The Laughter of Aphrodite

by Peter Green

  “Afterwards we sat up till nearly midnight discussing alterations and improvements. Cercylas says that if I really want to we can move in the moment the place is bought and have the work done—literally—about our ears. I think he, being a tidy creature, would much prefer to wait: but somehow the idea of watching our dream take shape makes the house, for me at least, a living organism, into which we will—I hope—be slowly absorbed till we form an integral element of its atmosphere.

  “I tried to explain this to Cercylas. I think he understood. But he knew it was what I wanted, what would make me truly happy, and that, he said, was enough for him. (He is adept, too, at sidetracking those fancies which I think will make me happy, but in fact won’t) I told him what Aunt Helen had said about my infinite capacity for being spoilt, and he nodded: that, he said, was the main reason why he had married me. Then, with his most disarming grin, he added: Which leaves me little time for other activities. The trouble with Cercylas is that I am always in danger of taking him for granted. Such constant love and devotion become a little unnerving if thought about too often: so I don’t.”

  Again, I have omitted the most crucial part of that late-night discussion. (Sometimes I think the reason most people keep a journal at all is not to preserve the truth—far from it—so much as to reshape the past for their own peace of mind.) I had never spoken openly to Cercylas of my relationship with Chloe, though I felt certain he knew about it—and what it implied. But that night, suddenly, I had a violent impulse to drag the subject into the open, to confess, to humiliate myself. Cercylas’s understanding and warmth and generosity were more than I could bear: I made use of his love, I gave nothing back. I was hateful, cold, predatory. All this I poured out, suddenly, in a confused and tearful torrent of words.

  Cercylas heard me through without interruption. When I had sobbed and sniffed myself into comparative silence he said: “What a curious notion of love you have: rather like an Egyptian trade agreement, so much corn in exchange for so much wine, and special clauses to prevent bilking. Hadn’t it occurred to you that one of the many reasons why I married you was because making you happy gives me active pleasure?”

  I wiped my eyes and stared at him.

  “Why should I dictate what form your emotional or sexual pleasures take? I don’t own you. Why should that make any difference to what I feel for you?”

  “But if I really fall in love, if I’m emotionally involved—”

  “You are being stupid tonight, darling. Why shouldn’t you become emotionally involved with anyone you like?” He shook his head and smiled. “So many rhetorical questions: I apologize. But try to understand that nothing you could feel for another woman would impinge on our relationship. The two spheres are distinct, they complement each other, enhance each other. There’s no competition, nothing to stop you loving a woman and loving me. Love takes many forms: you’re a poet, you should know that. So please forget this absurd idea of your having married me under false pretences: apart from anything else, it doesn’t exactly flatter my intelligence.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry.” He spoke with sudden vehemence. “It isn’t in character—at least, I very much hope it isn’t. One of the most attractive things about you, my love, in case you hadn’t realized it, is your absolute determination to get your own way. You’re ruthless as only a good artist can be. You’re so implacably self-centred that you’re not even conscious of the fact. I find you quite fascinating.”

  It was the oddest complimentary speech anyone had ever made to me. And then my mind flashed back to that winter day in Pyrrha, to a tall figure in a fur cap and sheepskins: This curious illusion you have that you’re a delicate, sensitive creature too refined for the rough-and-tumble of ordinary life. You’re tougher than any of us, really, Sappho: it’s never once occurred to you that you can’t, in the long run, get exactly what you want.

  I laughed despite myself. “Antimenidas once told me almost the same thing, word for word.”

  “Antimenidas?” His eyebrows lifted a little, his voice had an ironic inflection as he said: “But of course, Antimenidas was—is—in love with you too: surely you realized that?”

  My astonishment must have been obvious: Cercylas could not have asked for a better illustration of his remarks on my character. I said, rallying: “That’s absurd. He called me a ravening harpy—”

  “So you are, darling.”

  “—and he said he was sorry for any man fool enough to marry me.”

