Compulsory Games

by Robert Aickman

  Every morning the philosopher would hasten to Santa Monica to enter his devotions. Immediately, if his Destiny rewarded him, he would fly to the shadow of the Castle of St. Angelo. There he would meet the Goddess of Wisdom—to talk philosophy.

  He noticed that a rumour he had heard to the effect that English women disliked being spoken to as ladies, with grace and fine delivery, was not universally applicable. Meanwhile, he escorted her home to her English breakfast of bullock and pig.

  •

  The same delightful duty devolved upon him on each of the next six days. The brother he found a charming fellow, easy to become acquainted with and willing to learn. After one night’s experience of the philosopher’s hospitality he was more than enthusiastic to devote every night between the same hours to study. How pleasantly the days passed for the young man! Dancing nights, and days indistinguishable from night. Who could want more?

  The philosopher had a more strenuous time. Nights occupied in tuition, mornings in rapture, days in the affairs of a man of the world. It was true that he failed in his object with his fellow-countryman at the Vatican, who instead of negotiating the annulment of the order against the philosopher’s safe return to Venice, merely tried to appease him with the office of apostolic protonotary and the order of the Golden Spur to add to his collection, conferred, purchased and attached at discretion. But the fullness of the hours had nothing to do with this failure: he would have failed anyhow.

  It is with those rapturous mornings that we are concerned. We see the strangely-met couple growing even more intimate in their common expertness in the French dialect. There is nothing more likely to attach one stranger to another of the opposite sex than such an unusual accomplishment. The two are as children who like reading, alone among many other children who do not like reading: secrets shared are the only bonds.

  Then, the man at least, was infinitely attractive. From his resplendent person emanated an extraordinary glamour, all the charm which the sophisticated mind finds in a subtle brain and a marvellously varied knowledge, when these are devoted to the observation of the humanities. The keen intelligence when directed elsewhere than to the human spectacle, merely repels; when directed towards the fussiness of personal details and family affairs, is unutterably enervating. But the mind which knows the ways of men and is able to luxuriate in their variety, is the mind one enjoys. The power of the intelligence must be well directed. Such a mind had the philosopher.

  The lady is preserved for us in a pencil sketch the philosopher made on one of those mornings, as they sat together on the centenarian Cardinal’s bench. The connoisseur regrets that the philosopher’s draughtsmanship lacked some parts of his brother’s talent; but the sketch is, none the less, infinitely precious, for it is the only portrait we have of this lady who influenced history. We see a marked cast in the eyes; cheekbones protruding in the Mongolian manner; a nose apparently broken in several places; a crooked mouth; a chin merging into a thin neck; one ear larger than the other; a narrow forehead with a curious sideways slope; hair in a few thick ropes, like serpents on the Gorgon. But though the philosopher’s pencil, normally nimble and well-trained above the average, appears on this occasion to have been left too much to itself, the mind, which might have directed it to better purpose, being no doubt fully extended in a discussion of old philosophies, still there appears in the portrait more than a glimpse both of the lady’s outstanding mind and of her wonderful beauty. For she was, as we have said, the cleverest woman the philosopher met; and we also know, because his whole life shows it, that in a woman, mere brains were not for him enough. When one can choose, it is a duty to Society to choose the best. The more discerning eye can see in the portrait the clear reflection of the philosopher’s good judgment. What power has the most clumsy pencil to conceal beauty?

  On the third day it became apparent that instead of meeting when the sun was already risen, they should meet for supper. It was only a matter of making the brother work a little harder during a shorter lesson. Then the philosopher had merely to accompany to its lodging the young student’s peacefully-dreaming body, and to pick up the lady on arrival. Nothing could have been simpler.

