“Meanwhile I am here.” she said with a rueful bitterness “the most beautiful woman in the world they say. O God.”
She has gone such a long way away now, dissolved among the shadows of time; only her masks are preserved in the tin cans that crowd the lumber rooms of the bankrupt companies. Iolanthe now is an unidentified wave to sadness which reaches out for me whenever I see a slip of blue Greek sky, or a beautiful late evening breaking over the Plaka. And then the horror and sadness of the way in which she said “Look” in a voice of a frightened child; and ripping open the cheap bodice showed me the bandaged breasts plumped out with their surgical wadding, and taped like hot cross buns. “I haven’t completely healed up as yet.”
“Cancer?” I exclaimed; but she shook her head and replied: “Not yet at anyrate. It’s even more ironic. Last year in Hollywood they brought in a new treatment for falling breasts—injections of liquid paraffin. It was all the rage. But mine went wrong though I am not the only one, Felix.”
She sat down at the mirror once more to adjust her disguise, saying tonelessly: “Now I have brought you up to date.” Subjects of calendar time trapped in the great capitals of the world. I let Iolanthe sink deep into my reveries; down she went and down like a plumb-line, turning and rolling through the subaqueous worlds of memory and desire, dissolving and disappearing from view.
“Come,” she said at last “enough of these post-mortems. I have ordered a hire car to wait for us at the office. Let us drive into the country together, have lunch, lie on the grass, forget, pretend.”
“Forget” I said, and suddenly remembered Benedicta. “I must just ring the office and see if there is any news of Benedicta; she hasn’t been very well of late.”
“Benedicta” said Iolanthe. “They say that it is all because she drugs. I heard it ages ago and it may be true. Apparently Julian….”
I felt my scalp tingle with rage; it climbed my spine to burst in the centre of my mind like a black bubble of fury. “I do not want to hear his name any more” I said. “I implore you.”
“Very well” she said calmly, and kissed me—the sort of kiss that might soothe a refractory child. I banged Number Thirteen shut behind us as we went downstairs.
We came back in the late evening, and she was careful to adjust her disguise before crossing the pavement to the glass doors of the apartment house. Outside lay the film company’s Rolls, with the usual small knot of onlookers hanging about it. Its presence always signified that she was inside and might at any moment emerge to be driven somewhere. It was quite miraculous to see how swiftly the crowd gathered—people seemed to spring from the very pavements: she had only to leave the lift and appear in the soft red light at the end of the corridor for the ferment to begin. Autograph books would flash. It was necessary to clear a track for her. Then as she sat back in the car noses would be pressed grotesquely against the windows; avidly the parched faces would inhale her, drink her up. But little Solange looked like some shabby dressmaker and not a head turned as she unlocked the tall doors and, once safe inside, blew me a kiss and rang for the lift.
I walked for half the night by the river which mirrored the opal-studded floors of the dark heaven powdered by Stardust; cold, it was cold. The spring day had foundered back into a subzero night which made me glad of a heavy overcoat. I roamed the deserted bookstalls and the dark ships along the river-front with a sense of confusion and loss; I should have been sobbing, I imagine, but what is one to do if the tears pour inwardly, if the amateur face expresses nothing? All that I deserved was some dirty unknown old woman with a gold tooth and shrunken thighs to drain my semen in an instant, pocket the money and scuttle downstairs again to her lamp-post; but even this seemed merely an act of bravado, an attempt at a self-inflicted wound which hardly penetrated the thick carapace of my narcissism and self-regard. Smelling of dirty underlinen, rubber, and sweat; nor could I assuage the thirsty hounds of introspection which were licking my bones. In a bookshop window I read a phrase from an open volume of Flaubert: “On ne saura jamais ce qu’il a fallu être triste pour entreprendre de ressusciter Carthage.” I read it over and over again; perhaps if I had had my wits about me I could also have become a master of corkscrew prose? I walked on and on until my legs would carry me no further; then I took a taxi back to my musty room, to spend the rest of the night sleeplessly doing battle with the giant shapes of a nightmare which paralysed my breathing and my will. My own groans woke me, and I remembered Benedicta saying: “But I suffer from daymares, Felix, pavor diurnus, as Nash calls it; it is harder to wake from them.” (At midnight the quantity of carbon monoxide in the blood reaches its maximum.) As always when she was talking honestly one had the impression of truth barbed with a ferocious tenderness. Next morning I scribbled a note to Iolanthe promising to visit her again, and pleading that urgent business called me back to London. In some unanalysable fashion our meeting had upset me, had knocked the props from under my self-esteem. It was hard as always to leave Paris—hard, grimy and metallic city where civilisation is always dragging its anchor; harder still to face cold London with the sullen ferocious visages of the young half hidden by hair.
