The Revolt of Aphrodite (29 page)

At last they were there; suddenly and quite mysteriously
materialised
upon a lightly sloping hillock—the three tall weapons looking more like combine-harvesters with snouts cocked at the sky. The gnomes that tended appeared first in a sort of tableau, leaning forward to identify us—in fear, I suppose, of being run down. Hoarse voices barked orders, answered one another; the Brigadier
re-emerged
from the nothingness and opened the door of the car. We followed him across the field to where soldiers in blankets now moved—but with the immortal listlessness of a typical apathy. The ground-glass tones of a sergeant major tried to stir them up with quaint oaths and elephantine jokes. But they moved like
somnambulists
. Marchant’s toy was a clumsy great barrel-organ of an
instrument
whose panels glowed with a whole spectrum of coloured switches.

He lurched across to it with a welcoming gesture, arms open, almost as if it had been a girl; then he crouched over it with an
over-elaborated
delicacy, touching now this part now that, manipulating switches, patting it and peering about him shortsightedly as if
seeking
some sort of reassurance from the sky. Watching him thus so vulnerably exposing the whole range of his naive gestures, his anxiety, his frail hopes, I had a sudden pang of sympathy for him; and at the very same moment I was swept by a conviction that here was not simply a scientist, but a sort of genius. His whole waking mind moved among abstractions now, like a fish in its element. And I made an involuntary comparison with my own gifts—the mere tinkering with string and wire, the superficial meddlesomeness of the second-rate gift: and I realised that I would have given anything to be Marchant, to belong to his tribe. How trivial my string of elementary devices seemed to me as I took in the feverish engrossed state of my fellow inventor; the very skeletal posture seemed to have the pulse of a different sort of fever running through it—an electrical charge. “We’ll have to modify the whole armature, of course” he said. “She’s far too heavy. But first let’s see if she works eh?”

We were surrounded by more figures leaning down to tend these
metal engines with the air of men carefully watering plants in a high window-box. These were the flint arrowheads of our wretched culture!

I could watch all this activity with a certain bemused detachment, since I could not interpret all these diverse movements; I was like an amateur at a ballet or a bullfight. All I knew was that these stubby snouts raised in sinister elevation against the lightening sky would spit out a momentary stab of flame. The Brigadier was counting; he held something in his right hand attached to a long landline. His air was that of a doctor taking the pulse-beat of a patient. A plane drowsed languidly overhead, established radio contact, and moved off. More orders came harshly out of the mist and a thick snicking of oiled steel. Marchant produced a little box, such as
airlines
issue to their passengers, containing ear-plugs, and urged a couple on me. Then came another interminable wait before the shoot began.

When it came I was quite unprepared for it; a tremendous
pulse-beat
ran through the ground under our feet and ran swiftly away to the horizon in an accumulating wave. The snouts recoiled slowly, with great elegance, hissing; only to return and flame again briefly. Fire and recoil, fire and recoil. The nearest part of the mist had been blown to bleeding patches; there were tears everywhere in the fabric now, it hung down and swirled slowly about. Marchant knelt down staring at his barrel-organ, hands over his ears, chattering to himself. A smear of sharp light illuminated a large-scale map over which hovered some disembodied moustaches. Then followed a silence during which a devout signaller communicated with the unseen through earphones, his box of tricks spluttering and crackling. I divested myself of my plugs and turned up my coat collar. Marchant was in a state of high elation. “It’s going to be all right; the
modifications
are nothing” he repeated; he had grabbed the sleeve of the soldier who disengaged himself politely, his attention turned on his signallers. Again. There seemed to be a long moment of suspense now followed by a lot of jabbering in military argot. The Brigadier shook hands with Marchant, and as he did so an equestrian figure emerged slowly out of the mist on our left with a high degree of improbability and walked his tall horse over to the battery. “It’s
the General” said Tanner, and went over to give an account of his stewardship. “Well done” said the mounted figure in sepulchral tones. “You can wind it all up now. The Minister has got stuck somewhere along the road, waiting for this fog to lift. We’ll have to wait and see what he says. I expect he’ll put it off until next week.”

“Well, that’s the lot” said Marchant. We climbed back into the car; he sat beside the chauffeur to take advantage of the light from the dashboard, for he had already resumed notebook and pencil in order to cover the pages with hieroglyphics and drawings. “Sorry” he said apologetically over his shoulder. “But unless I get things down they have a habit of disappearing.”

