SYLVIE'S RIDDLE

by WALL, ALAN

  'Don't you have anything to say to me?'

  'Sorry. I'm sorry for everything.'

  'That doesn't seem like enough.'

  'I know.'

  'There must be something else. '

  Owen seemed to be finding it difficult to speak, something John Tamworth could never recall before.

  'If she had died in war,' he said finally, 'and I had been her commanding officer, would you hold that against me?' The older man thought for a minute before speaking.

  'Not if you had behaved responsibly in the battle. Not if you hadn't needlessly put your troops in harm's way.'

  'Do you believe it's possible to make a film about war that's as serious as war is?'

  'I'd have to think about that.'

  'Well, I do. That's what I believe. That's my philosophy. It might be the wrong one, but it's mine. And if I couldn't make it real, then the film would have no value. I did what I thought was necessary to give those images reality.'

  'You seem to have taken away my daughter's reality in the process.'

  'She should have cared more about the outcome and less about the cost. When Visconti made Death in Venice he gave Dirk Bogarde some powder to put on his face that nearly took the flesh off… when Millais painted his Ophelia in the bath, Elizabeth Siddall nearly died of pneumonia… I didn't think she'd be so vulnerable. If I'd thought that, I'd have done it with someone else.'

  'But you'd still have done it?'

  'Yes. I would still have done it.'

  Mr Gregory looked at Owen now with an air of professional scrutiny. He was in no doubt that the man was telling the truth, but he was not sure what the worth of this truth was; certainly not his daughter's life.

  'It had better be good then, Mr Owen. This film that cost my daughter whatever tranquillity she'd managed to achieve in her mind. Is it possible to see it?'

  Owen looked at John, and John looked uneasy as he closed down the camera, but he went across to his shelf and brought back the blank plastic case with the DVD inside it.

  'This is an advance copy. The screening's still under discussion.

  There's some concern about the violence.'

  'Can we watch it then?'

  'Now?'

  'You do have a DVD-player here, I assume.'

  *

  John pulled the curtains, having made them all a cup of coffee, and they sat down together to watch the film: the writer, the director, and the father of the young woman whose image had moved through the ravaged landscapes with the anguish of Cassandra, or sometimes the mute stoicism of the young woman in Bresson's Balthasar. There was a lot more voice-over than dialogue. Owen had been assiduous. There were quotations from Herodotus and Caesar, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, Hitler, Churchill, Wilfred Owen, Tony Harrison. And each set of words was accompanied by the same ragged bunch of anonymous soldiers, fighting, killing, being killed, looting, raping. The mystery at the heart of this mystery play was how we could continue to do this to one another, after thousands of years of seeing the consequences. They moved across a devastated landscape, something like the paintings Paul Nash made of the trenches. The music throughout was taken

  from one or another of Bach's cello suites, and the unavoidable plangency of that sound combined with the images was irrefutably moving. And then towards the end a new set of characters turned up for the torture and the female booty. What had happened was that Alex had grown so used to the boys doing the acting with her that she no longer looked afraid. She knew them too well to have the genuine look of fear that Owen wanted. They had all enacted so many horrors together that horror had been temporarily transcended. They had become too comfortable in their images of one another. So he'd had an idea: they'd set the scene up, and then at the last minute he'd put the boys from the street in. He made the other actors give him the costumes back and told them to take the night off. He'd picked some local rabble, hanging about out there.

  'What do we have to do?'

  'Put some funny clothes on and act nasty.'

  'We do that anyway.'

  'I'll pay you for it.'

  'How much?'

  'Fifty pounds each.'

  'Where and when?'

  That's what had happened. But even Owen had been astounded at their feral menace as they swooped around, and then descended on, Alex. He was hidden just off camera, and he could tell as she clutched his hand that this was genuine terror. Which had been what he had wanted, wasn't it? It wasn't as though he was glorifying war or rape, after all. The image of the horror had to be real to warn against the reality of the actual horror. To confront the mystery, the horror of the passion, day after day.

