by Simon Raven
Of this, it now appeared, she herself was to be the centre.
All at once the boys from Clito's closed in on her. She just had time to notice that Earle himself had backed away against the rock before she was lifted by a dozen hands and laid gently on the ground. The dozen hands now started to caress her in a dozen different ways, while out of the dark the pretty face she had fancied in the wine-shop loomed down from one side to kiss her on eyes, ears and lips. As the face hovered and dipped at her own, hovered and dipped again, always close enough to blot out what little she might actually have seen in the darkness, it began to seem to her as though it were this one boy alone who was making love to her but this one boy somehow endowed with so many limbs and so much skill that he could rouse pleasure simultaneously in every place of her body. Instead of being fumbled by a crowd, she was being gloriously embraced by an immortal god with a face like Cupid's and the magical ability to make one mouth do the work of ten, ten fingers do the work of a hundred. From head to foot, every nerve in her which was apt for stimulation was being stimulated; she was, literally, one mass of desire. As the tongues and fingers went on busily about their tasks, she felt her damp thighs being slowly prised apart, The god was poised, he was about to enter.
Then she was lying alone on the cold shingle, with only the disarray of her clothes to prove that she had not imagined the entire scene.
'Come back,' she called; 'come back.'
'I told you you wouldn't regret it.' said Earle, who was now standing above her. 'An amusing idea, which originated with the Empress Theodora in her younger and jollier days.'
'Bring them back.'
'All right.'
There was a quick flurry in the darkness and once again her god was loving her tenfold.
'What can you tell me about Fielding Gray?' said Earle.
'What's Fielding Gray to you?' she mumbled, while the pretty Cupid face brushed lightly over her cheeks.
'Tell me about him.'
'Nothing to tell.'
The god stopped loving.
They're bored with your old body,' said Earle. 'You must excite them. Tell them what you did with Fielding Gray.'
Angela started to tell. Slowly the god moved into action again, leaving her lips free to utter the phrases which roused his divine lust.
'I see,' said Earle at length. This boy the two of you talked about ... this boy that killed himself. Describe him.'
Once again Angela's thighs were parted and the god was poised.
'I never saw him.'
The god perceptibly withdrew.
'Christ, Christ,' she screamed; 'don't let him go away from me.'
'Excite him then. Tell him about this boy. He likes hearing about boys.'
Yes, thought Angela wildly, all gods are bisexual.
'I can show you a book,' she babbled, 'Fielding wrote a book. Fair-haired ... strong limbs but delicate too ... light silver hairs on his legs ...'
'Go on.'
She felt the poised god move very slightly nearer.
'I don't know. Yes. I do. There's a statue like him. Fielding told me. In some porch or something the Americans made in Athens, a statue of a boy with a flute.'
'How very convenient,' said Earle.
He snapped his fingers, and the god sank his sacred flesh slowly into Angela's, working the while at her whole body with his tongues and his fingers and his other immortal members.
'No,' said Maisie; 'I won't do it.'
'Didn't you hear properly?' said Somerset Lloyd-James. 'Five hundred pounds, I said. To say nothing of an introduction to a new and noble client.'
'New and noble clients are all right,' said Maisie, 'if they still want to come. But I won't do what you ask to this Tom Thingamabob at the BBC.'
'All you've got to do is to meet him, get him started ... you know... and then go there and kick up a theene.'
Somerset still tended to revert to his childhood lisp when he was excited or upset.
'I don't go out to work. I do it here. What you're asking,' said Maisie, 'isn't decent. It isn't fair and it isn't professional.'
'Now, look here, Maithie—'
'—And you look here,' she said. 'I'm paid to make men come. I don't mind which way I do it—as you very well know by now—because that's what they're paying me for, and as jobs go in this world it's as fair and as square as most others I've heard of. But what you're asking's different. You're asking me to make a fool of someone who's never done me any harm and who's got his job to do the same as I've got mine. If a man wants to knock on my door and says, "Maisie, here's a tenner, make me come", then I'll do my best for him and welcome. But if a man wants nothing to do with me, I want nothing to do with him, and I'm not going out anywhere for the sake of stirring up trouble.'
