The Laughter of Aphrodite

by Peter Green

  His eyebrows went up, and he looked at the half-full wine-cup. For once he seemed to be enjoying himself in my company: there was a lip-licking air of anticipatory relish about him. He sat down, wrinkling his nose, savouring his undeniable position of advantage. Well, I thought, two can play at that game. I settled myself back against the pillows, sipped at my- drugged wine, and waited.

  Having made his point about my drinking habits, Charaxus proceeded to scrutinize first my face (with obvious disgust) and then the bed and the linen-press, as though expecting to find a lover hidden there, or at least some unmistakable evidence of my gross debauches. This, I had to admit, was rather effective. But then he ruined the whole thing by saying: “This room smells like a whorehouse.” My brother can be relied upon to produce the appropriate platitude for all occasions.

  I smiled (poor booby, it was like taking sweets from a child) and said: “My dear Charaxus, how travel does broaden one’s experience.”

  He flushed, and rubbed the back of his hand across his nose: a sure danger-signal. A warm, delightful torpor was stealing through my body: I had all the time in the world before me.

  Charaxus said: “Now listen to me. I don’t propose to argue about what happened in Egypt. That’s my affair—”

  “It was a family affair.”

  “And so is this.”

  I shrugged, and drank a little more wine.

  “Your position,” said my brother, “is extremely vulnerable. I would have preferred to avoid such plain speaking, but you leave me no alternative—”

  “What a liar you are, Charaxus. You came round here with one idea in your head: to humiliate me.”

  “I see there’s no reasoning with you. Very well, then; I shall give you some facts. One: your recent behaviour has alienated all responsible people in this city, including your friends. You have disgraced the dim to which you belong. You have caused grave scandal in our society. These are not small things.”

  He paused, apparently expecting a comment.

  “Go on,” I said. “I prefer the speech whole, not in installments.’

  “There is also the question of your financial position.”

  Ah, I thought. Now we come to it.

  “I am right in saying—am I not?—that you now have no assets whatsoever apart from this house.” His whole voice and manner changed when he was talking about money, became quick, shrewd, authoritative. “The capital which your husband left you has been spent, and there is very little to show for it. You no longer derive any income from your—guest-pupils.” His tongue curled unpleasantly round that last word. “You are living very largely on credit—I think I could tell you just how much you owe in the city, and to whom.”

  “Naturally,” I said. “Tradesmen have no secrets from each other.”

  He shrugged: he could afford not to take offence if he felt so inclined.

  I said: “You are forgetting my patrimony. I still have a share in the family estate.”

  “That,” Charaxus observed smoothly, “is a debatable point. I agree that according to our father’s will the four of us were left equal shares. But Eurygyus died as a minor, and so his share reverted by law to the eldest male descendant—”

  “The eldest descendant,” I said. “There is no distinction of sex.”

  “The court, you will recall, decided otherwise.”

  “I also recall who the judges were.”

  Charaxus said: “You are, of course, at leisure to reopen the case if you wish. It will be a long and costly business, but—” He spread his hands expressively.

  I said: “There is my own share.” I knew what was coming.

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. But there are two points again, which I really must remind you of. A clause in our father’s will specifically places your share of the estate under my administration from the day I come of age—”

  “It also guarantees me a proportionate income from the vineyards and olive-groves.”

  “just so.” Charaxus rubbed his hands. “But since you chose to mortgage your share to me when you were regrettably short of ready money, that provision no longer applies.”

  He cocked an enquiring glance at me, half-triumphant, half-apprehensive, as though expecting an outburst of fury, perhaps a physical assault: but the drug was taking firm hold of me now, and (in any case) I had used up most of my temper on poor Thalia. When I made no comment, Charaxus said: “You are in an unfortunate position, sister.”

  I sighed wearily. “All right,” I said. “What are your terms?”

  Charaxus placed his fingertips together and stared at the floor.

  “You can keep this house,” he said. “No, don’t start protesting; if every merchant you owed money to foreclosed—and they well might—the place would be sold over your head.”