  Let it not be thought from anything in this short record, that the philosopher was not a gentleman. Facts condensed, and abstracted from the whole record of the man’s existence, or rather from that of life itself, by the consideration of which alone, is any judgment possible, may mislead the reader in this point. In all seriousness, we recall to his or her mind that the philosopher was not only personable, learned, accomplished, intelligent, rich (at the moment), experienced, healthy and possessed of an aptitude for living almost unique in history, but was also among gentlemen, among ladies, and (as had been said) among those who were neither, a gentleman. Nor had those members of society, fortunate only when he came their way, any doubts in the matter. So why should the reader.

  •

  On the fifth morning, as the procession of supper was entering its last stage, the philosopher contemplated exerting all his forces to keep the lady free, and to make her his captive.

  He started, as experience had taught him was best, by saying that if she persisted in her determination, he had considerable influence with His Holiness, which he would immediately use to her advantage. She declined, as he knew she would.

  He broadened the argument, by pointing out that God is more effectively served by the subject who uses all His gifts to the full, than by the subject who rejects them for penances and miseries obviously associated with the Devil.

  He tried to convey to her limited experience what life could be for the wise and fortunate. He found that, experience or no experience, she knew as much about it as he.

  He suggested that the service of the mind is pleasant only so long as the mind has something other than itself to feed upon. She did not regulate any part of her life by the word “pleasant.”

  He pointed to the rising sun, and remarked that Santa Tomasina’s establishment was so placed in the midst of warehouses, that she would only be able to see that orb at midday, when it was most hot and repellent.

  She resisted him, but all the time so as to make clear that it was only his arguments she repelled, while she held his person in ever greater love and respect.

  It was this respect that defeated him. From all women he was used to the last stages of passion, adoration and prostration, but the respect of an equal was new to him. Had he put forth all his powers in an appeal to her spirit, he would certainly have won. No woman with her degree of intelligence would have resisted him. But he did not. The two of them were so alike that they would hardly be safe together. He could never have escaped her, and variety is essential to a sophisticated man.

  He saw, for the first time in his life, a fitness in all things. Her departure into what for any other woman he could ever respect, he would have thought death in its most terrible form, was for her, the only woman who had ever respected him, appropriate. That was the mark of her distinction. She was the only woman in the world to him.

  •

  The brother being unfortunately drunk that evening, (having now learnt how to enter that happy state by his own efforts and being impelled to console his losses at play), it fell to the philosopher, at the termination of the sixth day, to see the lady into her convent.

  This day had been too hot, even for the Roman dogs, several of whom were reported by those with an unusually analytical sense of smell, to have expired. But in the evening it became suddenly cool; the sun was setting with almost tropical rapidity. A mist was beginning to put the people to flight, as if it were a cloud of poison gas. The rich were beginning to shiver.

  When they arrived down a long, straight, empty, ill-paved street at Santa Tomasina’s portals, it occurred to the lady that the moment of parting must be sudden. For the first and last time in her life, she knew the full meaning of the word “qualm.” She also remembered, and was saved by the recollection, that she had never learned her companion’s name.
By this time, she had no need of her companion’s name. By this time, she had no need to pluck up her courage in such a manner.

  “Giacomo Casanova, at your service,” he said with a smile. “From you I hide nothing. But I call myself by the title conferred on me by His Majesty the King of France. I am known as the Chevalier de Seingalt.”

  “I am Mary Boreham, but I used to be known as May.”

  “I write the name on my heart.”

  “Buon’ notte, Signor Casanova.”

  “Buon’ notte, Signorina Boreham.”

  •

  On the seventh day, he rested. On the evening of the eighth, he had not only pulled together the various strings which had drawn his soul to Rome, and which had been slightly disarranged by this incident of the Goddess of Wisdom, but was deep in a brand new affair with the most enchanting creature he had ever met.

  •

  (Casanova, in writing his famous Memoirs, omitted this incident for the good reasons we mentioned at the start. That is why it has been left to us to recapture.)

