The Double Tongue (3 page)

After that of course I disappeared into the women’s quarters and the usual sacrifices were made. I went into a five-day period of seclusion. The ass in rut and Leptides’ loud, male laughter and his shouting out what ought not be said – they were a kind of initiation into my new state.

I must have been happy some of the time. I think girls are created to be happy for a time in childhood. They can be happier in their skins than men, or boys rather, who have always to be doing something, mischief probably. But now of course, aged fifteen, I was grown up. It was difficult. Sometimes I think, and indeed thought at this early experience of being grown up, that we should be free and natural as birds are. What should we think of a bird which was different and feverish, that never flew but sat all the time on a nest? But my parents expected such normality. It should have been easy enough, for all I had to worry about were my courses and all the rituals attached, but the rituals didn’t bother me and my courses hardly hurt me – merely added to the confusion in my head and a slight headache for a day and a half. They were just enough to remind me that women aren’t free, not even the free ones. It was like a not very heavy chain which had been waiting to fasten itself round my waist to ensure that I was a prisoner like all women. The only consolation was that for a few days each month I was untouchable. What followed was that on those days I could have any thoughts I wanted without the gods taking any notice of them, because the thoughts were untouchable, too. I have never told anyone this truth because it is a mystery and only to be written down rather than spoken. So on those days when I was thought to be unclean I found myself thinking all kinds of forbidden thoughts and planning to put them away somewhere safe. I do it now for I am in my eighties and what does anything I do matter?

As I was grown up, when my father had guests who were suitable – and I don’t think my father ever had guests who weren’t – I was sometimes allowed to sit on a high chair by my mother in hers. Of course neither my mother nor I said anything on these occasions and if a guest was so forgetful of his manners as to address either of us directly my father would answer for us as was proper. So, though I saw Ionides very soon after I grew up, I never spoke to him. He was rangy and restless and gaunt. Though he was not much more than thirty years old there was grey in his hair and a grey tone round his mouth and chin where he had shaved in the Alexandrian manner. He smiled sometimes out of his gaunt face and you could see how the muscles moved under the skin. It was a strange smile. There was a grief in its appearance which I am sure enough he did not really feel. It was there, you might say, partly by accident and partly by his position which was distinguished. He was, in fact, the priest who had to interpret the mouthings of the Pythia when she was beside herself on account of inspiration. The second visit he made, there came a moment when he actually smiled at me, which in a younger and less distinguished man would have been suggestive. But it was a kind, sad smile and it moved me much as my brother had done. I dared to smile downward slightly and drew my scarf closer. I was conscious of wearing my best dress, the one with the egg and dart border. I am sure there was some kind of communication he intended, after an appraisal taken. It was like the first glint of the sun. The very next day my father sent for me. This was not to the large hall where we entertained our guests but to a smaller room, the estate office in fact, where there was the only paper in the house and large bundles of tally sticks. My father was flicking the balls of his abacus. As I came in, he threw the tablets at an estate slave who waited before him.

‘Add them up for yourself!’

When the slave had gone my father turned to me.

‘You may sit down there.’

I got up on the three-legged stool which was slightly too high for me and waited. He opened a box and took out a document which I could see was written on all over and beautifully written at that. He unrolled it and muttered the contents to himself.

‘So and so the son of so and so, blah blah, has given for partnership of marriage, blah, her mother being blah to blah son of blah. Bride brings so much –’

‘But, Honoured Father –’

‘Don’t interrupt. This is a great day for you, young lady. Where was I? “Son of blah, bride brings – let husband and wife live together – duties of marriage – if separation – let the husband restore – father of the husband Leptides – contract valid written in duplicate – each party – ”’

‘Father!’

‘Don’t interrupt – “and in answer to the formal question – ”’

‘I won’t! I won’t marry him! Who does he think he is?’

‘Leptides son of Leptides. You must have known.’

I found I had climbed down from the stool. I was twisting my hands one with the other. I suppose it’s what they call wringing.

‘What does he want?’

My father snorted.

‘He wants to finish the job if I remember rightly.’

‘Never! Never!’

‘Now listen, my girl –’

And still wringing my hands I did listen, and heard all the arguments which might be expected. My parents knew best. Leptides was a fine young man – well, not too bad a young man – I would thank them when I showed them their grandchild. Considering the dowry I had to bring him I ought to be down on my knees begging for forgiveness from my parents who had done more than their best for me. Who did I think I was? The Queen of Egypt? Get up, child, it’s not as bad as all that. Women must be married or where should we be? It’s ordained by the gods and who was I and so on …

Who was I indeed? I was already down on my knees but it was not in supplication. It was in panic and anguish through which I actually heard the threat of more bread and water and was ordered angrily to go back to my room and think about it. I did that, scurrying away like a mouse in a rickyard – not even a rat. When I got back to my room I walked up and down, up and down, arms crossed on my bosom, hands beating the upper arm, what they call with women beating your breast though not even the deepest grief or terror would make a woman do that, up and down, up and down. I went mad, I think. Crouched on my pallet bed I saw there was only one thing for it. I must escape somehow. I must get away – but where? I thought of my brother and determined that I must go in his direction – towards Sicily – something would happen, the gods would protect me.

Now, at my age, I know a strange thing. I was going through the motions of escape. What I was doing was making a last utterly desperate appeal to my parents: see! I am even willing to face death to escape this fate! But at the same time the underside of my mind knew it was an appeal. The only honest determination of my mind was this: I will go towards Sicily and I will go
as
far
as
I
can.

I will not elaborate on the contrivances I made. It involved getting the boughten slave who thought she owed her son’s life to me to get me a boy’s tunic. The necessary companion of this foolish escapade – foolish if I did not admit it was an appeal, but sensible otherwise – was, of all creatures, Pittacus. The only people who saw us leave by way of the back court were slaves who were at once astonished and frightened. I was astride the ass in my tunic with a scarf draped over my legs and Pittacus did not much like my weight where it was, as a change from the mill to which he was so accustomed as to think it the only way of living. He had also, what was very natural, a tendency to turn in a circle if I was not keeping him straight, which I could only do by whacking on the turning hand with a stick. We had got no more than a hundred yards along the track above the beach when I heard the horn from the hill. The next thing I heard was a great belling of hounds and shouts of men, which confounded Pittacus who wanted to go back home. I had got him pointed towards Sicily when the clamour increased suddenly. A full-grown stag came round the corner of the path with three hounds hanging from him and the rest of the pack boiling round him and the men on horses only a few yards behind. Even at that moment I did not understand my peril and felt for the poor stag and its terror so that it turned aside and dragged the snarling hounds down the beach towards the water. The hounds had a go at Pittacus and when he felt a real bite he bucked hugely and threw me into the air. I fell on a hound or two which broke my fall but it was still heavy enough to knock me out.

I came to, to feel my tunic tearing. Leptides and Ionides were either side of me, keeping the horses’ hoofs clear of me and whipping the hounds away. The anger and contempt in their eyes – and the laughter in the faces of the riders who now crowded round – were worse than the nips I had suffered from the hounds. I find it hard to believe at this distance of time, but it was indeed Leptides who chased the stag into the water and ordered the huntsman to cut its throat while Ionides wrapped his cloak and my scarf about me and set me before him on his horse. I did notice even then how he winced at the touch of my flesh and how, when he saw what I tried so desperately to conceal from him, his face twisted in disgust. But I was ignorant, weeping and sore. I had made my appeal sure enough and now had to abide the consequences of it. I passed the next few hours in a kind of deliberate insensibility. They took me back to the house, called for my mother, said things, everybody said things. At one point Leptides was whipping off our boughten slaves, the house slaves had too much sense to interfere. At last I was in my own room, wearing a dress just like a grown woman, my nips smarting where they had laid salve on them, my mother standing by the window and closing the shutters as if there had been a dead body in the room. I wished at the time that there had been. When they were closed and the room in an artificial twilight she still stood looking down at me.

‘You fool.’

After that, there was a long pause. She began to walk up and down, then stopped again.

‘What are we to do with you?’

Still I drew myself in and hid in my own mind.

Presently my mother left me. There is not much to say about my state except that it is a retreat, further and further away from the daily world. It is not a drawing into one’s self; or rather it is, I suppose, since in those circumstances where else is there to go? But what it feels like is a deliberate descent into the earth, down and down. Each time I realized afresh the enormity of my disgrace, the depth of my shame, I drew myself in and thrust myself down, down, away from the daylight, away from people. Also away from the gods. I suppose that was where my ignorant but now one-pointed mind came on a fact which would have astonished me if I had been in a condition to think round it. The fact was that I missed the gods and was not just ashamed, but stricken down with grief, and when at last I got to the level where there were no people but only gods, my heart broke. Do not think it was this god or that. They had drawn together in a sacred band. Even our herm, the cheeky column with the privates of a man and a bearded face, who stood, fronting the path from the ferry, even he seemed glad in my imagination to be turned away from me.

Oh, that child! It is a kind of self-love I suppose that makes me smile to myself when I remember her. Well. For all the ascetics say, a degree of self-love is no bad thing. It makes life possible, unless like the ascetics you think it wholly bad and to be rid of as soon as you can. But whatever you think of her, whatever I remember of her there is no doubt about the poor thing’s shame and grief with her gods turning their back on her! Until then I had accepted them as being there because everyone else – grown-ups I would say – believed in them or said they did. I was too young and ignorant to know that people do not always believe what they say they do. Anyway, in that small room, with its pallet, its single chest, its hooks with one or two cloaks hanging from them, there in the artificial twilight she dropped down into grief, into sorrow beyond the shame. She dissolved away like a lump of salt in fresh water. There was nothing but grief before the retreating backs of the gods: then they were gone.

There is a void when the gods have been there, then turned their backs and gone. Before this void as before an altar there is nothing but grief contemplating the void. Time passes but irrelevantly. The void with the grief before it is eternal. Even the sound of the wooden bolt being shot back and the latch lifting did not alter that contemplation. My mother’s voice was more deeply bitter than I had ever heard before.

‘He has withdrawn his offer. Leptides, that oaf, has withdrawn his offer. He’ – and it sounded as if she spat the words out – ‘He pities us!’

Life is not bad. It is intolerable, which is different. I sat up heavily. I stared at my mother’s feet.

‘He doesn’t want the thousand pieces of silver?’

‘What decent man would when a woman went with it who has shown everything she’s got to half Aetolia? But a boy, heir to no more than a farm, to turn down alliance with us – with us!’

I heard the door close again and the latch drop. I listened for the wooden bolt to move but it never did. Well. What bolt is needed to cage a naked girl?

Presently I sat up, then stood up. I felt my nips and they had hardly broken the skin. The hounds were well enough trained – no Molossian dogs those! They had known their place and the difference between human skin and a stag’s leather. I took my phial of olive oil and rubbed a little of it into my face. I thought to myself that if Leptides had gone through with his offer I might have asked him for a mirror – and flinched at once from the bloodless image of his voice:
What
would
you
want
with
a
mirror
? I combed my hair out but unravelled the knots with my fingers. I had neither so much hair nor so many combs that I could afford to lose any of them. I eyed my open chest with its folded clothes. The best one lay on top. I moved it on to my pallet and took out a dark gown that had frayed round the hem at the heel. I put it on slowly then fastened it with bronze brooches on either shoulder. I girdled myself and crossed the straps between my small, not to say insignificant breasts, then pulled up the skirt to let it hang down over the girdle.