  “I see,” I said; and indeed the picture was all too clear.

  “Furthermore, I will cancel the mortgage on your share of the estate and pay you an agreed income from the profits on all sales.”

  “Are you quite sure you can afford to?” I asked tartly. The unprecedented— and, I must admit, most uncharacteristic—way in which he had squandered money on Doricha in Egypt had made dangerous inroads into the family capital.

  “Oh yes,” he said, mildly: “I can afford to—now.”

  An unwilling flicker of admiration rose in me. It is not every man who can recoup his own extravagance with so sure a hand as my brother (an exceptional vintage helped, but it was his knowledge that placed the exports); nor, indeed, every merchant who travels the Aegean with his own cargoes, as far afield as Egypt too, in search of good markets—especially if he is nearly fifty. But money always has had the most extraordinary effect on Charaxus, ever since I can remember.

  “Now,” I said, “you had better tell me your conditions.”

  “Very simple, my dear.” But he looked ill at ease as he said it. He got up and stared out of the window, with his back to me. “There is only one condition: you must give up this fellow, this boatman or whatever he is. I must have your word that you will never see him again.”

  I said nothing: there was nothing to say.

  “Think,” said Charaxus. “You will have a house and an adequate income. The scandal will soon die down if you do nothing to encourage it. It seems a very generous arrangement to me. You will have ample time for your writing. There may be some pain at first—I know that, who better? But you have Cleïs still, my dear. A daughter’s love is truer, more deep and enduring, than some vagrant lust for a common fisherman.”

  I stared at him, realizing that he meant it, that he was full of selfcongratulation on having found so reasonable a solution to a vexing family problem. This was how his mind worked. Yet the malice was there, unacknowledged: “vagrant lust,” whether he remembered it or not, had been the phrase I used to describe his own liaison with Doricha. And how much did he know about the breach between me and Cleïs?

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and in a curious way I was sorry: the whole situation lay so far beyond his comprehension. “But I can’t promise you that. It’s blackmail, Charaxus. Besides—” I broke off, unable to justify or explain myself: how could I talk to my brother of dignity, self-respect, words that for him were smooth, debased coins, rubbed into a meaningless blur by much handling?

  In the silence that followed I could hear his heavy breathing, with the faint catarrhal wheeze that never seemed to leave him, winter or summer.

  “Then I am sorry too,” he said at last. “I had hoped to give you some sort of free decision. But whatever your choice, the end will be the same.”

  A cold trickle of terror ran through my body, eclipsing momentarily the numbing effect of the drug.

  “No,” I whispered, “no, no, no,” like a child who has dropped some fragile, beautiful toy and tries to will the moment back, make things as they were before.

  Charaxus said: “Your young friend has been—how shall I put it?— somewhat indiscriminate in his favours. So I had a friendly little chat
with him. He proved more amenable than I expected.”

  “You bribed him,” I said dully.

  “Not at all. I told him that one or two well-connected citizens were considering whether to lodge charges of adultery against him—which, I may add for your benefit, is quite true. I also told him that if he were to leave the country voluntarily, the matter would go no further.”

  Whether from the shock (though I had known in my heart, surely I had known) or the increasing effect of the drug, I felt a total physical paralysis spreading through my body. Every muscle seemed stiff, sluggish: it was as though Charaxus had become some obscene male Medusa, gorgonizing me into brittle grey stone.

  “I see,” I said, but my lips scarcely moved.

  “The young man shipped as a deck-hand on a cargo-vessel two days ago.” Charaxus smiled complacently. “I have a certain influence with the harbour authorities. Everything was arranged in the most discreet way.”

  The last hope. “This ship,” I whispered. “Has it=

  “Sailed? Indeed yes.” He might have added: Would I have been here otherwise?

  Two words, like slow bubbles, formed themselves on my lips.

  “Where?” I whispered. “When?”

  Charaxus stared at me, and for the first time I thought I saw an expression of genuine pity on his face.

  “Yesterday, at dawn. The long haul to Sicily.”

