by Peter Green
“This is the last of these letters. I hope you haven’t found them too boring or incomprehensible. A girl of twelve, I know, has more important things to think about. Treat them as lessons, if you like: all lessons are dull, after all, and even Chiron can’t hope to avoid prosiness on occasion. But remember, my dear, that there is a great deal in life which Homer (for whatever reason) saw fit to ignore altogether. The sooner you realize this—not that I imagine you want to at the moment—the happier, ultimately, you will be. Some people go through life without ever admitting it at all, which is not, on the whole, a good recipe for happiness. In any case, I have enjoyed writing to you: it is pleasant to have one correspondent at least who can be relied upon never to misinterpret one’s motives.”
So the army sailed home, as summer’s heat began to soften towards autumn; and Pittacus was cheered through the streets (looking rather sheepish, I remember) and afterwards given a splendid banquet in the City Hall, at which he got splendidly drunk. Next day the Council (whose members had not forgotten his tart dispatches) appointed him Chairman of the Board of Commerce, a job which most people considered very much beneath them, and which therefore fell, more often than not, to unpopular nonentities.
Pittacus did not seem in the least put out by the implied snub; he even, in his impulsive way, went so far as to declare that there was no post he would rather hold. At first this claim caused much superior and ill-natured amusement at his expense. But very soon, as he marched, with positively Herculean energy, into the Augean stables of public finance, the joke was dropped: it became apparent—even to the most hostile critic—that Pittacus had, indeed, meant exactly what he said.
I cannot remember a time when I was not familiar with the idea of death. Even as a child in Eresus the sounds of mourning, the smoking funeral torches, faces lined or, worse, nail-scored with grief formed a familiar element in my circumscribed world. A bloated ox lay dead in a ditch, kites and vultures flapping over it; the sick, sweetish stink of corruption turned my stomach, but I did not feel fear, much less surprise— perhaps because I was, myself, so intensely alive. I could not conceive death as having any relevance to me personally: I walked among mortals like an immortal Cod, immune and curious.
Perhaps this is why the deaths of those close to me—even my own father’s—always moved me less deeply than I expected. At nine years old children, they say, are inconsolable: every loss is a kind of death. It was not so for me. During our third winter in Mytilene my little brother Eurygyus, who had always been a sickly child, caught a racking cough, which went to his chest and killed him, without any fuss, in less than a month. He was just over five at the time of his death: we had, in fact, celebrated his birthday at his bedside. My mother and I both won praise for the brave way in which we bore our loss; the truth is that I felt almost nothing (rather to my own bewilderment), and I very much doubt whether my mother did, either.
This is not to say that I was, or am, insensible to suffering. But I cannot, except in the most superficial way, feel loss where I have not known love. An enemy would call this yet another proof of my all-engrossing self-centredness: I regard it as simple honesty. You cannot mourn the absence of what you never knew; the most you can feel is a generalized sorrow for the transience of human life. Perhaps I should have loved my brother, but the truth is that I scarcely knew him. When I paid my last respects over that tiny, open coffin, the waxen face I kissed might have been a mask. A child’s death is always inherently moving, and to that extent I experienced sorrow: personal loss there was none
Curiously, I was more upset (for a variety of reasons, I now see) by the sudden death of Uncle Eurygyus, which happened two or three months after Pittacus returned from the Troad. I seldom thought about him; none of us did. He was a tall, shambling ghost on the periphery of our lives, remote and abstracted, a subject for easy jokes, yet— somehow—a little frightening too. Anyone who so continually meddled with divine matters was bound to have a touch of the numinous about them. I could always feel when Uncle Eurygyus was coming, however soft his tread: there would be a gentle prickling at the base of my scalp. Sometimes I tried to picture the world as he saw it: a dark, threatening, dangerous place, full of invisible pitfalls and destructive powers all the more horrific for being so arbitrary.
