpiece. “But I could never dream of trying to get out” he said sadly. “But in your case, Felix, I——”

  “Me?” I said with some indignation. “Why pick on me?”

  “I wasn’t; but somehow I have always wondered about you—from way back at the beginning I mean. Whether you really belonged here, with us.”

  “Well I’m damned” I said, and the surprise was genuine. It was suddenly borne in upon me that there must, after all, somewhere, be people who didn’t belong to the firm. Pulley showed his huge teeth in an infantile grin. “You are one of the few people” he said “one can honestly distrust in this outfit. I would confide anything in you, I think.”

  “And you feel I should get out somehow?”

  “O, I didn’t say that exactly. I don’t know quite what I feel about anything any more, I’m so damn tired after all this drugging. And I still occasionally get the weeps for nothing at all. So don’t ask me leading questions. Besides, Felix, is there really time to worry? One minute you are fretting over your income tax, and the next you are staring up from the bottom of a pinewood coffin. Heavens, stay put, old boy, stay put.”

  “Stay put, you tell me now.”

  “Well, unless you feel too hampered. Lots of us do. The weak usually resort to acts of senseless violence. I remember old Trabbe—he ran out with a fireman’s axe one day and buried it in Julian’s car. But they cured him and sent him abroad. And poor Mrs. Trabbe—after she died the servants started wearing her frocks and shoes, surprising everyone and giving pain. O well!” He yawned and stretched. “I must be getting along now. It’s been good to see you; we must meet again soon, eh? When things don’t feel so damned precarious.”

  His eyes had a haunted look which somehow I misliked; his walk, too, was the walk of an old man. I accompanied him to the door and suggested that he might like to move in with me for a few weeks, but he shook his head slowly. “Ah thanks” he said. “But no. Cheerio.”

  I stood at the door and watched him wander off down the street towards the nearest tube station. He did not turn round and wave on the corner as was once his wont.

  * * * * *

  I had some difficulty in running Julian to earth—if that is the expression—but at last I found him week-ending somewhere in the country. My call caught him in mid yawn. “Ah good, it’s you Charlock” he said. “I was wondering who it might be.”

  “Julian” I said “I’ve come to a decision which I want to discuss with you. In itself it may not seem very important, but it is extremly so to me.” Julian coughed and said: “Well you know you can always count on me.” It sounded not at all sententious. I took a breath and went on. “I have decided to give one of my inventions away to the public—to give it away, do you see? Simply, unequivocally donate it.” He said nothing, and after a pause I went on. “Recently in playing about with some chemistry work in the lab I tumbled upon something which one might really describe as a boon to the ordinary housewife. It costs nothing, or almost nothing to make. It will completely transform washing-up.”

  “Well, for goodness sake take out a pat——”

  “Ah but listen. This I propose to give away. I propose to write a letter to The Times describing how anyone can, for the price of a pennyworth of common salt, make this….”

  The timbre of Julian’s attention seemed to shift and deepen. He sighed, and I heard a match click, followed by a puff. “I’m glad you decided to discuss it with me first before doing anything” he said. “What is the point of it, after all? At a penny halfpenny it would still be a boon—as a Merlin patent. Do you think we are dealing hardly by the public? By comparison with other firms I should have thought….”

  “That has nothing to do with it. I simply feel that for once in my life I must make this gesture, give something freely, you see; something which is the fruit of my thought, so to speak. Can’t you see?”

  “I follow what you mean” he said coolly. “But nevertheless I can’t quite see the motive. You have given the world so much through the firm, Charlock.”

  “Not given, Julian. That’s the point. Sold.”

  “There is a pleasing touch of religiosity about your idea” he said dryly. “I commend you.” He sounded serious but weary.

  “I know it sounds trivial; but for me it represents something momentous, something I haven’t been able to imagine for years—an act.”

  “The married man dreams of divorce” he said oracularly, and I recognised a Greek proverb in translation. “And the scientist thinks of science as a pretty girl with two cunts….” He was wandering, playing for time. Then a little more sharply came: “What am I supposed to do about this idea—agree? How can I, Charlock? Indeed I wonder why you consulted me. You know that you are raising much more than a personal question? It smells of precedent. Indeed whatever I said, I doubt if the firm would agree: and I am not the firm, as you know, only one of the camel-drivers, so to speak, in the general caravan. Anyway thanks for being honest enough to tell me what was in your mind.”

  “I always felt I could talk to you as man to voice” I said.

  “Irony was always your long suit, Charlock. Always.”

  “Anyway, now you know what I’ve decided.”

  Julian cleared his throat softly and let a pause intervene; when he came back to the charge he was dreamy, reflective, unincisive. “I wonder if you have really thought about it—no, it’s a pure impulse of generosity on your part.”

  “On the contrary: the fruit of a long interior debate.”

  “Hum. Have you considered, for example, your articles of association with the firm? This would cut across our agreement which is valid, if I remember, for some twenty years more at least.”