The fog was thinning out quite perceptibly and once upon the gravel road the chauffeur professed to know his way; we were able to dismiss the single jeep which had been delegated to shepherd us back to the main road. It turned aside with a roar and bounced back into the obscurity, leaving us to our own devices. We pressed on slowly with the headlights ablaze; from time to time the chauffeur sounded his melancholy horn—a desolating croak like that of some solitary marsh-bird. And then we found ourselves lost again; the gravel gave out and we were rolling softly along grass inclines. Marchant used a great deal of bad language, but added: “Thank God we brought some grub. This can’t last for ever. Let’s press on a bit eh? After all what is the worst that can happen? We might end up in Cornwall that’s all.”

“There’s no mud yet, sir.”

“Well, it’s your fault for sending the Army back.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

But even as we spoke a miracle started to take place; a wind started to flap from nowhere, lifting huge panels of fog almost bodily, rolling them back upon one another like so many strips of sodden newspaper. Huge rents and whorls and eddies began to appear all round us. In corners the white screen had begun to pour away like suds down a sink, to shiver and swirl like the dust devils of the desert. Huge slices of visibility were thrust upon us, and the sun started to shimmer through the opaqueness. It was like watching the
scrambling
retreat of an army. Even the terrain looked firm and promising; elated we moved into second gear and gave chase, squeezing down
the soft inclines, further and further. “A compass damn it; we should have borrowed one” said Marchant, but I was breathlessly watching the bewitching phosphorescence of the mist retreating from us. Larger and larger grew the spaces, until with a last sudden flick of the wrist a whole valley burst open to the view, radiant with sun and green grass on which glittered a million diamonds of condensing fog. The theatrical effect was vastly heightened by the fact that there, right before us, glowed the melancholy and enigmatic pillars of Stonehenge. Involuntarily we all three exclaimed. We were alone, surrounded by a good square mile of radiant sunlight. “Marvellous” shouted Marchant. “We’ll eat our grub here. Abandon ship, my lads.” It was doubly lucky as the chauffeur could now reorient
himself
in relationship to the stone monuments—we had been travelling at right angles to the correct bearing. The fog was now vanishing with greater speed, restoring the whole landscape to us, stretch by stretch. So it was that in a state of high elation we took our provisions and devoured them among these mysterious blocks.

It was not unduly cold in this frail sunlight. Marchant fell upon the chicken and ham with ardour, speaking volubly as he chewed. “Well, it went off all right, Charlock, didn’t it? The only fly in the ointment is that we didn’t see Julian.” He chuckled mischievously. “But I didn’t expect to. I don’t. I say, you are not much of a chemist are you? I’m not being rude, I’m asking.” I shook my head ruefully. Alas. “All the better stroke of genius that guess of yours—but I’m not sure that sodium is your answer; I’ll see what I can do to improve on it. It’s marvellous that you are not a jealous person.”

“Alas, I am.”

He gazed at me wide-eyed, his mouth full of cress.

“O Lord” he said in dismay. “I did hope not.”

We sparred good-humouredly for a while as we ate and gulped the scalding coffee; the chauffeur maundered off among the ruins, still wounded in his
amour
propre
by having mistaken his road. “As for Julian … well damn him. I don’t
want
to meet him any more.” He chuckled. “As a matter of fact I once had the impression that I
had
met him—and I’m not given to fond fancies. But once he asked me to take some drawings up to his flat and leave them. When I arrived there was a singular-looking bird in the lift, very striking in a queer
way. Deeply lined face, eyes like dead snails, medium to tall, dressed rather well in a stockbrokerish way, with a spotted bow tie. A brown signet ring. He was waiting for me in the lift. I tried to get him to speak, because then I would have recognised the voice, but he wouldn’t. So I simply said: ‘Second floor’ and let him press the button. I addressed a question to him but he shook his head without speaking and gave me a sort of sad smile—a lost world of a smile. On the second I stepped out and up he went to the top floor. Well, I rang the bell, but the manservant was a hell of a while coming to open the door to me. All this time I could hear this chap just above me in the liftshaft—hear his breathing I mean and smell his cigar. He hadn’t got out of the lift, he was just standing there waiting. Well, when my door opened and I was let in—while I was still
standing
in the hall having the front door closed behind me—I heard the lift coming down again. The servant said: ‘You’ve missed Mr. Pehlevi by a few moments, sir. He’s just gone out.’ Well now, had I missed him? I wondered.”

He laughed again with schoolboyish elation. “I say, you aren’t depressed are you?”