  In the film, when they'd done with her, they threw her body into the river. Which was the canal standing in for Deva, the war goddess who presided over the slaughter and the subjugation. The body wrapped in dirty garments floated on the surface. And the final scenes showed the Dee Estuary, the delta where the river met the sea and the waves ran one into another. The saddest of the cello suites played as the image faded out.

  John pulled the curtains back as the credits scrolled. Mr Gregory watched carefully to see that his daughter's name was properly credited. It was. He had investigated rape cases, and he tried to view these scenes with the same objectivity that he'd listened to the evidence years before. But he couldn't. He had seen the terror in his daughter's eyes. There was no faking that. Mr Gregory now stood up. He turned to look at Owen.

  'If it had been pornography, I would have done everything in my power to destroy you. But it isn't. I can't doubt your seriousness of purpose, even if I can only lament your methods. I hope you don't seduce all your young actresses. Could I have a copy of the film, please?'

  John looked uneasy at this.

  'Technically, it hasn't been released. I mean, it's not yet in the public domain. It will be screened by the BBC at some point, but there might have to be alterations.' Patrick Gregory simply looked at him in silence until John gave in; he walked over to the DVD- player, took the disc out, put it back in its box, and handed it over. Patrick now turned back to Owen.

  'Did Alex ever speak to you about lady Pneuma?' Owen started laughing, if a little bleakly, then stopped himself.

  'Yes. living on air, wasn't it? Alex was into so many cultish notions, I could hardly keep up.'

  'That's why she went to Scotland. To put that particular belief into practice. To rid herself of the stains of the flesh. She seemed to think the biggest stain of all was you, and this.' He held up the DVD. 'look in the Sunday papers this week. You'll find quite a lot about lady Pneuma. Don't think they'll ever find any other young ladies starving themselves to death up in that bothie.'

  At the door, Mr Gregory finally turned to John.

  'It does seem to me, Mr Tamworth, that you must share equal blame with Mr Treadle, just as you share equal credits for the film. You could have switched your camera off at any time. You could have asked the young men to leave. And if I got it right, Mr Treadle was hidden under the pile of rags, so he couldn't actually see the look of terror on my daughter's face. You could though, couldn't you, as you looked through your lens? Caught up in the excitement, were you? Realised just how strong the footage would be? It wouldn't surprise me if you two weren't in for an award or two for this one.'

  Then he was gone.

  The Tragic Lecture

  Fatum. Sylvie's mother had once explained the word to her. It was related to karma, but not the same thing. Fatum: it's the one bit inside you that won't be told. The part that's once bitten twice bitten, once shy twice shy. The ineradicable, the unreformable, the incorrigible splinter of your soul that even Orpheus with his lyre or Saint Michael with a hymning throng of angels could not beguile to be anything other than precisely what it is. It's what you're stuck with, brother. No one and no thing can talk it out of being irreducibly thus in all its bloody-minded authenticity. Fatum: it'll get you into trouble. It'll lose you friends. It'll go down into the grave at last, but not before you do. Even a centur
y of therapy or sympathetic magic can never coax it out of you. Fatum: it's there to stay. It can even get you married. It had certainly got Sylvie married.

  If you believe in it, then you also had to believe that external events connived to fashion it thus and thus. Otherwise it couldn't have its potency, could it? The phone call had come half an hour before. Alison.

  'Don't get me wrong, Sylvie. I'm not trying to get rid of you or anything. But the job could have been described with you in mind. History of images. Photographic, artistic, cinematic. The iconography of perception. A particular interest in the popular arts and music would help. That's you. It's your subject, your articles, your book.'