  Cercylas took both my hands in his: the lamp-light flickered over his brown, lined face. “I wouldn’t argue with him, Sappho. In fact, I might well have said the same thing in his place. But—had you noticed?—I happen to love you, so why shouldn’t he—perhaps even for the same reasons? One of which, without a doubt, is your quite splendid naïvety.”

  For the second time in as many minutes he had taken me off-balance. I said: “Ruthless and naïve? It sounds an unlikely combination.”

  “Not at all. Most of the time you don’t notice people as individuals; and when you do you have a touching faith in what they say rather than what they do or are. Please don’t ever change: it’s a delightful trait.”

  We both burst out laughing. Then, on a sudden impulse, my hands still clasped in his, I said: “Do you get pleasure from making love to me?” I was surprised by my own candour: I think Cercylas was, too, because, for the first time, he hesitated before replying, and then merely said: “Sometimes, it depends.”

  “On what?”

  He shook his head. “We’ve talked enough for one night.”

  Much later, in the darkness of our bedroom, he said: “Are you in love?” His hands moved gently over my bare body.

  “No. Yes. I don’t know-

  “Tell me about it.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then—“There will be,” he said.

  “Are you so sure of the future?”

  His fingertips traced the contours of my body, delicately outlined lips, cheek-bones, nose, brow.

  “I know you,” he said. Then, with an ambiguous touch of irony, he added: “You mustn’t disappoint me, darling.”

  Next day Agesilaïdas and Ismene, who had been married less than a month before my return, came back to Three Winds from Pyrrha, bringing Ismene’s children with them: Mica, Atthis, little Hippias, each nearly five years older than on that bright morning—so long ago, so fresh still in the memory—when I had stood at the side of the great black ship that was bearing me into exile and watched, through a dazzle of tears, Atthis’ grave, sunlit face dwindle, merge with the waving anonymous crowd, vanish out of sight. Partings and reunions: what a significant element, now I come to think of it, they have always formed in the pattern of my existence.

  XIII

  Old wounds ache under the scar: even now I find it hard to write about Atthis and the love we had for each other. Sometimes I am tempted to formulate that last despairing prayer for blessed oblivion. Let memory fade, let my yesterdays return to the anonymous dust that made them. But I cannot escape her, she is everywhere, in the small tree-climber vines I can see from this window, in the homeward-gathering evening star that we so often watched together, in the moonlit sea and the smell of a wood-fire and the autumn wind.

  She changed the world for me, its shape and brightness and texture: because of her I could never see anything in quite the same way again, never be what I had been, for I was a part of the world and so changed with it. The filaments of our love ran out to the ends of the earth, they embraced all creation. No other love I have known possessed this universal dimension: it transcended passion. I remember once thinking: If I reach out my band, I can scoop the stars from the firmament, night will brush like a mole’s soft fur across my fingers.

  When I look back, I seem to see a clear, sunlit sky, tranquil, radiant, charged with splendor: the brief time of blossom, the pink-and-white glory shed over Lesbos in springtime. Yet the pure halcy
on days, the days of untroubled happiness, were transient enough: our eternity lasted two years, no more, and then the storm-clouds gathered, rain lashed the fallen petals, the spring was gone for ever.

  There were bright days still to come—a burning, febrile high summer, moments of autumnal nostalgia; but never again were we to recapture that first morning freshness, that miraculous unfolding of passion from a love as pure and perfect as the crimson bud of a rose. The rose is blown now, winter waits over ,the mountains. Why do I still sit here, among these ghosts and shadows? So little time remains to me, the sun will soon be down.

  It was the first warm day of the year when I came back from Three Winds, shaken, dazzled, walking in a sweet agony of all the senses—blinded by blossom and sunlight, bird-song exploding in my heart like some divine revelation, all the flowers of the world shedding their odour about me. Cercylas was out in the southern portico, stretched on a day-bed, reading: he glanced up at my approach, and for a moment half-closed his eyes, as though dazzled by what he saw. (A flattering fancy, of course: the sun was behind me, high still, and struck straight into his face. I am pretty sure, too, that whatever my inner feelings may have been, I looked like any lovesick ninny the world over.) He rolled up the book he had been studying and said: “Well, darling, how did you find the bride? Suitably— what shall we say?—epithalamial? Or did all those strapping children spoil the effect a littler