“No.” But really I was, depressed and confused. “As for Julian,” he went on “I’ve given him up, as I say. But it’s curious how a little thing like his obstinate Trappist-like refusal to manifest himself gives rise to rumours. You can never trace the source, of course, it’s always at second hand. But someone had heard that he was disfigured by lupus and was too ashamed to show up; another chap in the office had heard that Julian was going through a long and complicated piece of facial surgery. There may be something in that one. The Institute of Directors were addressed by a man who had a huge dressing across his forehead, and wore dark glasses. It’s rum, I
suppose
, but I’ve got used to it. Strangest of all was Bolivar, a weird painter fellow; Julian bought some of his things for the firm. You may have seen them. Well, he claimed to have done a sort of
composite
portrait of him based on the evidence of those who said they had seen him—what they call an Identikit nowadays I suppose. On the sly, of course. Bolivar was an awful drunk and lived on some repulsive cat-food in a basement room in Campden Hill. He’s dead now‚ poor chap; but during his last illness he rang me up and said
that he was going to leave this portrait to me, and that I should find it in the drawer of the bureau in his room. I went round, but he was already delirious and the drawer was empty. I say Charlock, cheer up. When a civilisation has decided to bury its head in the sand what can we do but tickle its arse with a feather?” Marchant raised his pale and grubby finger and apostrophised the sages of antiquity. “O Aristotle, your civilisation too was based on slavery and the
debauching
of minors.”

It was almost noon before we piled back into the car to start the homeward journey, and by now almost the whole landscape had come back into sheer focus. The fog had banked up to the north and west but in our immediate vicinity visibility was virtually total. It was pleasant to feel the car at last able to slide up the scale into top gear, and to see the hedgerows sliding by. In the remote distance among the dangling coils of remaining mist moved an ant-line chain of Army cars crooning across the plains; but we had gathered
momentum
now, and our tyres whirred upon the fine macadam. I settled myself in the back, wrapped my coat collar around my ears and fell into a doze. I do not know how long I was asleep, but when at last I woke it was with a start of surprise. We were in the middle of a forest moving in almost total darkness through a fog much heavier than the one we had experienced; moving, moreover, in a long slow string of main-road traffic, tail-light to tail-light, in a slow forlorn processional. “It’s come back” said Marchant angrily. “It’ll take us weeks to get back to London at this pace.” So it would seem.

We were advancing slowly and circumspectly in measured
distances
; at some of the cross-roads ghostly policemen walked up and down the lines with torches keeping the files as free for movement as possible. There were long inexplicable halts, followed by short advances, and then new halts. It was on one of these halts that I suddenly saw, in the whiteness of our headlights, the number of the car in front of us; it was Julian’s Rolls! We had drawn up almost touching his rear number-plate. “My God, it’s Julian” I cried to Marchant. “He must have turned back.” And before the matter could be discussed—indeed in quite spontaneous fashion—I opened our car-door and lurched into the road. I ran up alongside the Rolls, calling out “Julian” and rapping with my knuckles on the glass of the
side windows. But the whole car, like our own, was virtually misted up. Only the windscreen wipers kept a triangle of visibility open in front of the chauffeur. I tried to draw his attention, but he was watching the road ahead and did not appear to see me. I tried the rear glass again, shouting once more, and from inside a hand lowered it about an inch. A voice, not Julian’s, said: “Who is it?” I wiped a circle of mist from the outside and said: “Is Mr. Pehlevi in there?”; and from the misty interior the voice—probably that of the Minister—answered testily. “Yes, who wants him?” The glass was lowered slowly and I said, somewhat foolishly: “Julian, it’s
Charlock
.” There were two figures sunk in the dark depths of the
limousine
, and I could see the face of neither clearly. Just an etching of two black Homburg hats. “I was looking forward to meeting you at last” I went on naively. One hat turned to the other, as if waiting for it to take the cue and answer me; but Julian did not speak. I was still hanging there anxiously when there came a hooting of horns and the confused sound of traffic police shouting: “Move along there smartly please.” A torch flashed moth-like from somewhere near. “Julian” I cried, I wailed. But the Rolls was moving forward now—the whole line sagged forward and peeled itself off softly into the obscurity. The window went up with a slap; I was forced to rejoin Marchant in our car, furious and disappointed. “It’s his car all right” I said. “And he’s in it. Next time we stop….” But we had reached a double cross-roads with an island now, with slightly better visibility; the cars ahead were moving to left and right now, the file had thickened and started to disperse down the various lanes. By the time we came up to the faintly glowing beacons Julian’s car had
disappeared
, and we were hard behind a charter bus, hemmed in on either side by small cars. A mournful hooting filled the air. Marchant laughed and slapped his knee. “I suppose you can’t catch them” he said to the chauffeur; but the rejoinder was an obvious one. They could have slid away down any of four roads. Once again he had given us the slip.