  “Twenty years.” A shiver ran down my spine. Yes, I knew it all right—but uttered out loud like that it produced a chilling effect.

  “It wouldn’t work” said Julian at last in a more wide-awake voice. “It would lead to some costly and tedious litigation, that’s all. And you’d lose, the firm would win. Contractually you are tied for everything.”

  “We shall see” I said, but I felt my voice falter. Julian went on suavely: “You know don’t you that there is a whole string of charities supported by us in part or in full? Merlin’s staff are encouraged to contribute to them—why don’t you? You could make over the whole of your salary to them if you wished. Ask Nathan to show you the bound volume with the lists.”

  “I’ve seen it.” I had. There was a huge vellum tome the thickness of the Bible listing all the charities to which the firm contributed.

  “Well” said Julian. “Wouldn’t that do?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” He was almost peevish now.

  “We get Income Tax relief on those—it’s a company ploy.”

  “I see! My goodness, you are hard to please.”

  He puffed away another long silence and then asked: “What is the source of all this unrest, Charlock; where does it come from?”

  “I have simply come to a point where I must make a gesture, even the feeblest of free gestures, to continue breathing.”

  “It must be due to some misconception about the nature of the firm. I feel in all you say a funny kind of moral bias—an implied criticism which cannot be wholly just. Are you just
being pharisaical, holier-than-thouish?”

  “No, I’m being holier-than-meish for a change.”

  “What I’m trying to say is that the firm isn’t just an extension of moral qualities, a product of a wicked human will, of a greedy mercantile spirit. It goes deeper than that. I mean, it has always existed in one form or another. At least I suppose so.”

  “What a sophistry! The firm is not the world.”

  “I’m not so sure. I’m not saying it’s an easy thing or a gay thing; but it’s a fact of nature, man’s nature. One can’t blink the firm, Charlock.”

  “Nature!”

  “It must correspond to some deep unexpressed need of the human psyche—for it’s always been there. We should take it more coolly. It’s not in itself malefic, it is just neutral, a repoussoir. It’s what we make of it….”

  “So the slave is born with his chains, is he?”

  “Yes. Some can free themselves, but very few. I couldn’t. If you believe in free will or predestination, for example——”

  “Cut out the homilies” I said.

  “Well, who imposed the firm on you, then?”

  “I did. Out of ignorance.”

  “Not really; everything was clear from the beginning; your eyes were wide open.”

  “Like a three-day kitten.”

  “I don’t see how you can want to back down at this stage.”

  “Even in prison they get remission for good behaviour.”

  “But damn it, you might wake up one day and find yourself in charge of the firm, or most of it; Jocas and I won’t live for ever, you know.”

  “God forbid!”

  Julian said “Ach!” in an exasperated sort of way and then became mild again. “The firm isn’t inflexible” he said, with a faint tinge of reproach. “Despite its size it is a pretty fragile thing, a bundle of long wires stretching out around the world. But it is all based on one slender item—the spinal column of the matter: that is the sanctity of contractual obligation. If you abrogate that you begin to damage the essential fabric of the thing. Naturally it will try to protect itself like any other organism.”

  “I must do this thing, I tell you.”

  “You will end up by building up a delusional system about being persecuted by the firm—the poor thing does not merit it.”

  I ground my teeth.

  “Anyway,” he went on “there is no pressure the firm can bring upon you in the immediate sense; but it would certainly counter any such move as the one you have outlined. It’s strange, you still seem to think of it in terms of personalities; but it has long ago outgrown the personalities which created it—Merlin, Jocas, myself: we are already merely ancestors. The firm is self-subsisting now, rolling down its appointed path with a momentum which neither you nor I can alter. Of course he that is not with it is against it, and so on. In other epochs it might have taken other forms. But man rests, unchangeable, unteachable, and the firm is cast in his mould—your mould, Charlock! Ask and it shall be answered! Prod the old sow with a stick and it grunts.” He paused and his voice sank softly into the tones of a twilit resignation. Under his breath, in a whisper which I could just catch, I heard him say: “And Iolanthe is dying?” He sighed, he was talking to himself. A long silence fell.

  “You are still there, Charlock?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I think all this must come from your sense of impotence aggravated by success; such feelings always result in rash moral judgements. You have never succeeded in doing the abstract work for which you pined—though that was not our fault. And you have worked up a grudge against the firm in telling yourself that it is caught up in the nets of base matter, is exploring and adapting matter, expropriating matter.”

  “And the results?”

  “My dear, I can do nothing, nobody can. Yes, we can make small adjustments of stress or direction or emphasis. But the wheel turns in spite of one. Come, grow up, Charlock. The firm won’t bite, you know.”

  “I am still waiting to be convinced” I said grimly. “All this is special pleading.”

