Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) (25 page)

I laughed.
‘Touché!
’ I said. ‘But now let me hear about Sapphire. You say she came to you for advice: what did she tell you?’

‘About Erica at the Nonsense House, and about finding an obscene metal case in her cupboard, and about your suspicions of Sally. She kept nothing back.’

‘And what did you tell her?’

‘I said that she mustn’t be afraid: that she was safest with you in the very vortex of the whirlwind. I used that expression deliberately: and I’ll tell you why. It was because one evening, when I was transcribing the last of the poems from your book, the Goddess entered my study wearing a white-striped coat and green shoes. I knew who she was and abased myself. She stood over me and wrote on the clay directly under your name: “Before the year is out, I will whistle up this seed of wind to blow the rotten boughs from my trees.” So when I read Sally’s report of your evocation, I felt little surprise. But I kept in the background and watched the mare’s tails in the sky and listened to the sound of the wind in the acacias, until yesterday, when the Goddess sent Sapphire to consult me.’

‘I’m sorry for Sapphire,’ I said, ‘but sorrier still for Sally. The Goddess has given her the most difficult part to play.’

Quant sighed deeply. ‘I must go home now for the evening-smoke,’ he said after a pause. ‘Mallet-head will be waiting to fill my pipe. He’s a good fellow and an industrious colleague. Good afternoon, Mr Venn-Thomas. Thank you for a pleasant chat.’

I detained him. ‘Quant, may I see your English poems?’

His hand went to his breast pocket. ‘I have taken the liberty of bringing one with me. I wrote it some time ago when Sapphire’s mind was obsessed by premonitions of her present grief; the ties of sacred parentage are very strong and I express my sympathy in the poem. As you see, it’s already engraved on silver, with the New Cretan translation opposite.’

‘But surely, you have no sheets allowed you? You’re not officially a poet?’

‘Being the curator of Late Christian texts, I transcribe on clay any poems that come to light, and the magicians judge them. A council ordered this one to be engraved on silver: they attributed it to the poet Marvell.’

‘Well, well, what it is to be a margoton!’

He chuckled. ‘I can’t expect that your opinion of the poem will be as favourable as theirs,’ he said. ‘You may not think that it stands as a poem at all, but the Council believe that it’s destined for inclusion in the
English Canon
.’

Then he hurried off with an authorial embarrassment that touched me. When he had closed the door, I read the poem, which was in characteristic seventeenth-century style, though nothing like Marvell’s; but then, the editors of the
Canon
had credited Marvell with poems by various other hands, not all so competent as Quant’s.

A sunbeam on the well-waxed oak,
    In shape resembling not at all

The ragged chink by which it broke
    Into this darkened hall,

Swims round and golden over me,
    The sun’s plenipotentiary.

 

So may my round love a chink find:
    With such address to break

Into your grief-occluded mind
    As you shall not mistake

But, rising, open to me for truth’s sake.

I shouted after him: ‘Hey, Quant!’

‘Yes?’ he answered from the end of the field.

‘Thank you. The poem stands.’

He came back, pressed my hand gratefully, replaced the silver sheet in his breast pocket and went off again, humming softly to himself.

What a nice chap he was!

While Quant was talking, I made up my mind to live in the present and think as little as possible about my own epoch. I might be in New Crete for years; I might perhaps never get back, and while I was here it would be ungrateful not to make the best of things. Now, at any rate, I was free of the grosser aspects of our down-at-heel pluto-democracy; the food was wholesome; the people were courteous; the countryside was magnificent. I had a thoroughbred at my disposal and so much to amuse or interest me that, frankly, it was absurd to hanker sentimentally after St Jean-des-Porcs as it had been, or for the mad, anonymous whirl of Piccadilly Tube-station in the rush-hour, or for a deck-chair, a packet of Old Golds, a glass of Tio Pepe and Simenon’s latest novel in my own rather scruffy back-garden in Sainte Véronique. Especially, I must put out of my mind all emotional ties that linked me with Antonia; Antonia had no part in this life and my sentimental thinking about her had enabled Sally to outwit me. It had been stupid of me to equate Sapphire with Antonia; they were entirely different people. And in bad taste: I had behaved rather like a widower who forces his new wife to keep the loved one’s memory green by wearing her frocks and underclothes and using the same scent.

‘Tell me the latest news,’ Sapphire said, coming quietly in and settling down in the chair Quant had vacated.