  JUST A SONG AT TWILIGHT

  UP THE mud road, neither old nor new, but timeless and sad as the people who built it, advanced the much battered station-wagon, far, alas, from any station. Every now and then, an outcrop of the fundamental rock ridged the mud like an irremovable weal, and, each time, the wagon seemed to rise and fall feet rather than inches. It was almost as emetic as had been the long, slow sea crossing with the pigs and the priests. The terrain, however beautiful, looked tired and ruthless. There is no heart in the land, Lydia used to hear them allege of her father’s English acres; of this land the words were true in a different sense. The very sunshine seemed dark, and the air buzzed with small hostile noises. Most of all, of course, the heat was incredible, just incredible. She could not have believed in such heat. None the less, motor coaches could from time to time be seen in steady congestion far below on the coastal highway, transfigured across the world on tourist posters.

  It was all so different from last time; so different that the difference frightened Lydia more than anything else. It had been less than four months before that she and Timo, weary of London frustrations, especially of rising costs and of Timo’s inability to find work that was not stultifying, had gone to spend a fortnight on the island with Nugent and Paca, who ran a “guest house” there. Paca was supposed to have been a fugitive from political reaction when first Timo and then Nugent had met her. Timo was supposed to have lived with her, though, as so often, Lydia could not be sure, as Timo was always so indefinite, and Paca never spoke at all, not even of politics, with the imperfections of which she had presumably come to terms. Indeed, Lydia had thought tolerantly, Timo was so quiet and vague and Paca so totally silent that a relationship between them must have been at the primeval level. By now, Paca was bony, grained, and slovenly as well as silent, and sat about with a four-day-old rose in her hair. Nugent (who in England had been an unsuccessful architect) ran the guest house, and had no time to think anything of anybody else, ever.

  None the less, from the very first moment, as she put it, Lydia had been attracted by everything else about the island, by everything except Nugent and Paca’s guest house. The island seemed to answer so many problems, and she had been far more determined to go and live there than Timo, though even he had seemed determined, for Timo. It was the first time they had ever agreed about anything so important.

  They had not even agreed about getting married. Lydia was quite sure of this, certain that Timo had undermined her with the unique destructiveness of the weak and desperate; though she had since read in a book that no one ever marries anyone without fully intending it, and wishing it. The book, of course, only undermined her further.

  The guest house, filled with polite smells and tourists grumblingly keeping up with other tourists, had proved so irksome that they had spent all of their time far from it. This was not difficult, with Nugent so preoccupied and Paca so taciturn. Emancipated from the anxious claims of home, they had wandered like clouds, and Lydia had loved simply the differences: the patched buildings, the square look of the fields, the dark people with aggressive eyes, wearing loud colours or else black, the odd food at odd hours, the cheap and easy liquor, above all, being a woman, the warmth. Then it had been spring and promise; now it was summer and climax. But, naturally, there had been more to it than all that; more than warmth and security, more even than change. On the island Lydia had, that spring, caught a glimpse of beauty itself and agreeable mystery. She could not define these things. She felt it unwise to try. And, most remarkable, Timo seemed to feel them too. For the first time also, they really seemed to feel alike. Three days before they flew away, they decided not only as every sensitive person does in such circumstances, to come back, but to move to the island and live there.

  They had spent merely the next morning driving round in a hired car. Within a few hours, they had found a large stonewalled patch of unkempt holding at the top of a deep cleft in the cliffs; with a small modern structure, built of slabs, lying empty in one upper corner of it. The site seemed perfect: only twelve kilometres from the glowing town where Nugent and Paca lived, and which Lydia believed she would never tire of gazing at while sipping aperitifs in the square; with no other building in view, and no convenient area in the little declivity for new neighbours; with what amounted to a private sandy beach, accessible by an adventurous scramble that would keep the weight down and the muscles up; with lovely sunshine for three-fourths of the year, and little to be frightened of even in the short winter. Admittedly, the house was less attractive.