Yet to the casual observer his death, like his life, must have seemed a faintly comic affair. He had lately developed a great fad for magical herbs: the house was full of nasty-looking (and often nasty-smelling) roots that-no one was allowed to touch, while there were always two or three villainous old crones hanging about the back-door, muttering, much to the alarm of the kitchen-boys, who were almost as superstitious as Uncle Eurygyus himself. One of these unpleasant hags persuaded him to make a midnight expedition into the hills at the time of the full moon—there was some special root which could only be dug up when various unlikely conditions had been fulfilled—but was careless enough to pick a time when the autumn rains were due. Uncle Eurygyus got a terrible soaking, failed to find his root, and died of lung-congestion five days later.
To my utter astonishment, I found myself crying my heart out at his funeral. Perhaps I felt sad on Aunt Helen’s behalf; perhaps I knew, instinctively, what an unobtrusive buffer he had formed between her and my mother; perhaps I was just at that difficult, between-states age when tears come easily and often for no apparent reason. Then I caught my mother staring at me in a very odd way, her face a mixture of disgust and lubricious speculation. This made me pull myself together with remarkable speed; but not before my cousin Agenor, who always looked so much older and more protective than his years—I think he was fourteen at the time—had put a comforting arm round my shoulders, and given me a clean handkerchief, and made a warm corner in the grey desolation that lay like a winter on my heart.
We stood in an awkward group round the bier, the tall tapers flickering behind us, not knowing what to say to each other. Uncle Draco was there, an even taller version of Aunt Helen, with a tendency to look down his nose like a broody heron. Aunt Xanthe, plump and sweet-natured, stood beside him, with little Irma, and dark eleven-year-old Ion, the brother I had never before met, and Gorgo. Gorgo was thirteen now, her red hair burnished and lustrous like her mother’s, her face subtly transformed in the past year from a snub-nosed moonishness to something softer, more delicate, alive with secret warmth. I thought of her and Drom, and the coldness deepened inside me: I was so small, so dark, so plain. No spark of warmth, let alone that extraordinary glow. I shut my eyes miserably. Nothing can be the same again, I thought. And then a voice in my head, unexpectedly, said: But do you want it to be? Yes, I whispered. Yes. Do you? Yes. I think so. Do you? I don’t know. I’m afraid—
Of death?
No. Never.
Of life, then?
Perhaps.
Of yourself?
Always.
Why?
I don’t know—
Do you want to stay as you are?
Yes, yes, please yes—
For ever?
Yes.
I opened my eyes again and found that Aunt Helen was looking at me, with odd, fixed intensity. For a moment I felt, with a stab of irrational terror, that the secret voice in my head was hers, that she was a part of me, possessing me. Then the moment passed, but her eyes still held mine: I seemed to become weightless, to gyrate in a soft dazzle of candle-flame, a still, bright centre, while the words ran unbidden through my head.
The terror of the spring. Beauty hurts. Light hurts. Light after darkness. Stumbling from the cave like Persephone, to unfolding buds and green spikes in the furrows and a tide of longing in the blood. A strange face looking back from the glass, a body grown suddenly unfamiliar. The usurper, the alien. Who cannot be withstood.
Who is yourself.
V
Perhaps the most unexpected result of Uncle Eurygyus’ death was the change it brought about in Aunt Helen: a change which, directly, or indirectly, affected every member of the household. It is hard f
or me, having been so intimately involved in it, to explain just how, and why, it came about. My mother, with her usual commonsensical briskness, declared that Helen was suffering from temporary religious mania—and added tartly that she had at least chosen an appropriate object for her devotions. Like most of my mother’s assertions, this one had just enough truth in it to mask its fundamental superficiality and wrongheadedness: it left one with the uneasy suspicion that she might, after all, be right.
At first Aunt Helen was very quiet and withdrawn; it seemed almost as though her personality had been drained away, leaving nothing but an animated husk behind. She spent much time alone in her room. She spoke seldom, and then only to arrange some necessary household matter. Her eyes had an inturned look, as though she were searching herself—for what, and why? Her brother came visiting once or twice to see if she needed help and was politely frozen out: curious to see that great heron of a man reduced with so little effort. The slaves had more or less run the house before and continued to do so now, blandly ignoring my mother’s brisk attempts to re-organize them.