  Sylvie had taken the computer reference and downloaded the application form. And it was true. The post of Senior Lecturer in Images, Their Function and History seemed to have been customised to fit her work and her obsessions. She had printed out her CV: she could update that quickly, and complete the application. Given the time of year of the advertisement, it was evidently a rush job. Something had fallen through, or someone had pulled out. This made it all simpler. If she had somewhere else to go, then the rest fell into place. She would resign from the Signum, and sell the house. Then she would bugger off, without a single tear shed for anything or anybody. Except maybe Henry and his minotaurs. Alex Gregory might have died but she had still been the other woman in her marriage. She couldn't actually weep for her.

  *

  Sylvie had been right. It was a rush job. The course had almost been cancelled because a new vice-chancellor wasn't keen on it, but there had been too many applicants, since it had already been advertised in the prospectus. Even better: the course leader knew of Sylvie's work and admired it. She was asked to wait behind after her interview. Five minutes later, Bernard Stanley walked towards her smiling.

  'Do you want to come to my room, Sylvie?' Once inside he turned round from his desk without sitting down, and said, 'We're in a position to offer you the post if you could commit yourself now to taking it.'

  'I'll take it.'

  'You're absolutely sure?'

  'No question. I understand the teaching you want done and I understand the terms. But I can be quite confident there'll be no change of heart on your part?'

  'Quite confident. Let's go back and talk to the dean then, shall we?'

  So Sylvie was now preparing her last lecture of the year for the Signum with a mood not far off gaiety. After she had delivered it, she would go and deliver her resignation to Hamish Flyte, who she had heard might not be around to receive many more of them. The last thing the university needed at the moment was an affiliated institute so disaffected that half its members of staff hated the Director of Studies. They were about to give him the old heave-ho, but dressing it up with the usual palaver about early retirement, enhanced pensions for distinguished service, and what-have-you.

  She walked out past the For Sale sign, and got into her car Owen's was there gathering dust. Why had he suddenly stopped driving? Then off she went, down the usual roads, through the usual traffic, until she began the big concrete dip that ended in the tunnel. All that water thrashing about above her She'd taken the ferry over once, to see what it was like sitting on top of the water instead of being underneath it. She remembered those dreadful dreams of Henry's. Always the Severn rising and flooding his beloved gallery, soaking his pictures, drowning the poor minotaurs. You could hear their bellows up above the waves, and you could hear Henry's bellows tangled in the sheets. For some reason she suddenly remembered Alberto. He'd been around years before Owen turned up. She had met him in Italy and they had had one of those holiday affairs in which everything seems wonderful. He'd spoken barely a word of English. By the time he turned up the following year to re-claim her, he'd learnt a great deal more. The more English he learnt, the more she disliked him. It was as though his personality couldn't survive the translation. He did have a beguiling line in curses, all the same. His speciality was a series of remarkably inventive imprecations involving the penetration of a fellow's mother's orifices by the fellow himself, with the clear implication that, while all this oedipal thrusting and seeding was going on, the very last thing in the old dear's mind would have been to remark, 'Now just cut that out, you little motherfucker.'

  *

  She sat on the table. She was wearing a short black dress and black tights. Tights though, not stockings. She was happy to give Lionel his last glimpse of her thighs, but didn't want him catching the white of her flesh. She wanted him to take something away from the lecture apart from another heavy dose of sexual frustration. She switched on the overhead projector and slid the image over the glass.

  'Minotaur: the early Christians tried to turn him into an image of the devil, with Theseus as the Christ-figure who kills him. But that wouldn't do. That simplified life far too much. Look at this bull-man, roaring at the centre of his mystery, sweating hair and blood. The pagans might have had a better idea with their: regress us ad uterum.

  'Now it's worth making a note here that Ovid describes this creature as semibovemque virum, semivirumque bovem. Which is to say, half-bull-man half-man-bull, and which isn't to say that a man's head sat upon a bull's shoulders; that is very much by way of subsequent interpretation.

  'Picasso would never relinquish this beast, our therianthrope.

  He sits in the centre of his iconography, although it must be said that this cave is often a cave of flesh. His darkness, his rage, the endless stinging rebuke of his desire, these remained Picasso's themes throughout his life. And his blinding, which appeared largely to be his own addition to the mythic iconography. The beast blinded, led away by a young girl with a candle.