the big syringe
the shrunken penis
is all they offer now
to Venus
No, it won’t do; deep in the penetralia of one’s self-regard there was an arrow pointing towards something which had remained unrealised and unachieved—though how to formulate it without making a model I knew not. Nor should I let the calculated despair of this realisation drive me towards any violent solutions—violence is for the weak. But then Felix, it is precisely because of your weakness…. Someone said once that Julian was obsessed, not with dying, but with rotting; he could not face the idea of that (was it Iolanthe or Koepgen?). Nor could he submit to having his entrails removed, his body embalmed. He hit upon the notion of having a steel, air-tight coffin built for him by Gantry the famous makers of office safes. I had one in my office which closed with a slight puff. A Gantry with an elaborate combination-system whose code I am always forgetting.
High summer to autumn the year went by, its clock-time not matching the slow accretive growth of the buried decisions I meditated; but they were so inchoate as to have to be disinterred, brushed clean, examined—dug up like the bones of dinosaurs. The flora and fauna belonging to such bones must be imagined, their world visualised. Externally nothing had outwardly changed. Life still held its unhurried glacier-pace. Iolanthe wrote once or twice and I tried to answer, sitting before the blank paper for ages biting a pen. What I most needed to say would not rise to the nib. I gave up the struggle. Banubula, in search of female hormone I suppose, paid me a brief visit and for a few days carried me back to those remote unhurried epochs when we had both time and will to devise, to execute. Also the sacramental whiff of Polis and Athens. Jocas had been shot at by a eunuch and in returning the fire had killed the man; elaborate and exhausting litigation about restitution was still going on. Graphos was much worse; he spent all winter at the Paulhaus now, but the treatment availed him little. Hippo had “gone so white”. Well, so had we in a way; both the Count and I found our temples turning. I was sorry to see him go, in spite of his perpetual moaning about not being able to join the firm. (“But why on earth should you want to join it?” Banubula stroked his nose. “Well, because of you all; look at you, you are all so happy”.)
Benedicta still lay at anchor, not noticeably better or worse: still hovering between white depression and sudden bursts of tender enthusiasm—attacks of almost total lucidity one might have called it. Yet always lying for half the day in the darkened rooms, blinds drawn, candles fuming. “I suddenly realised one day that real people had become shadows—without any substance as egos.” It was well expressed, but I was tempted to answer “Except Julian I suppose?” Then self-reproach, of course, and bad dreams in which Julian sat by my bed, a small vampire-snouted man, staring at me with two live coals. I knew of course what all these women lacked—a tablespoon
of fresh poet’s sperm breathing salt air and seed into them. It can work wonders with a sensitive woman. What we all lacked, it seemed to me—and here I was mentally copying Koepgen with his ex cathedra judgements—was the mythological extension of human personality. I remember him saying, in front of a statue of the old king who went on sleeping with his dead wife for months: “And do you dare to imagine that there isn’t a real historic personage buried underneath each mythological one?” It was all very well. I went to New York, to Rio, conferring my intellectual bounty on them in well-shaped discourses.