‘I’m here and you’re here, and that’s all that matters,’ I said rising and placing my hands on her shoulders.

‘Really all?’

‘You heard what I said.’

She gave a sigh of relief. ‘Something’s changed you, Edward. I can feel it in your touch. It isn’t so nervous and prickly as it was.’

‘I’ve not been treating you properly,’ I said. ‘I’ll do better from now on.’

‘That’s nice to hear. I didn’t expect you to become a New Cretan in a day, and the hauntings made things very difficult for us.’

‘I don’t think there’ll be any more.’

‘If you say so, there won’t be. How are they all at home? How did they take my going away?’

‘I’ve only heard See-a-Bird’s view. He’s rather down in the mouth and talks of becoming an elder.’

‘On my account? How very wrong of him, even if Bee-flight’s just done the same. We must stop him at once. He’s still too young and vigorous to play billiards in the Nonsense House every evening and spend his mornings just pottering around.’

‘Well, I think it’s a wise move. He’s living up to his name; he can see the vultures hovering above the clouds. Anyhow, it’s rather on Starfish’s account than on yours.’

‘But what happened to Starfish?’

‘To break the news as gently as possible: Starfish thinks that he should have been asked to share Sally’s cloak on a newly turfed grave.’

Sapphire gasped, clutching at her throat. ‘Whose grave?’

‘Fig-bread’s, I’m sorry to say.’

‘Oh, poor, poor Fig-bread! Did he get killed in the war?’

‘No, his horse mauled him.’

‘Ana have mercy on us all! But he was so proud of its manners, and it was such a gentle creature.’

‘Before it was bewitched.’

‘Bewitched? You don’t mean that! By whom?’

‘Can’t you guess?’ I looked hard at her.

‘I don’t want to try,’ she faltered.

‘By Sally, of course.’

‘I don’t believe it, darling. I won’t believe it. It’s utterly impossible. Don’t tell me such dreadful things – it’s like those nightmarish stories from the ancient world. Fig-bread loved Sally; and she loved him.’

‘I’m sorry, my dear, but that’s what happened.’

‘But why? What reason could she have had?’

‘She wanted a religious excuse to spread her cloak for another man.’

‘For another man?’ she asked in a strangled voice. ‘For whom?’

‘For me, of course.’

‘And did she? And did you… ? Oh, this is a waking nightmare! Say you didn’t!’ Sapphire wailed.

‘Of course I didn’t. Not on the grave, at any rate. But early this morning while I was asleep she tricked me by disguising herself as Antonia again and coming to bed with me. I gave her all she asked.’

‘But really you love only me?’ she whispered. ‘You are sure of that?’

‘Only you,’ I said. ‘I did love Antonia, as you know. But, as one of our poets has callously put it, “that was in another country and, besides, the wench is dead.” It’s you now. And I’ll try not to forget your warning – what you told me that first night we spent together. Only don’t cry! I can’t bear to see you cry.’

‘I don’t think I’ll ever shed another tear after this,’ she said faintly. We ate supper in silence; both of us were thinking hard. But first we chalked the keep-away symbol on the door – three cranes with their wings raised menacingly – and lighted the stove because the evening was chilly and rain was pattering on the quince-leaves. Now that I had decided, for Sapphire’s sake, to shed my old habits of thought and become a New Cretan I was reminded of the day when I had swallowed my insular pride and tried to talk French as the French did with all their habitual gesticulations and vocal tricks. ‘Am I being dishonest?’ I asked myself. ‘Am I just putting on a theatrical turn? Or is this really myself?’ I didn’t know.

In my previous life – I had to refer to that again, but with the emphasis on ‘previous’ – there had been three distinct Edwards, each developed in relation to a different woman with whom he had been in love. The first of any importance was Virgilia, a district-attorney’s daughter from South Carolina: she was blue-eyed and ringleted, with a fascinating Southern drawl, devoted to horses, dancing and success. For her sake I had cultivated these first two interests until I outdid my rivals and so achieved a limited degree of the third. For her sake, too, I deliberately played at being an American, even to the extent of drinking quarts of bourbon – I don’t really like the stuff – playing practical jokes in and out of season and following the doings of the Katzenjammer Kids in Virgilia’s favourite comic-strip with obsessional fervour. She called me ‘Ward’ and thought me very interesting and worthwhile for an Englishman, until, deciding one day to marry me, she gave me a heart-to-heart talk about the future and found to her consternation that I baulked at her definition of success. Success to her meant the rapid acquisition of a great deal of money by selling at a high price things that someone else produced at low cost, and then adopting standardized high-income-level habits as dictated by the higher-toned shiny-paper weeklies. I couldn’t change her views, even when I tried to high-hat her as a cultured European of ancient lineage; nor could she convert me to hers, even when she threatened to give me the air. I told her that my education at Oxford – she had heard of Oxford – had made me incapable of selling even a sack of corn in a famine year, but she said ‘nuts’ – in that case her Uncle Henry would put me in the soft-drink business and help me to meet up with influential and worthwhile people. So I said: ‘Oh, b—— your Uncle Henry!’, forgetting for the moment that there are some words one can’t use to nice young American girls and hope to get away with. That tore it.

I left the next day, and within a fortnight was back in Europe, at my father’s, where I met Erica – Erica with her knife-like wit, her utter contempt for the world’s opinion, her strange mixture of fastidiousness and filth, of deceit and singlemindedness, her easy and contemptuous command of every social accomplishment to which she gave her mind – from ski-jumping to hat-designing. She had been in ballet and the first time I tried a rumba with her she made me feel like a hick, though I fancied myself as a dancer; and the first time I played poker with her, she stripped me to the skin, though I fancied myself as a poker player. I fell for her hopelessly and tried to adapt myself to her style by playing the déclassé rough-neck and translating her outrageous caprices into action, and by acquiring a taste for Pernod, which was not my drink either. I became Teddy then; Ward was forgotten. But the Catalan adaptability and enthusiasm that I had inherited from my mother was tempered by the stubborn Yorkshireness that I inherited from my father; and, after all, I had been educated at Rugby and Oxford. In the end Erica found me intractable – I wouldn’t take part in her grisly scheme for murdering the Vicomte de Martinbault, or even in a profitable dope-smuggling racket – and broke with me in as ugly and humiliating a way as she knew how. I should perhaps explain that the Vicomte had fallen for Erica in a big way and was making a thorough nuisance of himself in our small circle. When he died violently soon afterwards the police pinned the crime on one of his valets, a Corsican, who confessed to having mutilated the body in a fit of revenge, but insisted that the throat had already been cut when he found it. Neither Erica nor I was called to give evidence; the valet obligingly closed the case by committing suicide in his cell on the evening of his arrest. But she must have known something, because she had skipped across to Switzerland by plane two hours before the murder was reported.

Then came Antonia. Her family was Anglo-Irish, but they were burned out of their Co. Sligo castle by the Sinn Feiners while she was still a child, and emigrated to a village near Oxford. She had gone to the University a year after I was sent down, and read History. What I liked about her was that she had no special talents. Though she played a fair game of tennis, swam and danced creditably, could manage a horse, sewed and cooked quite well, she neither wrote, painted, acted, sang, nor played a musical instrument, and cards bored her. She drank an occasional Dubonnet or dry sherry – for her sake I stopped mixing my drinks and reverted to my English conventions – and had neither illusions nor ambitions. Her prejudices, such as her refusal to wear a fur coat or smuggle the least thing through the Customs or make close friends with Catholics, were all half-humorous. But though she had no special talents I recognized that she had genius: the subtle and peculiar genius of being herself, knowing herself and always rising superior to the situation. If she said something witty, as she did quite often, her words came out so simply and casually that one didn’t realize until too late that they deserved applause. Antonia was, in fact, a lady. Genius makes the lady; talents, the gentlewoman. She called me Ned, and I was consistently happy with her. Erica had ruled me by fear, Antonia by love; Virgilia had never ruled me – we had played together like overgrown children.

One night Antonia told me,
apropos
of nothing, and in so conversational a voice that it made no impression on me until the next morning: ‘But in the end, of course, we have to understand that we’re separate people: it’s not enough just to love each other.’ She had not meant that one of us would probably outlive the other and either have to live alone or find another partner; she had meant just what she said. That was all very well for her: she always kept a clear sense of herself, as I think both Virgilia and Erica did in their entirely different ways. But I had been successively Ward, Teddy and Ned, and though those characters were not historically irreconcilable it was a difficult task to disentangle my true self from among them. Perhaps New Crete was my opportunity; or could it be that the Edward who was slowly emerging from my friendship with Sapphire was merely another historical variation on the well-known theme?