  It was one of his own vessels, then. Wine to Sicily, grain on the homeward run. Sailing south of the Peloponnese, by Crete and Cythera, to avoid haulage-dues at the Isthmus, with an underpaid crew and the constant risk of savage storms across the Ionian Sea.

  As though reading my mind, Charaxus said: “Not all my ships go down, you know: give me credit for a little business sense. Besides, that particular young man is much more likely to end with a knife in his back.”

  I said: “Go away now. Please go away.”

  He hesitated, shifting from foot to foot.

  “You must see the whole thing was hopeless,” he said at last.

  “Oh yes. Quite hopeless. I knew that.” My eyelids began to sink.

  “You’ve had a shock. Of course. But you’ll soon get over it.”

  “I expect so.”

  “You ought to start writing again. It would take your mind off things.”

  Perhaps I will, I thought. Perhaps I will. But not as you suppose. This time it is different. This time I must take the shattered pieces of my life and see them whole. I must purge my suffering with words, cast out the pain visibly, cauterize to heal. There is nothing else left for me.

  I tried to smile. “Thank you, brother,” I said.

  “Everything will be all right. You’ll see. I’ll attend to all the legal details today. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  I closed my eyes, and seemed to plummet down a sheer black vortex, an engulfing throat of darkness. But before I could open my mouth to scream, or catch my breath, I was asleep. I never heard Charaxus go.

  I was wrong to mistrust the Egyptian drug Alcaeus gave me. I slept, as he said I would, for twelve hours: it was dark when I awoke. I stretched till my muscles cracked. It had been months since I felt so buoyant. Then the mists cleared, and I remembered. But the pain had lost its rawness: it was as though during my drugged sleep a fine protective skin had grown over the nerve.

  He was gone, irrevocably, and I remained.

  Over, finished, broken.

  I was forty-nine years old—very nearly fifty, indeed—and now the Goddess, herself eternally young, eternally virgin as the new spring came round, had played her last, most merciless trick on me.

  But my body refused to acknowledge the words, or their meaning: unaccountably that sense of euphoria, of sheer physical well-being, persisted and spread. Had Alcaeus foreseen this too?

  I took a lamp, walked through to my library, and unlocked the great chest that stands beside the south window. Here, tumbled in hopeless confusion, lay the fragmentary record of my life—bundles of letters, invitations, love-tokens, half-finished drafts of poems, old bills, journals (I never had the patience to keep one for more than a month or two at a time), the trivia that every woman accumulates, quite unconsciously, and finds a recurring surprise whenever she springcleans or moves house. I stooped and prodded into this musty confusion of papers, smelling the camphor-wood, the dusty, faded tang of old documents, old emotions, all a dead past. Well, I thought wryly, here’s material enough to raise the dead, indeed. And the words passed silently through my mind, my fingers closed over that old, battered silver locket. I lifted it out and sprang the catch, knowing what I would find, seeing the blue ribbon and the lustrous curl of dark auburn hair through a sudden dazzle of tears. I loved you once, Atthis, long ago, when my own girlhood was still all flowers—the heartbreaking awkwardness, thin arms and legs like a colt’s, the great grey eyes and the ridiculous dusting of freckles. Atthis, Atthis, my true spring love, what has become of us?

  I closed the lid of the chest: the hinges creaked, and fine dust flew up as I turned the heavy key. Tomorrow, I thought, tomorrow I will begin to find the answer. I went back to my bedroom feeling curiously at peace. When I got there my supper was waiting for me on the bedside table, and my finest Coan nightdress, with the tiny embroidered roses round the yoke, had been laid out for me. It was only then I noticed I was still wearing the bath-robe in which I had fallen asleep.

  In the shadow beyond the lamp a slight, timorous figure stood, hands folded, waiting.