And then, quite unaccountably (or so it seemed, it was so sudden) Pulley walked into the house in Mount Street one evening with an air of rare distraction. He had found the front door ajar as I had been expecting Marchant to come and talk chemicals. A new cadaverous Pulley; without even greeting me he crossed the drawing-room to the sideboard and poured himself a stiff whisky and soda. “Well” I said. He looked at first blush as if he had been beaten up—his forehead was all blue and bruised; moreover his skin was yellow, as if he were just getting over an attack of jaundice. But no, he said, the bruises were due to a fall downstairs and the yellowness due to a bug he had picked up “out there” and for which he had been under treatment by Nash. “Just got back from Zürich this morning to find my digs in an awful mess.” He sank into a chair sighing, and giving me a yawning grin with very little grin in it—a funny rictus really.
“Pulley, what have you been up to?”
He shivered a little and said: “They gave me drugs at the Paulhaus, drugs for bugs, old man. And now I don’t know what I’ve told them, at all I don’t. I can’t remember. It worries me. Did I tell them the truth? I didn’t mean to. Anyway, I’m not really sure it was him—Robinson.”
“Wait a minute. Stop this babble. Who is Robinson? And where?”
“Sorry” he said with contrition. “Either it was Caradoc or it wasn’t Caradoc, and it was only a glimpse. I was sure it was at first; then when I left I suddenly grew doubtful. Maybe it was Robinson after all, the old man. But I’ll begin at the beginning. The smell of copra—do you know it? I can’t get it out of my nose. Specially rotting copra mixed with a little oil and bilge. Day and night vomiting about in a little boat smelling of singed gym-shoes. I’m not saying it isn’t all very beautiful, it is: but I’d prefer to see postcards. The damp in those islands, my boy, the damp winds, damp clouds, steamy jungle. And the diet, chunks of pig and breadfruit inadequately cooked and very badly served on leaves. After about a month I’d had enough. Moreover I’d cleared the few survivors, visited them as from an airline insurance company. There remained a man called Robinson, a de-frocked clergyman they said, who had gone native and retired to a tiny little island miles from anywhere. He had been on the plane, or so the passport people said, and had crawled ashore and disappeared. Presumably he had gone back home again; but the last copra boat had gone ages since and the next wasn’t due for a while, so I just had to cool my heels in Pyengo.
“A more godforsaken dump I never hope to see; and if the ladies are kind as they are reputed to be, it’s all very well. Only you should smell the local cold cream they use on their bodies. That also takes getting used to. However there was sunshine, there was a sharkless lagoon, and the foodstuffs arrived wrapped in old Times, so I made do with it until I could catch the boat for Robinson’s little island. Apparently he had quite a tidy copra crop to be collected and some shells. So an occasional visit was on. Anyway there I stuck and waited, slowly getting athlete’s foot in my armpits. Nor did such enquiries as I could make offer much hope. In fact the whole thing seemed a waste of time. I didn’t sleep very well, the blasted trees make such a noise. Also they said the season would soon be breaking, and I had visions of being stuck altogether. However at last it came, the boat, and the skipper agreed to take me; but he emphasised that Robinson absolutely refused to allow people ashore on any terms whatsoever; the crew were allowed to ship the copra and clear off. There were signs tacked up everywhere saying: ‘Strangers forbidden’. I said I would take a chance on it; but I didn’t feel too elated as apparently Robinson had a gun and was quite likely to use it. He had once fired at a suffragan bishop who tried to come and draw him back into the fold.