  Still, they had sat on the warm grass, feeling the hot rock beneath. They looked at the foreign sea, much darker than the clear foreign sky. They became sentimental, but when Lydia tended to become amorous, Timo was already worrying, not about the immediate decisions, but about his general economic ineffectiveness. It was a distress that always rather annoyed Lydia, because, in this matter at least, she had known exactly what lay before her when she married.

  “Oh, Timo, really. We shan’t have to keep up appearances here.”

  “Isn’t that a kind of defeat in itself?”

  “Do be simple for once. I have almost enough for both of us in any case. And we may as well try to make the most of it. Why can’t we just try to be happy?”

  Unusually, he had taken her hand and seemed to enter into the spirit of her possibly inordinate proposal.

  “I might get a part-time job teaching English. It’s a pity that no one needs Estonian.”

  “You can teach me Estonian. We shall have time for it here.”

  Timo smiled and squeezed her hand, but said nothing. She had long before come to suppose that his native land was to him at once a secret, from which she was thoroughly excluded, and something of a shame because he had been born in England and raised in England at a time when Estonia was being destroyed.

  “You will be able to write your book.”

  “My dear Lydia, we haven’t bought the place yet. We don’t even know if it’s for sale.”

  But, that same afternoon, with the aid of directions from Nugent, looking up from his battered desk, strewn with uncompleted foreign forms, they were told by a local businessman that it was. It was impossible to regard the businessman as an estate agent in the English sense, but he seemed to know all about every small plot and orange grove on the island, and doubtless about every crumbling citadel and up-to-date canning factory also. Moreover, he spoke English, because more and more of his business was with Americans. He said that the holding up on the cliffs was for sale. He owned it himself.

  “A bit here and a bit there. I pick them up when the peasants get into debt, or die. Often to pay for the burying. The people here give much for a good burying. Not like you in England, always trying to do things on the cheap.” His style of salesmanship could have only one conclusion: an impolite demand.

  “Can we build a new house on the plot?”

  “You can do what you like on the plot so
long as you can pay for it. It is no affair of mine.”

  “What about planning permission?”

  “It is all the same. You can do what you like with the plan so long as you pay for it.”

  “What about water?”

  The businessman wriggled his arms upward. “Water comes from God. It is there.”

  “Can we find a builder?”

  “I am the best builder.”

  Timo looked at Lydia. “We could ask Nugent to do us a design.” Duly, the price was even higher than they had expected, and the businessman wanted immediate payment. In the end, Lydia, half in whispers to Timo, undertook to transfer a large sum within a week from London to the local Bank of St. Gabriel, which the businessman recommended. Timo signed six or seven half-comprehended sheets of paper. The property was apparently theirs, subject only to settlement; and they went into the beautiful square for drinks. The precipitancy of it all was to Lydia one of the greatest attractions. She felt that the time had come for tremendous action if the two of them were to go on living together, or perhaps even living at all. Their doubts were so familiar, a sickness so chronic, that this time they clubbed them. When, the following week, all their London friends said they must be quite mad, usually in accents of manifest envy and malice, they lightly out-argued them.

  But now, in their own station-wagon, weighed down with books, art objects, pans, suitcases, and camping equipment, the twelve kilometres from the town seemed far longer than they had remembered. The whole journey from England had been almost unbelievably tiresome, with everywhere the difficulties encountered by refugees on the move with all their belongings. No longer could a customs inspection be treated as a formality: again and again the entire wagon had to be unloaded, and the contents made subject to contemptuous and detailed examination, lest they conceal drugs, gold ingots, or infection. One official had insisted upon slitting open a mattress. Another had confiscated a small case of tools, after Timo had admitted that he did not require them for his trade. The lack of a firm address in England had caused trouble, equalled only by the trouble arising from the fact that they could name no one on the island to “guarantee” them. Nor could Timo vouchsafe an acceptable occupation: in the circumstances “Teacher” seemed implausible.