My mother fumed, but was powerless: she threw all her considerable energies into our lessons, which very soon reduced us to semihysteria—all, that is, except for Andromeda, who disconcerted my mother by treating her as a huge joke, and nice Mica, now ten years old, who wanted to please, had a good mind, and remained quite placid when shouted at.
Midwinter encircled us: snow powdered the carob-tree, darkness fell in the afternoon, ships lay harbour-bound, and we woke, late and drowsy, to the sound of last night’s warm ashes being raked over in the braziers. We read Homer, and learnt to weave, and practised an hour a day on the lyre, under the guidance of a wizened little Lydian music-master who made the rounds of the big houses, and obviously enjoyed teaching young girls.
Agenor, Charaxus, Hermeas, and now Larichus too (who was just seven) went out to school every day, escorted by old Sosias, who had been born to a slave-girl in Aunt Helen’s family house, and had come with her on her marriage. It was a standing joke that Sosias would, one day, learn to read. He sat through every class at school, one eye on his charges, the other peering wistfully at the blackboard. He had been doing this since Uncle Draco was a schoolboy, his enthusiasm undiminished, the alphabet as great a mystery to him as ever.
My cousin Meg and I had a close but difficult relationship, punctuated, at irregular intervals, by violent emotional storms which neither of us quite understood. We were both several years older than Telesippa, who went half-mad with boredom when left to her own devices, and spent much time and ingenuity in doing all she could to torment us. The house was loud with little-girl teasing, slaps, tears, and peevish recriminations. Sometimes my mother would step in, very high-handed, and attempt to restore order—which, of course, invariably made things much worse. Only Aunt Helen, lost in some unimaginable world of her own, seemed immune to all these domestic stresses—indeed, quite literally unaware of them.
It was a late afternoon in the turning month between winter and spring, when Pittacus called, unannounced, stumping into the house with a blast of cold wind at his back, wrapped in his heavy black Thracian cloak. The hills were a froth of early almond- and apple-blossom, dappled in delicate, wind-blown colours, so beautiful and transient I could scarcely bear to look at them. My mother, always a great walker, had marched off after lunch, dragging Meg and Telesippa with her. There had been a stormy row because I flatly refused to come.
I said I had a headache, which was true.
“Of course you have,” said my mother. “Moping about indoors all day long.”
“Please, Mama. I really do feel ill.”
How could I ever explain that what I found unbearable was the thought of her striding between those almond-trees, taking over my private vision, converting it into her own prosaic terms? There were few doors that resisted my mother’s pushing, few rooms, however intimate, that she did not explore and diminish. She had an instinct, which almost amounted to genius, for reducing dreams to dust; yet if anyone had seriously suggested this in her hearing, she would have been hurt past measure at such ill-founded malice. She was not a hypocrite, which made things worse: most of the time she had a quite touching faith in her own opinions.
So I became obstinate and sulky, and my mother hysterical and vituperative, and neither of us gave an inch. In the end she slammed out of the house with my two cousins, leaving me in a state of trembling exhaustion. My head throbbed, my stomach was queasy, a sour metallic taste lay at the back of my mouth. I lay down on a couch and closed my eyes. The house was very still. The boys would not be back from school for another two hours; the slaves were all dozing in their quarters on the far side of the house, and Aunt Helen was shut away upstairs. Violent-coloured patterns—gold-edged purple pansies, jagged scarlet streaks, flashes of greenish light—danced and pulsed inside my eyelids. I felt as though I might be sick at any moment.
It was then that Pittacus appeared: I jumped up in surprise as he entered.
“No,” he said, reading my thoughts, “I didn’t bother your porter.” He spun a key round one finger by its ring. “The garden-wicket is so much less public than the front-door. Don’t you agree?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. His face had a high flush, and there was a curious artificial precision about his voice: it made me think, for no apparent reason, of a man picking his way across a swamp, from tussock to tussock. He had put on a good deal of weight since I saw him last; though he carried himself as well as ever on those thick, slightly bandy legs of his, he had the unmistakable beginnings of a pot-belly, while his hair and beard were rapidly turning grey.
He said: “Is your aunt upstairs?”
“Yes.”