  “Thalia,” I said, and at the note in my voice she stepped forward, breathless—eager, into the light “Thalia—” And then she was in my arms, sobbing and shaking, her warm, sweet-smelling hair against my cheek, while I stroked and soothed her as though she were some small, frightened animal. I said: “Did Praxinoa send your and she nodded, unable to speak, still trembling violently. A small, ungainly child. I held her closer, feeling the hardness in my own breast break, loosen, flow free in a warm flood of tears, the deadness quicken, memories crowding my mind, the past of a sudden spring river, lit with unlooked-for sunshine. Tomorrow the search would begin. But tonight, at least, I had a brief, sweet reprieve.

  II

  It is hard—harder than I would have thought—to detach myself from the present. What am I conscious of, at this moment, sitting in my library with the mementoes of the past scattered over the desk in front of me, pen in hand, committed to my voyage of personal discovery? The sound of a cock crowing in the valley below. The thin distant note of a trumpet: the morning watch taking over on the city walls of Mytilene. The taste of the apple I ate for breakfast, the pattern of the small silver fruit-knife I used to peel it. Thalia’s smile, the touch of her fingers—gentle still, but firm and confident now—as she combed and braided my hair. The smell of wood-smoke from the kitchen ranges, and of baking bread, and of fresh earth after that brief, violent storm that came whipping against the shutters of my bedroom in the small hours. The touch, the exquisite touch on my skin of clean pleated linen and silk. The sight of sunlight dappling the fig-trees below the terrace.

  The beautiful pleasure and agony of the senses. For this there is no time, no sequence of remembered events: only a series of vivid images, caught from time’s flow, held and treasured. I walk in the gallery which is my past, pause by this or that picture, smile or sigh, and move on. When I try to recall my earliest childhood what I am most conscious of, always, is sunlight: sunlight everywhere, dancing motes of dust, the lizard iridescent on the wall between gnarled vine-branches, shadows a mere emphasis of universal brightness.

  I am in Eresus again, walking through a sea of head-high, whispering green barley, below a sky so intensely blue that all colour seems drained out of it. Or I am perched on a white stone wall, in one of those steep, winding streets below the citadel: looking down I see a huddle of red-tiled roofs, the merchantmen with their brown patched sails riding at anchor, the sea crawling, grape-purple or viridian, round the harbour’s embracing arms. Or I am standing with my nurse in one o
f the great bakeries, where the famous white barleybread of Eresus is made. There is a smell of dust and flour and chaff; from outside comes a creaking and a grinding, a monotonous nasal dirge as white-powdered, muscular slaves heave at the great quern; and gigantic cats come sidling round me, purring like mountain lions, rubbing themselves against my back and legs. Then the oven door is flung open, the loaves are slid out on a long wooden paddle like a winnowing-fan, and all other smells are Eclipsed by the crisp earthy richness of hot bread. My teeth bite into a crust, I see the steam rise from the torn loaf.

  Now I am in the walled garden of our house, a little way out of Eresus itself along the coast road. There is a tall pine by the fountain, a favourite haunt for summer cicadas, and in the orchard beyond, apples are reddening. The mountain stream which runs past has dwindled to a mere summer thread among white stones. But the banks are shady with tamarisk, and in my mind’s eye I can see a herd of black and white goats concentrated into one small pool of shadow. Across the stream, in our big vineyard, the air is fluid with heat: my eye travels into the mountains, pine-clustered, mysterious, the white dusty road that winds away to the unimaginable world beyond.

  Here in the garden it is still and cool: the wind stirs a little in the cypresses, the bees are busy, and the fountain drips, quietly, drop-drop-drop, into its green-stained marble basin. When I look up I can see a kite, wings outspread, circling, waiting. From beyond the wall, like sounds heard in dreams, come the krrk of a partridge in the corn-field, the bark of a shepherd’s dog, the tinkle of goat-bells, the sudden agonized, sawing bray of a donkey. I am lying on sweetsmelling pine-needles, watching the ants scurry to and fro, gleaming black, each with its twig, its seed, its minuscule social burden. Then my mother’s voice cuts through this glass bell of stillness, and the pieces shatter, and I am a small, frightened child, jumping up, brushing pine-needles off my dress, ready to face the world of ‘her arbitrary laws and unpredictable commands.