'I dare say we could go a hundred higher.'
'Court cases,' said Maisie, 'names in the papers. I'd never have any peace and quiet again. So either get out of here, Mister Somerset Lloyd-James, MP, or tell me what I can do for you. Who do you want me to be this week? Your governess? Or the chamber-maid at that hotel by the seaside? Or that jolly Aunt who played hot cockles with you in the back of her Rolls on the way back from the circus? We haven't had her for nearly a year now.'
'None of those, I think,' said Somerset, still lisping. 'Can we have the woman on the train? You know ... when there ithn't a corridor and she's thuddenly taken thort?'
Captain Detterling went to dinner in Chelsea with Gregory and Isobel Stern, Although Gregory had finally agreed to do the Cavafy memoirs, he was still proving obstinate in other matters and relations at the office were rather strained. However, it was understood that this dinner was a social occasion, and since Detterling was far too well mannered to talk business when he was not supposed to, all would have been well had not Gregory himself raised the topic.
Today,' he said, 'I signed a contract for a book which propounds a new theory of the Crucifixion.'
'What new theory?' Detterling asked.
'That the Romans were exclusively responsible.'
'But we had all that,' said Detterling, 'ten years ago. Late in 1951. the Jewish historian Shalom Franklyn published an exceedingly long and detailed book about it. It's all been said, Gregory.'
'Then it should be said again. Because people have already forgotten.'
'They have not forgotten,' said Detterling. 'On the contrary, they remember very clearly that Franklyn was shown to be wrong. He succeeded in shifting a bit more of the guilt on to the Romans, and he blew up the notion that Pilate was a humane and civilised man; but he didn't prove, because he couldn't, that the Jews were spotless in the affair.'
'This new book I have bought does that.'
'Then its author is either unscholarly or deluded.'
'Why are you so keen that the Jews should have killed Jesus Christ?'
'I'm not blaming them, Gregory. Christ asked for everything he got. I'm just saying that this particular controversy is dead.'
'And if there were new documents?'
'Are there?'
'Professor Bamberger, the author, claims to have inspected—'
'—Claims to have inspected. What's the matter with you, Gregory?'
'So Bamberger is a liar?' said Gregory, thumping the table. 'He is a Jew and therefore a liar? So that is it?'
'Boys, boys,' said Isobel. 'You don't want me to miscarry? Let's talk about something nice.'
'So talking about Jews is not nice?'
'For Christ's sake shut up,' Isobel said. 'Has anyone heard anything more about Fielding in Greece?'
'You should know. It is you that is always dreaming of him.'
'Not for a long time,' said Isobel 'I used to think there was something psychic between Fielding and me, but since the baby's been coming it's all stopped.'
'Nature,' said Detterling: 'I'm told she protects pregnant women against any form of worry by releasing a special secretion into the blood. Your body manufactures its own opiate.'
'Yes,' said Gregory. 'Na
ture would not wish you to worry about Fielding at a time like this.'
'I never worried. I just had hunches about what was happening to him. Or what was going to.'
'I must say,' said Detterling, 'I should very much like to know.'
'One morning,' said Gregory, 'he will wake up in Athens and say to himself. “My God, how could I be such a fool?'' Then he will come back to us and start writing novels again. Love's Jest Book,' he said to Detterling, 'is still selling slowly but steadily.'
Isobel shuddered.
'I hated that book.' she said.
'May one ask why?'
There's a light, bright flicker of madness in it. Any sane man would Have forgotten all that stuff years ago.'
'No writer is strictly sane. Nor are people who have psychic hunches.'
'Well, pregnancy seems to have stopped my kind of madness,' said Isobel. 'What can we do for Fielding's?'