He seemed about to add something, but thought better of it. He stood there, looking at me in a fixed way that made me feel thoroughly uncomfortable, still swinging the garden-key from one finger. Then he turned and went clumping up the stairs: I heard his heavy footsteps move along to Aunt Helen’s door, and the sound of the door opening and shutting again, and a faint, sharp, muffled exchange of voices. For a moment or two there was silence. I felt my heart pounding, and when I touched my forehead it was clammy with cold sweat. I stood beside the couch, waiting.
Then, suddenly, the voices exploded again, with an unmistakable angry note about them; and the door slammed, and Pittacus came back down the stairs, muttering to himself. He stopped when he saw me, and stood there, looking very ruffled and put out. A lock of hair hung over his forehead, and a vivid red weal ran across one cheek. He grinned at me, rather sheepishly. For the first time I realized he was not altogether steady on his feet.
“Well,” he said, and took a step or two towards me. My throat was dry: I felt paralyzed. “Your aunt’s a very stubborn woman, Sappho my dear.”
He frowned and shook his head.
“Don’t understand. Unkind.” The slur in his voice was now unmistakable; whatever had happened upstairs had, clearly, drained his last reserves of self-control.
I said nothing, conscious always of his hot eyes on me.
“You’re not unkind, are you?” he said, and took another step forward. I had never heard that particular tone in his voice before. He was close enough now for me to smell the stale wine on his breath. Then, with a kind of sob, he reached out and put his great brown scarred hands over my breasts.
A cold, awful thrill, half-terrified disgust, half an even more terrified excitement, ran through me. I could not move or speak: I had become a thing, an object. For an instant, an instant only, time stood still. Then those searching hands shifted from my breasts, gripped me hard, swung me off my feet and on to the couch like a limp doll. His face was over me, all tenderness gone from it now, huge, bearded, frightening past belief, eyes suffused, the weight of his body pressing down.
“Ahh,” he said, an appalling animal snarl, and clamped those great wet hairy lips on my mouth. I gasped, sickened by the smell of him, the heat, the unspeakable slobber of saliva:
and as I did so his tongue forced itself into my mouth, a monstrous polyp-like invader, while one hand groped at my thighs. I can never forget that instant, never find words to describe the degree of revulsion it aroused in me.
I must have bitten him instinctively, without knowing I did it. I heard him give a shout, and then he was standing up, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, quite sober now, a dreadful expression on his face. My stomach contracted as though squeezed by a giant fist: I rolled over and vomited on the floor, in long, agonizing spasms. When at last I looked up, my eyes starred with tears, he had gone. I heard the click of the garden-gate. Then I sank back on the couch, faint, shaking, drained, deadly cold.
All I could see was my mother’s face, twisted in that near-insane rictus of loathing; all I could hear was the dreadful hissing torrent of words, the hate and pain and horror, the nightmare. You’ll learn, she had said, and now I had learnt, my illusions and trust shattering like thin shards against the granite surface of reality. True: all true, every word.
At that point I fell asleep: and I had not yet woken when my mother and cousins returned from their walk. With great fuss I was put to bed and dosed with herbal infusions: my mother always enjoyed a crisis. For the next few days—encouraged, perhaps, by my unexpected docility—she was heard congratulating herself, at frequent intervals, on having had the good sense not to let me out of the house that afternoon. “The child was obviously sickening for something,” she said. “After all, she’s my daughter. If I don’t know her, who does?”
It is easy—too easy—to say of some event: If only this had not happened, my life would have taken a different course. Yet I find myself tempted to make the assertion when I look back on that dreadful afternoon. If I had not become estranged, in those particular circumstances, from the one man who both understood and could help me. If I had not, in self-protective reaction, swung violently over to my mother’s way of thinking—not only about human relationships, but every aspect of life. If I had not, in consequence, become—very much against my natural inclinations—deeply and actively involved in politics. If Myrsilus had not returned from exile and seized power at the precise moment he did. If my mother had been able to accept the love I offered her. If Aunt Helen had not, for the first time in her life, lost control of her emotions. If Andromeda had not been her father’s daughter. If, if, if.