  I scarcely heard him. I was staring at the fig-tree that stood in the corner of the garden below the terrace: old—just how old, no one knew—with a thick, split trunk and innumerable grey branches latticed against the light. Its ancient roots reached down into the earth like knotted chthonian serpents: its branches were gnarled arthritic fingers that blossomed miraculously into buds of greenness. The whole tree seemed to writhe and move: it glowed with argent fire, it was Adonis resurgent in the skeletal corpse of winter. Today only a weathered stump marks where it once stood: the gardener’s officious axe has brought down my vision of light.

  Cercylas said curiously: “What is it, Sappho? That fig-tree—you’re looking at it as though you’d never seen it before.”

  His voice came to me from some other world: remote, insubstantial. I nodded. “Yes,” I said, “you’re right. I have never seen it before. Never till this moment.”

  The pupils of his eyes contracted like a cat’s: was it the sunlight again? I blinked, shook my head, and then, abruptly, the vision faded, colour and light ebbed back to normal. But the exaltation was still there, in my head and heart, transfiguring, a river of bright fire.

  “I see,” Cercylas said very softly; and then, with one of those disconcerting flashes of insight he so often displayed: “I don’t envy poets their gift, you know; for me it would be like—staring into the sun. To see with such intensity demands a special strength.”

  “Yes: to see, to feel—” I hesitated; he did not.

  “To love, yes. Love, after all, is a kind of seeing. That is why poets are so susceptible to it—”

  “And so ruthless to those they love: isn’t that what you mean?”

  He smiled affectionately: there was a cool twinkle in his eye. “Perhaps. Now tell me about Ismene: I’m curious.” He tossed the roll aside, and I sat down on the day-bed beside him. As I smoothed out my skirts it struck me, for the first time, that they were the same vivid lime-green as Chloe had been wearing that first day in Syracuse. An age and an exile ago.

  I said: “Well, she certainly looks different: she’s put on weight, for one thing, and lost that dreadful drawn white look, you remember? Agesilaïdas fusses round her like an old hen—”

  “How old is she, for heaven’s sake? Thirty-six? Thirty-seven?”

  I said demurely: “Perhaps she needs a little—mothering.” We both laughed. There was a pause in the conversation then, not long, but enough to hint at the different ground ahead. Cercylas said in almost too casual a voice: “How are the girls taking it all?”

  I drew a light breath. “Very well, I think. They like Agesilaïdas , that’s the most important thing. He’s made them his allies in a kind of conspiracy to look after Ismene, and they adore it.”

  “So does she, I should imagine.”

  I giggled. “Poor Ismene; she did make rather heavy weather of widowhood, didn’t she? But Agesilaïdas , is such fun, too: witty, civilised, well-read—”

  “Darling Sappho, you make him sound the most dreadful bore.”

  “The girls don’t think so.”

  “He probably flatters them into adoring him for his apt quotations,” my husband said, amiably. “They’re sensible enough to see he doesn’t relish the interloper’s role—not, I fancy, that the old thing could ever be considered a rival to Phanias.”

  “No: he and Phanias don’t have much in common, do they? Except Ismene.” I giggled again: I was more nervous than I allowed myself to admit.

  “Even that might be, in a sense, debatable.”

  Our eyes met: his were friendly, encouraging. I said: “Do you know who else was there? Melanippus—”

  “Oh? I thought he might have taken a trip to Egypt.” For a non- Mytilenean, Cercylas was astonishingly well up in local gossip: he enjoyed nothing better than observing, with engrossed fascination, every twitch in the complex web of personal relationships throughout the city. (There is a tradition that only women possess this trait: personally I have always thought men put it about in order to take women off their guard. All the greatest gossips and scandal mongers of my acquaintance have been men.)

  I said: “Well, if he does, it looks like being for his honeymoon.”