  It was, of course; and yet in another way it wasn’t. It made sense on one level, nonsense on another. I had not yet succeeded in penetrating to the basic fallacy in these contentions. In a funny way, too, I thought him—Julian personally—innocent of any intention to delude. He believed what he said, and consequently it was true, not for me, but for him. Perhaps even objectively true? My reason was spinning like a top. The vertiginous sense of failure was so intense that it had got mixed up with my breathing. I was suffocated. I heard Julian put down the receiver and walk away a few steps; then in the silence I heard some music begin to play—the opening bars of a Schumann concerto. “As an honourable man,” he said “who abhors all exaggeration, I do not know what to tell you.”

  How many of these ideas would remain waterproof? I wondered. Julian was sighing again. “What about Iolanthe?” I said cruelly. (Marchant said that ideas were simply nags; one rode about on them until one tired of them, then tied them to a tree and fucked them.) “Iolanthe” he repeated slowly, accenting the word wrongly. “What of her?” In my almost drunken state I could not resist a further threat. “A creation of the soap-flakes mind” I said. “Nobody would believe it to see her picture in your flat.” Julian smiled invisibly. “An artist” he said, and “A smile to make one rise in one’s stirrups.”

  “I might even leave England,” I said “where the national sloth has reached the brain cortex.”

  Julian coughed. All of a sudden his voice became bony and determined; a sort of cold fury possessed it: “There is only one solution for you—to stop inventing altogether; to retire on your winnings—I will not call them earnings, for without us you would be penniless today. Abandon the game altogether.” Then his voice changed again; it sank into a lower register, it became merciful, tender, calm. He whispered almost to himself. “Who can gauge the feeling of a man in love who is forced to sit and look on at the steady deterioration of a fine mind and lovely body? We must celebrate the people who set us on fire.”

  “Julian” I cried. “Is this your last word?”

  “What else?” he said with such world-weariness, such inexpressible sadness, that I felt a lump come into my throat. Yet at the same time gusts of rage and frustration were still there in my mind, I could not still them. “Mountebank! Actor!” I jeered. Yet he did not seem to have heard me—or at any rate the insults produced no recognisable reflection in his tone.

  “Graphos” he said “could only love a weeping girl. If she did not weep she must be made to—so he said.” All of a sudden I recalled a chance remark of Io’s to the effect that only the free man can really be loved by a woman; I wondered which of us she might have in mind? Ah which?

  I had said it before I knew the words were out of my mouth—without any premeditation whatsoever. “Julian, for how long has Benedicta been your mistress, and what is the name of the drug?” I heard him draw his breath sharply as if I had run a thorn under his fingernail. “Do you hear me?” I said lurching about drunkenly and laughing coarsely. Silence from his end. It was war now to the very knife, I felt it. Yet the silence prolonged itself into infinity as I stood there. “Julian,” I said again “you don’t need to tell me; I shall find out from her.” There was the dry crisp click of the receiver going down, that was all; and I stood with the sea-shell of emptiness to my ear, mumbling to myself; for somehow these stupid remarks had set fire to my mind, illuminating a whole new area of unmapped action. The key—of course—the key to everything was Benedicta! I could do nothing that did not encapsulate her consent, her agreement. Before any problem could be settled I must settle the problem of this wife of mine. “By God” I said to myself as suddenly the fact dawned upon me. “Of course.” How unjust I had been to her! I was filled with remorse all of a sudden. I had never really talked to her, explained to her, tried to enlist her support for my plans … I must rush to her side to explain everything.

  But by the time I reached her B
enedicta had already taken one of her characteristic leaps forward into triumphant unreason, eluding more successfully than ever the vain pursuit of her doctors or her lovers.

  The slim three and a half litre Lethe lay outside the office—a birthday present from the firm; its glossy black snout pointed down-street like a lance laid in rest. This elegant missile could sway silently through traffic, and climb effortlessly into the hundreds with a faint blue snarl. For the most part it made only the noise of cremated silk—which is to say, no noise whatsoever. Its brief insistent horn copied the note of a trumpeting goose. I tell you the intoxication of driving this deft shooting-star across London soothed away my anxieties. Cool winds came off the river at Hammersmith; cloudy sunshine feathered out the last of the daylight. It would be dark before I arrived. It was dark when I did.

  The house presented its usual aspect of tenantless animation—as if the owners had gone out to the pub for a drink leaving all the lights on, the radio on, the fires unguarded. It was the servants’ day off no doubt. The lake was still. In the vague enthusiasm of my self-discovery (that I still had the power to conceive of independent actions) I was ill prepared for anything out of the ordinary. I could think about nothing but my own feelings: about how to make them clear to poor Benedicta. So much so that I hardly took in at first the bloody spoor which here and there marked the scarlet staircase-carpet; nor the trail of dummy books which lay anyhow on the landings—an obscure paperchase of empty titles like Decline and Fall and Night Thoughts and The Consolations of Philosophy. Up I went and up: not sufficiently attentive to be alarmed, more puzzled. Yet here and there—it was like following a wounded lion to its lair—I came upon a red pug-mark freshly impressed in the carpet. What could it mean? How on earth could I guess that Benedicta had been at that double toe of hers with a kitchen knife?