'Make as much money out of it for him as we can,' Detterling said. 'Then when he finally goes raving at least he'll be able to afford a comfortable bin.'
Earle Restarick flew from Nicosia to Athens. The minute he arrived, he took a taxi to the Agora and went straight to the reconstructed Stoa at the far end of it. He walked along this until he came to the boy with the flute, examined the statue with great care, and then knocked on the door beside it. When the door had been unlocked from within, he passed into a small and windowless room which contained several metal filing cabinets, a desk with one chair, and a lot of broken statuary.
'How's the ancient world?' he said to the man who had admitted him—a thin, short man, with a nose as long as a hockey stick and a sensitive mouth.
'Preferable to the modern one. How's the Great Game?' There is an interesting problem to hand. Does the American School of Greek Studies in Athens run to a knowledge of comparative ethnology?'
'Try us.'
'That statue just outside in the portico?'
'A copy from a late Hellenistic original. Probably made about AD 100. What's that got to do with ethnology?'
'Comparative ethnology. The Grecian type seems to have changed since the late Hellenistic period.'
There have been a lot of mixed marriages round here in the last 2.000 years.'
There must be some areas—remote areas—when you can still find the classic article.'
'Only flukes, accidental throwbacks. For 2.000 years the whole of Greece has been swarming with Syrians, Romans, Franks, Lombards, Venetians, Egyptians and Turks. No area is remote enough to have escaped the attentions of that little lot. If you want the classical Greek type, there's only one hope for you.'
'Oh?'
'Find a German got from the time of the occupation. There are a few about. Blond, blue-eyed, straight-limbed—a very passable imitation of the old Dorian strain. The only people in this country who still look like real Greeks.' said the man with the hockey-stick nose, 'were fathered in the forties by the Hun.'
'And so,' said Somerset Lloyd-James to Lord Canteloupe, 'there's nothing doing with Maisie. Though she'll be glad to see you personally in her professional capacity.'
He handed Canteloupe a slip of paper on which a telephone number was written.
'But,' Somerset went on, 'as regards Tom Llewyllyn there is another possibility.'
Canteloupe sighed.
'Here we go again,' he said.
'On the contrary, we don't go anywhere. This time we just sit absolutely still,'said Somerset, 'holding our breath and waiting for it.'
'Waiting for what?'
'Nemesis,' said Somerset with relish.
'Do you have to talk like a schoolmaster?'
'Nemesis,' Somerset pursued, 'which in this case will come, not as the scourge of pride, but as the scourge of innocence. It really is exquisitely funny.'
He started to chortle, sounding like something behind the wainscot in a story by Edgar Allan Poe.
'If you don't stop that horrible row,' said the Marquis Canteloupe, 'and tell me what you're talking about, I shall hit you on your bald, yellow head.'
Honking and wheezing with his macabre merriment, Somerset began to tell him.
7 : Diversions
Three days before he was due to see General Grivas, Fielding's sight-seeing schedule took him once more to Delphi, where he proposed to spend the night and make a more detailed exploration than he had had time for on his previous visit. He left Athens in a hired car (self-drive) at ten in the morning, stopped on the way at Thebes to look at the museum, and arrived at Delphi in time for a late lunch. Having then established himself in the Xenia, in a room which looked straight out over the gorge, he drove along the hillside to the ancient site and began his carefully planned tour of inspection.
After fussing about for some time among the 'treasuries' in the temple enclosure, he sat down on a stone and read Pausanias' account (in the Loeb edition, which he had procured from the bookshop on Constitution Square) of the shrine and its environs. He then walked on up to the temple itself, peered down into the chasm from which the priestess had uttered the oracles, and started on a conscientious examination of the inner precinct. It was while he was doing this, and cursing himself, not for the first time, for his contemptible knowledge of archaeology, that he began to feel he was being watched.