“Well, one has to take risks; and after all that time waiting I felt I really should. The voyage was hell for smell, the sea was oily, everything appeared to be rotting all round us. Three days it took and at last we came to the tiny little island and drew into a rusty iron pier with a crooked crane. The ship tooted to tell Robinson that we had arrived but nobody answered, so the crew just swung off and began to load the copra which was lying around fairly neatly laid out for them; also several big boxes of seashells. I walked up and down for a bit in a hesitant manner, keeping my eyes skinned; but nobody appeared, and the skipper seemed to think that nobody would. It was often like that, he said. He pointed over the hill and said that the village was somewhere over there; and so I started to stroll in the direction he indicated. It was quite pretty and quite green with patches of cultivation here and there; I had been told that the total population of the island was about sixty souls—enough for the harvesting and all that. There was rather an exceptionally large hut standing some way outside the nearest village-shaped cluster and I went towards it, imagining it must be the chief’s or Robinson’s. All the way along I saw notices tacked to the trees saying: ‘Strangers absolutely forbidden. Danger’ which didn’t sound too reassuring. However on I pressed. As I got nearer to the big hut I saw that there was an old man sitting on the steps, an old man with a mane of white hair. He started when he saw me and gave an inarticulate cry, as if of rage. I waved my hands in a peaceable and pleading manner, like a soldier waving a white flag of truce, and called out in English: ‘Is Mr. Robinson here? I have only come for a moment to ask him a question.’ My dear Charlock, that was absolutely all. My range was fairly extreme, but I did get a good look at him. He was simply covered in hair, beard to his waist, high-foreheaded sweep of mane backwards, loin-cloth, and rough thonged slippers made of some bark or other. His eyes were small and bloodshot, and at this moment regarded me as a cornered and wounded wild boar might.
“Everything seemed to come together in a confused sort of focus—you know how it is in moments of excitement? And some of the things I saw in that few seconds I didn’t take in until afterwards, when I was on the run. For example that he had two small kids at his breasts, he was giving them suck, old man. I could even see some of the milk trickling down among the hairs on his breast, white as coconut-milk. It seemed to me that it was Caradoc all right. I mean that at that precise moment it seemed so; later I lost confidence in my judgement. A woman appeared at an upper window, large and rather handsome, and clucked something at him. All this happened in a twinkling. I called his name once in an uncertain sort of way. Then he put down the kids and picked up a gun which was lying beside him and opened fire. A bunch of leaves from above my head fell with a crash on me. There was no time to argue; it was a near miss. I took to my heels with the shells knocking up the stones all around me. Once I thought I had been hit, but it was gravel thrown up by the shots—but it hurt. It must have been a six shot twelve-bore, for he sent all six whistling about my ears, some damn near. I cleared the brow of the hill with thumping heart and galloped down to the pier where they had just finished loading. I took refuge in the deck-house until the ship drew anchor and set off. I feared he might follow me down to the harbour and take a pot shot at me there.
“Well, this whole thing, sort of instant snapshot stuff, had a strange sort of effect on me. It wasn’t just the unexpectedness, the fright and so on. I felt as if my mind had been, for one brief second, unfrozen; and even later when it went back into deep freeze again, the experience left something, a nagging something. I’m not much good at expressing these things. Later, of course, when I got very ill I had all sorts of feverish delusions about us all, about the firm. Julian had me flown back to Zürich where they could look after me. But God,
the drugs were strong—I’m still woozy from them. And then that old fool, Caradoc or Robinson? Yes, but it was Caradoc. It is touching in a way—I saw how clumsily, how shakily he had tried to escape, to leave his body behind so to speak. Why on earth should he do it? The firm is everything to me; it’s a livelihood, and a creative way of earning one. And yet, Felix, and yet….”
He gazed at me with sallow concentration from the fireplace, fingering the bruises on his forehead and sucking his teeth. “Another thing I didn’t know I’d noticed until after we set sail was the sort of house he was living in there. It wasn’t like most of the architecture of the place—it was canted up on piles. You don’t remember, do you, how Caradoc used to talk about the theory of Sarasin that the proportions of the Parthenon corresponded in a way to the pile-buildings in Celebes? He used to go on quite a lot about it, and often drew it in the sand for us. No, you’ve forgotten? Well, anyway, it’s this sort of shape if I remember rightly.” He took out a coloured pencil and sketched in the following figure on the back of a newspaper.