  “Mica? Yes, I’d heard something of the sort. How he’ll enjoy having a real artist all to himself: the fashionable portrait-painter and her husband, holding court”

  “Poor Mica.” She alone had looked wary and ill-at-ease that afternoon, her childish high spirits very much under control, dark smudges beneath those hurt, Cassandra eyes. But she had talked with bright, almost brittle animation, matching Melanippus’ mood, playing the part he had envisaged for her. What was her reward to be? Social prestige, financial security, a tolerant, understanding husband. Only the eyes hinted at the sacrifice which these advantages would demand.

  Seeing Melanippus and Agesilaïdas together—so carefully polite, such demonstrative paragons of marital and near-marital virtue—I found myself wondering how close their relationship had been in the old days, what unspoken conspiracy linked them now. Did they, as I, realize the fresh and subtle light which Mica’s betrothal cast on her mother’s remarriage? Imitation, especially between children and parents, is by no means always the sincerest form of flattery.

  “Why poor Mica?” Cercylas asked. “She knows what she wants: she’s going to have it”

  “Does she?”

  “Do you?” His eyes were faintly mocking, but I could sense how he hung on my answer.

  “Yes: I know what I want.”

  “And are you going to have it?”

  I sat very still, hands folded in my lap. The two rings on my marriage-finger glinted as the afternoon sunlight struck them: the heavy signet, the entwined and pursuing snakes.

  “The Gods know,” I said at last

  He nodded. “The Cods know indeed.” The moment was over: we understood one another now. When Cercylas spoke again, his voice had recovered its old casual, bantering, ironic note.

  “And what about Atthis? She looks a delightful creature, but it’s so hard to tell what’s going on in her head: that grave expression gives nothing away. Do you suppose she’s brewing up some choice poison for her step-father on the quiet?”

  I laughed. “Is Atthis really so inscrutable? Odd—no, I can see what you mean, it’s just that—” However hard I tried, I could not prevent my voice changing when I spoke of her: there was a queer thickening in my throat, a breathlessness. “No, I mean, I think she likes Agesilaïdas very much.”

  “Well, that’s lucky, isn’t it?” Cercylas looked at me pensively, his grey eyes giving nothing aw
ay, his expression—it struck me, with sudden surprise—an unconscious parody of the grave, inscrutable mask which he attributed to Atthis. “She’s so young. It would be so easy to hurt her.”

  I nodded. “I know,” I said, “I know.” The afternoon was warm still, but my clasped fingers felt, suddenly, as cold as ice. Cercylas got up, swinging the rolled-up book in one hand. He said: “I shall be dining in the City Hall tonight. A special invitation from Myrsilus. Now, what should that mean, do you think?” His eyebrows lifted in half-humorous resignation: it struck me then—not for the first time— that he knew a great deal which he never passed on to me, that there were whole areas of his life in which I had no part.

  I said as demurely as I could: “It’s no use asking me: try Aunt Helen.”

  “Heaven forbid.” He grinned. “How did you acquire such formidable relatives, Sappho? There must be an art to it.” I said nothing: this rhetorical question, I decided, was one that did not require an answer—luckily, since I would have been hard-pressed to supply it.

  Cercylas hesitated a moment longer, then said: ‘Well, I must look at the accounts”—a remarkably lame excuse for him, I thought—and walked away down the colonnade, head bent as though in meditation.

  I sat there a little longer, alone now yet not alone, remembering each minuscule detail of that momentous afternoon. When I arrived at Three Winds she was nowhere to be seen. Like a sleep-walker I embraced Ismene and Mica, curtseyed to Agesilaïdas , offered the gifts I had brought, conscious all the while of Melanippus’ cool eye appraising me. There were drinks of sweet cordial and little sesame cakes and endless questions. It was only after an hour that I dared to say, as casually as I could: “Where’s Atthis?”

  Ismene smiled: “Oh, down in the orchard. She’s been so strange lately, Sappho. I can’t explain—remote, withdrawn, as though she weren’t there at all, yet not unhappy—”

  Mica said, with a touch of impatience: “Oh, nonsense, Mama, she’s just at the age to go mooning about by herself: why do you pay so much attention to it?”