  'Now look at this image from the caves at Lascaux. I want you to look at it hard, while I put some ideas before you. Our fate as a species is to reside in consciousness, but this is a tragic fate. It means that wherever we are, we're also elsewhere. This is at the root of that famous lament of Keats': '0 for a life of sensation, rather than of thought.' And as far as we can see this was our fate from the very beginning. Deep down in those caves in Lascaux, Chauvet or Altamira, we can be pretty sure of one thing: there were no aurochs or bison down there, only their images. Now whether our ancestors from the Upper Palaeolithic were in shamanistic trances or not, they had taken away the image from the point of its perception. They drew the image without the creature before them. Once we have separated the image from the point of its perception, we have started to carry the world around inside us. And it's grown heavier and heavier The more lenses we fill our world with, the more images there are to carry. Down in the caves, they had only two.' Sylvie pointed to her eyes. 'But how many have we got?

  'Imagine if you were far enough away, high above New York, the way the lens was so far away from the Large Magellanic Cloud. If we had sensitive enough equipment up there we could see the extraordinary geometry of the city's streets; there's a labyrinth if ever there was one. And then a tiny flash of light, which will travel on through the darkness at 186,000 miles per second, and then another flash and another. It's going to travel for 160,000 light years, so whole epochs will pass before what has happened here happens there. Our Magellanic observers then see a moment in history. Tiny flashes in the labyrinth. John Lennon has been shot over and over again in the back. He stumbles and the spectators move forward. Their eyes are filled with that dazed wonder, just like these children in the Vollard Suite.'

  Sylvie now removed her final image from the glass.

  'Lenses and constellations. 'Try to be aware of them. This is how we construct reality.

  'And just before you go, I'd like to thank you all for your attention. Because this is the last lecture I'll be giving at the Signum Institute. I'm leaving to go elsewhere.'

  The murmur of complaint that went across the lecture hall gratified her. Lionel came up to her as she was gathering up her notes.

  Are you really going?'

  Afraid so, Lionel.' He stared at her beseechingly. Oh God Lionel, she thou
ght but didn't say, there must be some female undergraduate here prepared to take you to bed, even if she does have to dry your head out first. Then she went and delivered her letter to Hamish. It had given her a certain amount of pleasure to tell the students before him.

  'It's not open to negotiation, but then I gather you won't be in any position to be doing much negotiating from now on, anyway.'

  She left then. She had one more place to go before packing up her things and preparing for Kent. She walked down the road steadily in the direction of the Physics Department. She only knocked once on the door and walked straight in. Helsey had a female student with him.

  Ask her to leave. Ask her to leave and come back later.' Annette, would you mind coming back in an hour or so.'

  'I have a lecture.'

  'Then make it tomorrow.' The student stood up and collected her essay, with evident bad grace. She gave Sylvie one final stare and left the room. Attractive girl though. Wonder how many personal tutorials she gets each semester.

  'That wasn't very nice, what you did,' Sylvie said, before the door had closed. She had forgotten how attractive he was. The tall forehead, the high cheek-bones.

  'I'm sorry. Sorry for everything.'

  And the letter to Hamish fucking Flyte saying I seduced you.

  Are you sorry for that? That let you hang on to your professorship, did it?' He looked genuinely startled.

  'I never wrote a letter to Flyte. He wrote one to me.'

  'I saw the letter, Tom. Don't lie.'

  'You can't have seen the letter, because I never wrote one.' She stopped and thought back. Actually, she hadn't seen any letter, had she? Hamish had only let her catch a glimpse of the letter-head, then he had ordered her out of his room, after giving her a version of what he said were its contents. Tom was rustling through one of his drawers. He pulled out a sheet of paper.

  'This was the only communication that passed between us.' He handed her the sheet. It was from Hamish to Tom. She read: