Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) (30 page)

‘Yes, thank you, we recognize them.’

They recognized us too and whinnied a greeting. Quant dismissed the groom and I went up to Sapphire’s mare. ‘Steady, old girl,’ I said. ‘No, sorry, no apples today! I just want to see that saddle-bag of yours. Here, Quant, have a look at this!’ I handed him a flat wooden box.

He opened it. It contained a clay-board covered with New Cretan writing. ‘Shall I translate it for you?’ he asked.

‘Please, do,’ I said. He cleared his throat and read in an unsteady voice:

‘My own dear love:
    ‘I can call you that now because you’re free once more. Why didn’t you come early to the quince-hut, as you had promised? But your answer will never reach me now: I shall have died when you read this. Sally acted quickly; she called a council, and I had to sentence myself to death. She fetched my mare to the hut and we rode off at once. I felt very miserable; I had not said goodbye to you. Before we came to the road that branches back to Zapmor, she taunted me cruelly: “If you loved him, why didn’t you give him everything? Wasn’t I right to eat what you left on the side of your platter?” There was evil in her voice, and greater evil rose in me. I remembered Cleopatra’s
aer
, “The Greedy Child”, and resolved to blotch her face with it. I crooked my little finger at her and began: “Listen to me! Cleopatra…” Then, all at once, I noticed a titmouse on a branch and stopped short.’

‘Why did she do that?’

‘We have a proverb: “See a titmouse, think twice, then think again.” The titmouse brings a warning from the Goddess.’

‘I see. Go on.’ He continued:

‘Sally had not seen the titmouse. She turned to me and said obediently: “I’m listening.” Having thought twice, I thought again, and thanked the Goddess in my heart for putting Sally into my power by revealing to me that her secret name was Cleopatra. “Cleopatra!” I said, “I’m riding to Zapmor. Come with me! And don’t speak again until I give you leave.” She obeyed meekly. We rode fast, and when we came to the clearing where she had tried to bewitch you, I said: “Cleopatra, fetch a spade!” She went away and fetched one. “Cleopatra, remove the turf from Claud’s grave, and dig!” She obeyed. When she uncovered the body, its head was gone. “Where’s the head, Cleopatra?” I asked. “They have it at the Nonsense House,” she answered sullenly. “You’re cheating Ana of her due,” I said. “Make amends, Cleopatra!” She handed me her lances, knelt down and bent her head submissively. “What’s your last wish, Cleopatra?” I asked. “Not to be reborn,” she answered. “You shall spread no cloak over my grave!” I stabbed her in the nape of her neck, laid her beside Claud’s mutilated corpse, shovelled the earth back and spread the turf over the grave again. Then I rode to Dunrena, and registered her death. I write this in the Royal Stables. Goodbye, my love! These are unhappy times.

S
APPHIRE
.

Quant’s only comment was: ‘Starfish will have his hands full until the relief comes on Monday.’

‘If he lasts until then,’ I said, as we walked slowly away.

‘Where next?’ he asked.

‘Frankly, I don’t care,’ I said miserably. ‘A church.’ Perhaps I’d find some consolation there. Above all, I wanted to free my mind of the picture of Sapphire murderously despatching Sally with a
descabello
.

‘Very well,’ Quant agreed.

‘Is that a church over there?’

‘Do you mean that house with the new moons painted on the windows?’

‘I’d have called them old moons.’

‘You see them reversed; but they look brand new from inside. No, that’s not exactly a church: it’s the Moon House, where the holy madmen live. They worship the Moon in whatever way they please, making the Goddess laugh with their solemn antics; and they laugh themselves, of course, just as loudly. They’re the happiest people in New Crete and despise the outer world because it’s not so holy as the Moon House. A priest and priestess look after them. Madmen are no trouble, not even in thundery weather. They never dream of going out, for fear of dissipating their holiness.’

‘Don’t they ever break the windows?’

‘That would be to destroy the symbol they love best. They’re mad, not bad.’

We stopped outside the Church of the Hare, where a service was in progress. I showed my pass at the porch and entered. There was a shrill sound of pipes. Eight horned men, in green, were leaping round a square altar, surmounted by a winnowing basket, and the congregation squatted on the floor clapping their hands in time to the pipes. As the rhythm quickened, the green men leaped higher and higher: a charm to make the corn grow, I supposed. The priestess stood apart, fondling a leveret, her lips moving soundlessly in prayer. I leaned against a buttress and looked around me. Except for seven recesses in the walls, each holding a garlanded replica of one of the idols in the district, and a rack full of flails, the church was as bare and square as a tithe-barn: not even stained-glass windows or frescoes. Without change of tune, the dance went on and on and the green men showed no sign of weariness. One of them leaped nearly his own height and a yellow froth showed on his lips. The priestess paid little attention; she uncovered one of her breasts and pretended to suckle the leveret.

I had soon had enough and went out again. ‘Where’s the nearest bagnio?’ I asked Quant.

‘Why that?’

‘I must have some distraction – anything. No bagnio could be duller than that church.’

‘Up the street – the house with the catkins painted on the stucco. They’ve just put the lamp in the window to show that it’s open.’

‘What goes on there?’

‘The usual thing, you know. It’s a sort of first-aid post where one goes when one isn’t in love with anyone in particular but feels unhappily lecherous. That’s called the catkin stroke, and it’s no disgrace. The place is run by a priestess and staffed with good-looking servants. She keeps them in a continuous condition of heat, ready for anyone who comes in. There’s a male and a female ward.’

‘Anyone at all? I thought smokes didn’t mix?’

‘They don’t. But anyone visiting a bagnio becomes a member of the servants’ estate for the time being; because to go there implies a failure in discrimination. Magicians aren’t admitted, though.’

‘My pass is good, I’ve been told. Coming with me?’

‘No, thanks. I’m not ill.’

I showed my pass to the tall porter who, after scrutinizing it carefully, tied a brassard with four chevrons on my right arm. ‘The catkin makes servants of us all,’ he quoted sententiously. ‘Step this way, mate! We’ll soon put you right.’ He took me past an enormous, realistically tinted china phallus that dominated the hideously papered entrance-hall, down a long flesh-coloured passage, to an open swimming-pool. The broad walk around it was paved with shiny blue, black and yellow tiles, and flanked by a row of cabins roofed and balconied like Swiss chalets with flower-embroidered lace curtains at their doors. A strong smell of musk arose from the tepid water. As I entered, several naked girls slipped into the pool and swam languidly around like a Hollywood aquacade, while others posed on the edge, like Paramount starlets, casting sultry glances in my direction. I stood irresolute. ‘Shapely girls, but how dumb they look,’ I thought.

‘You’re a stranger here, I see, and a bit shy,’ said the porter. ‘You may play with two or three girls at a time, if you like.’ He led me along the scented pool to a pseudo-Moorish cafe up some steps at the far end, but paused to pull aside one of the cabin curtains, revealing a vast brass bed with a heavy black silk coverlet and bright yellow bolsters and pillows. ‘In fact,’ he continued, ‘they don’t think much of a man who’s satisfied with only one. Ah, here comes the Priestess!’

He retired, and the Priestess, an enormous pigeon-chested prima-donna of a woman in a gaudy kimono, waddled up and greeted me with a glance of commiseration, clutching a large coffee tray inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She sat the tray down on a sandalwood table in a pierced alcove and poured me out a cup of strong Turkish coffee, into which she slipped a little black pill. ‘To enhance your pleasure,’ she said, pulling forward a chair with twisted gilt legs and red plush upholstery, and motioning me to sit down. ‘Would you like a swim first, or are you seriously ill?’

‘To tell you the truth, Madam,’ I said, eyeing the squat bedragoned coffee pot and the enamelled brass cup with fascinated horror, ‘to tell you the truth, I came here out of pure curiosity.’

‘Oh, but that’s altogether against custom. I’m quite sure you’re ill; you look terrible, and anyhow you can’t leave now without honouring Our Lady of the Catkins.’

‘But I’m a magician when I’m not wearing this,’ I said, fingering the brassard, ‘and really…’

‘How delightful for the staff! This is an unheard-of honour, blessed be the Goddess who sent you! I’ll instruct the porter not to admit anyone until you’re quite finished. But now I’ll leave you; you’ll feel more at home when I’m gone.’ She curtsied herself off.

I closed my eyes, drank the sickly-sweet coffee at one gulp, and rose to go. Almost at once a sort of ethereal mist spread across my vision: all the colours of a soap-bubble, dotted with starry glints of gold. My knees went weak. I slumped back into my chair. The starlets, seeing that the drug had done its insidious work, tripped silently up the steps in single file. Then a fiddle began to play, a black velvet curtain dropped behind them and one by one they paraded in front of me with pink ostrich-feather fans, revolving slowly and sinuously under a spotlight to gipsyish music. To pretend that I was left unmoved by this crudely libidinous display would be dishonest. The mad rainbow of stars and colours swirled before my eyes, heightening the emotional effect. Yet I could not help feeling vaguely ashamed – ‘at this time of day, too,’ I reminded myself – and for a moment wondered what on earth I should say to Antonia on my return. But even with Antonia by my side I had often dreamed my recurrent Arabian Nights dream, a relic of adolescence, in which I was a sultan among his complaisant harem, in a setting not unlike this – always to wake in acute disappointment before I had made my choice between the slender, haughty, high-breasted blonde, the plump little seventeen-year-old with the brindled curly hair and the friendly smile, and the exquisitely fragile, honey-skinned Indian princess with jewelled wrists and ankles and the solitaire pearl folded in her navel.

This time it seemed ordained that I should have my dream out, once and for all, never to be dreamed again. Our Lady of the Catkins was handing it to me on an enormous mother-of pearl tray, and it would have been discourteous to decline her well-meant gift merely because my taste in interior decoration differed from hers, or because of a treasured legend of my poetic fastidiousness in sex. A scene from the late war flashed across my mind: godly Sergeant-major Clegg with a scandalized red face, reporting irregularities at a company billet, when we were stationed in Nottingham. ‘I’m an old soldier, Captain Venn-Thomas, Sir, and I don’t like to ride the men too hard; but begging your pardon, Sir, that billet’s no more and no less than a bloody knocking-shop. I’ve put Corporal Stukes under arrest. Will you see him now, Sir?’

Poor catkin-struck Stukes! And what had he told me? ‘You can’t stop nature, Sir.’

‘But my good Stukes…’

I wondered vaguely what the pill had contained. A compound of hashish and hippomanes?

There was no need for me to indicate my choice: the starlets knew intuitively which of them I desired, and presently my favourites came tripping forward and half-led, half-carried me off to our Great Bed of Ware, with its squabby gilt cupids and brass-knobs as big as urns, drew the poppy-and-passionflower curtains behind them and undressed me with expert fingers.

Quant was waiting patiently on a bench outside when I emerged an hour later. I was surprised to see no customers waiting for admission. ‘I thought the whole town would be queueing up four deep,’ l said.

‘No, the illness is not at all common; it usually starts with a sudden depression. Someone meets a brutch, or has a nightmare, or a wife or husband dies suddenly, or a lover is lost. Nobody likes to change estate, even for an hour, but a visit to a bagnio puts people on their feet again. It’s a salutary experience… On a gay holiday morning like this the girls don’t expect visitors, so the Priestess usually gives them access to their fellow-workers in the women’s ward. How disappointed they must have been when you told them you weren’t ill. And what luck did you have with your game?’

I blushed. ‘I can’t grumble,’ I said.

‘I’ve spent many a pleasant half-hour with the Priestess. However, like all servants she tends to be too much on the defensive. A good player defends and attacks simultaneously. Shall we have a game now? Or have you had enough?’

At this point, fortunately, he produced his cambeluk board, which saved me from further embarrassment.

‘You must have misunderstood me,’ I said. ‘I haven’t been playing cambeluk with the Priestess. I only talked to her over a cup of coffee.’

‘Then come and learn how to play it at once.’

As Quant had told me once before, everyone in New Crete played cambeluk. It looked as simple as draughts, had as few rules, and a much smaller board; but it was deceptively complex and after the opening moves no two games were in the least alike. I played several rubbers with Quant, but never won a game, though I’m usually good at that sort of thing. One of my first acts on returning to our epoch was to visit a patent lawyer and have him register the rules; so I may yet die rich.

The Royal Playhouse was closely packed, and I was aware of a tense expectation in the audience, more overpowering than at any First Night I had ever attended. Nobody laughed or fidgeted, or came in late, or exchanged greetings with friends across the auditorium. Though there was no sign yet that the performance was about to begin, all sat silent and pallid, hands on knees, heads jutted a little forward, stirring only occasionally to finger a tight collar or scratch an itching ear. They looked like so many prisoners in the dock at a mass-murder trial. White-robed priests walked solemnly up and down the gangways swinging censers that gave off aromatic fumes of rosemary and myrtle. The playhouse was domed, but otherwise built more or less on the model of a Greek theatre. It had no boxes or galleries and no orchestra pit, and seated about a thousand men and women on its tiers of curved wooden benches. Quant and I sat next to each other about half-way up.