Death of an Elgin Marble (17 page)

‘Much better in here,’ agreed Powerscourt.

‘How’s business? They tell me you’ve been looking into the missing Caryatid at the British Museum. That so?’

‘Afraid it is. I’m not having much success so far.’

‘I took our youngest, Miranda, the one you stood godparent for, to see that Caryatid when Miranda was little. I always remember her telling me she was going to be a Caryatid when she grew up. She liked the girdle, apparently, something like that. Oddly enough, I’ve had a lot of dealing with those wretched Greeks this week.’ Burke looked rather troubled at this point. ‘The modern ones, I mean, not the ones who went around all day talking philosophy and putting Socrates to death.’

‘Is all not well in Plato’s cave, William?’

‘You’re bloody well right, all is not well in Plato’s cave. They need a wizard in money and finance rather than philosophy. Whole bloody country’s pickled in debt, Francis, pickled. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘Really? I don’t recall seeing anything about it in the papers.’

Burke laughed bitterly. ‘Plenty of people have been taking plenty of trouble to keep it out of the papers. It’s been going on for years now. Some so-called friends in the City of London advanced the rebels a lot of money to fund the sacred cause of Greek independence. Bonds. Plenty of money up front, plenty of interest to pay ever after. Our Greek friends had trouble paying those bonds so they borrowed some more. Then their main export collapsed about twenty years ago so the money dried up. Sorry, Francis, do you know what the main Greek export was?’

‘Not a clue.’

‘Currants, would you believe it, currants. Then they lost a war with the Turks and had to pay a huge indemnity. Guess how they decided to pay that off? You’ve guessed it, Francis. Another bloody loan. So now all Greek loans are supervised by an international consortium of six leading countries. I’m one of the British representatives on this Tower of banking Babel, so help me God.’

‘Do you think this is any use to me, William, investigating the theft of a Greek statue from the British Museum?’

‘Can’t see how it is. Just one thing, though, Francis.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s that old saying about don’t trust Greeks bearing gifts. Be even more suspicious than usual. Chances are the buggers won’t be able to pay for anything. Not for a long while.’

The lecture hall close to the British Museum was almost full. Londoners were crowding in to hear a lecture called ‘Some Reflections on the Lost Caryatid’, by Dr Tristram Stanhope, former Fellow of St Luke’s College, Oxford, Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum. The event was being staged by a new body calling themselves the Caryatid Committee. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were seated on the side near the back. The principal players were already on stage. There was a bishop in his finest purple with a silver cross prominent round his neck. He was attended by a humbler man of the Church, clad in plain black, possibly his chaplain. A harassed-looking man sat beside him, checking his notes. There were a couple of substantial citizens who looked as though they might be important players in the City. Of the principal speaker, there was, as yet, no sign.

‘Do you think our friend with the peacock feathers is going to be late, Francis?’ whispered Lady Lucy. ‘And who is that bishop?’

‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Stanhope is late. He’s probably been here for some time, just dying to make a dramatic entrance. The worried chap is that Liberal MP from Bristol who always supports the latest fashionable craze. The purple Bishop is called Jeffreys, bishop of Oxford. They believe they’re closer to God in Oxford, the bishops, always have.’

Lady Lucy looked sharply at her husband, but he pretended to be fiddling with his shoelaces. One floor above, latecomers were being ushered into the last available seats at the back of the balcony. The Bishop began to look rather anxious. Outside the bells of a nearby church were striking seven o’clock. The lecture was due to begin. Powerscourt watched carefully as the Bishop closed his eyes, possibly in prayer. At last, a curtain at the back was flung open. Tristram Stanhope strode dramatically to the centre of the stage and took his seat. He was wearing a long smoking jacket in dark blue velvet with a cream cravat and a yellow carnation in his buttonhole.

‘That’s the peacock feather equivalent, Lucy,’ Powerscourt muttered. ‘Wait for the bloody carnation to expand into an ornamental tail halfway through the lecture.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen.’ The MP was on his feet at the lectern now. ‘For those who do not know me, my name is Archibald Street, Member of Parliament for the City of Westminster. It is my great pleasure here this evening to welcome one of the most distinguished classicists of his generation, Dr Tristram Stanhope of the British Museum. Dr Stanhope.’

The Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities made his way to the rostrum quite slowly. He spread his arms out over the sides and waited until his audience was completely quiet. Then he waited a moment or two longer.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. ‘It’s good to be back here so soon! Less than a year ago I was honoured to be chosen to give one of the Lipton Classical Lectures in this very room on the Roman Idea of Virtue. I am glad to be able to report that on that occasion, as on this one, the hall was full to overflowing!’

He paused. Lady Lucy poked her husband gently in the ribs.

‘This evening is a sombre occasion for all of us concerned with the study and scholarship of the classical world in this country. As you all know, a Caryatid,
the
Caryatid as we like to call her, has been ripped from her place in the British Museum and replaced with a forgery.’

There was a long pause while Stanhope adjusted his notes and fiddled with his glasses.

‘I want you to picture a column or a pillar,’ he went on, ‘slender, graceful, taller than a man, adorned with the marks of the Ionic or the Doric or the Corinthian orders. Now I want you to imagine your column standing beside other columns in a row of six or eight or twelve. Your column may be standing to attention as part of the front of a building – it could be the Bank of England or the Royal Exchange here in London, it could be the front of the Pantheon in Rome, it could be the front of one of Andrea Palladio’s churches in Venice. Your column might be on display inside a Renaissance church – it was the masterstroke of the architects of that time to turn the classical order inside out. In ancient Greece or Rome, the columns or the pillars were on the outside, the brick building contained within them was on the inside. Brunelleschi and his colleagues turned it round, with the brick walls on the outside and the columns on the inside. Think of your column in all those places and then go back to the beginning, to the building on top of the Acropolis in Athens, the building that now serves as a visual shorthand for Greece itself, the Parthenon and its rich panoply of columns. The history of our columns is a key part of the history of Western architecture and of Western culture.

‘The Parthenon and the Acropolis are also a key part of the Caryatid’s story. Above all else, Athens is the city of the goddess Athena. A giant statue of her, eighteen feet tall, adorned with gold and jewels was the centrepiece of the building contained within the inner Parthenon walls. The Acropolis is a memorial to the days of Athens’s glory in the wars against the Persians. The unlikely victories at Marathon and Salamis are all woven into the story of the buildings on Athens High City. Each year there was a great festival to Athena, the PanAthenaica, and we believe that the people taking part in the procession to the Acropolis, the soldiers, the horsemen, the maidens who made the new cloak for the goddess every year, the animals for sacrifice, the charioteers, are all shown on the Parthenon frieze we have in the British Museum.

‘Our Caryatid was a human pillar, a human column. She and her five sisters took the place of columns in another temple on the top, the Erechtheion, built about 406
BC
. The Caryatid was part of the continuing story of the myth of Athena, patroness of Athens and her Acropolis. Erechtheus, to whom the temple was dedicated, was a former ruler of Athens in years gone by and the building may have replaced an earlier one, dedicated to Athena Polias, Athena of the city, that was destroyed by the Persians seventy years before.

‘People often ask me lots of questions about our Caryatid. Was she based on a real person or did the sculptor simply invent her? We do not know the answer, of course, but it was the custom for the sculptors of the time to use models in their work. So the man who made the statue may have met the Caryatid, made a drawing of her perhaps to help him in his task. The more discerning ask at this point: how or where would the sculptor have met the model? Ladies of the night might have wandered round the streets of Athens but well-born young women – and scholars are unanimous in saying that our young lady was well born, if not actually from a noble family – the respectable kept themselves behind closed doors, rarely venturing out into public view. Our Caryatid has kept her great presence, her air of suppressed authority, a slight hint of feeling herself to be better than others across the centuries since her birth. The most interesting theory – and I have to confess here that it is my own – is that the Caryatid may have been based on one of the aristocratic women involved in the priestly rites surrounding the goddess Athena. Maybe the sculptor asked the priestesses for help in his work on the Caryatids for the new temple.