At first the feeling was in no way uncomfortable: it was rather as though some tutelary spirit of the place, not the god himself but some otherwise unoccupied minor deputy, was courteously hovering nearby in case he should require direction or assistance. It was, he told himself, a compliment to the interest he was taking; he was being recognised as a worthwhile guest. As time went on, however, and the feeling that he was observed grew steadily more insistent, he began to wish that his companion (for as such he now regarded him) would find some means of declaring himself. Repeatedly he looked about him. hoping that the undeniable presence might take bodily form, but the only bodies visible were those of two crestfallen Americans and their voluble guide, who was issuing an interminable harangue, down by the treasuries, about the Amphictyonic Council.
Anxious to get out of range of the guide's clacking monologue, Fielding now left the temple and took the path up through the trees towards the theatre. The guardian presence went with him. Somewhere in the pine-trees, he could not be sure on which side of the path, an intelligence which wished to communicate with his own was lurking along beside him. An intelligence? Say rather a fancy, a dream, a vision: something, in any case, which wanted to draw nearer to him but which, as he now realised, could not declare itself further unless he himself were to perform some act of prayer or ritual, utter some word or think some thought, which would give the spirit shape and enable it to come to him.
What prayer? What word? What thought?
'Who are you?' he called. 'What do you want?'
The presence lingered but came no nearer. Slowly he walked on up the path. He knew now that he needed more than mere words to speak; he needed to imagine something, or to remember something, or to feel something. A wish or an emotion? What? For if he could only make the mental effort required of him, he would be proved worthy and granted the vision. If not... well, it would linger awhile as it was now, but before long it would go sadly away, betrayed by his own failure of spirit. He must prove himself before it departed. What did it want of him?
He emerged from among the trees and found himself standing at the top of the theatre, looking down the stone tiers on to the stage below, and then beyond it, to the gorge above which the eagles slowly circled, to the bare, black ridge on the other side, and then away to the west, where the sun was sinking above the Gulf of Corinth. As he watched the eagles gliding, and as he saw the sea come glittering and creeping up to the olive coast below, he realised, for the first time in his life and with a physical pang which stirred in his body like lust, what it meant to be in a sacred place. He sat down on the stone ledge at the top of the theatre and burst into tears.
For some time he kept his head lowered, while the tears dripped off his face
and on to his feet. When he began to recover himself, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and put it up towards his eye. As he did so, he heard a voice which whispered into his ear the one word:
'Please.'
He looked to his left and his right; he looked behind him; nobody.
'Please,' the voice whispered, 'please. Don't cry. Please.'
My tears have let the presence speak to me, he thought. What more must I do to see it?
'Please. I am here. Please.'
He raised his head again and this time looked down on to the stage. In the middle of it was a figure. A boy. Of course, he thought: in this theatre of all theatres the lightest sigh from the stage, the fall of a rose leaf, can be heard in every part.
'I am here. Please.'
Fielding started to walk down the steps to the stage. As he drew nearer to the figure below, he saw that the boy's short fair hair curled above a square, creamy forehead; as he came nearer still, he saw that the eyes were mild and wide-set, that the nose was soft, that the lips were full and curved slightly downwards, and that there was a cleft in the chin. Dear God. he thought, he's been given back to me; that's what was promised in the pine-trees; for the price of my tears he's been given back to me.
'Christopher, oh Christopher,' he called, 'is it really you?'
The boy did not answer, but held out both arms and raised his mouth for a kiss.
Maisie rang up Tom Llewyllyn at the BBC.
'You don't know me,' she said, 'but I want to see you. I want to give you a warning.'
'I'm afraid I don't quite understand.'
'No, of course you don't, and I can't tell you more on the 'phone. Come round to my place at six this evening, and I'll tell you what I can.'
'I don't think I can do that.'
'Look,' said Maisie. 'You don't know me and I don't know you, but I know who you are and I know some of your friends. Fielding Gray for one—he's told me quite a lot about you. But it's not him I want to talk about, it's other so-called friends who are getting ready to land you in the dirt. So if you know what's good for you, you'll clean out your ears ready to listen and come round here this evening at six.'