‘The final question may be the most intriguing of all. Was she married? Was there, as it were, a Mr Caryatid? Little Caryatids perhaps, waiting in the wings to weave the robes of the future? Once again, we just don’t know. But we do know that it was the custom for the young women involved in the cult of Athena to be married. Children, who knows. But it was one of the principal duties of Athenian womanhood to produce the warriors of the future, the beautiful young men who would serve in her armies or her navies and bring glory to the city of Athena.’

The audience were entranced, except the Bishop. Powerscourt observed that he seemed to be nodding off, only for the black-clad chaplain to nudge him in the ribs with increasing vigour as the lecture went on.

‘So let me, in conclusion, ask another question. Why does this Caryatid matter so much? Why should we care about the statue of a marble girl born 2,300 years ago? I will tell you. We care because we took her in the first place. The British Government bought the Elgin Marbles, of which the Caryatid is such a distinguished member, that they should be safe in London, in better care than they would receive if they had been abandoned on some Greek hillside. Care, ladies and gentlemen, does not include theft. We care because, of all the statues that make up the Elgin Marbles in the Elgin Room, the Caryatid is the most complete. Not to put too fine a point on it, she has a head, a body, two legs and most of her arms but not her hands. That amounts to more than the goddesses and the charioteers on the frieze. But we should care for her not just because she is so nearly complete. We should care because she stands at the end of an Athenian century, the fifth century before Christ. She looks back to a glorious past and forward to a less glamorous future. Her grandparents might have fought with Miltiades at Marathon or sailed with Themistocles at Salamis. Her parents may have been present at the high point and finest definition of Athens’s glory, Pericles’ Funeral Speech over the fallen at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War. Members of her family will have watched the plays of Sophocles and Euripides. They will have marvelled at the work of Phidias and his sculptors on the Parthenon. They may have come across the philosophy of Plato. They could have argued with Socrates in the public spaces of the city. The Caryatid speaks to us from that long distant past. She speaks to us of the best civilization man has yet aspired to, one that has been a beacon and a model to past generations as it is for us today and will be again in the future. The Caryatid speaks to all of us of the better selves we might yet become.’

Tristram Stanhope stared at the back of the balcony as he finished his peroration. He waited for the applause. As it came rolling out, and the audience rose to their feet, he raised his arms aloft like a victorious boxer. He was drinking in the applause, storing it up perhaps for inspiration in quieter, less eventful days ahead.

‘My goodness me,’ Lady Lucy whispered to her husband, ‘we certainly got the whole peacock tail on display this evening.’

‘Look at the man,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘I do believe he is getting bigger with all the applause. Maybe he’s going to end up twice his normal size like Toad in
The Wind in the Willows
.’

The Bishop was now at the lectern, one hand raised to bring peace to the multitude. He conveyed all their thanks to the speaker.

‘And,’ he continued, ‘I have another happy task to perform this evening. It has fallen to me to act as the Chairman of the newly constituted Caryatid Committee. As of this afternoon, this is a legal entity, thanks to the activities of my two colleagues, Mr Hugo Findlayson of the solicitors Slaughter and May, and Mr William Finch of Finch’s Bank.’ The two substantial citizens rose to their feet and bowed to the audience.

‘The purpose of the committee is to raise funds to act as a reward for information leading to the recovery of the Caryatid. The cathedral authorities of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Moscow Road have indicated that they will be happy to join the Committee, as has the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. We pray that the Lord will look kindly on our efforts. After hearing the words of Dr Stanhope I do not have to tell you how important this work is. Stewards will be waiting to take any contributions you may feel able to offer the fund as you leave the hall this evening. Or you can approach the banker or the solicitor here about other forms of payment. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I suggest we close our evening with the National Anthem.’

‘Damn, damn, damn!’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt. ‘Why is everything going wrong this afternoon?’ The news had not been good that day in Markham Square. Lord Rosebery had reported in some irritation that nobody at all had replied to his advertisement asking for tenders to move a lot of his statues from one of his homes at Mentmore in Buckinghamshire to another one outside Edinburgh. Did Powerscourt regard this as an accident or a conspiracy? And, Rosebery’s note concluded, what did Powerscourt want him to do now?