Mantissa Page 7

  He raises his eyebrows in gratitude for this valuable insight into primitive Greek religion.

  “Apollo Musagetes, that was his real name. His stage name.”

  Now his mouth opens, in some surprise.

  “That’s what irritated me so much when you talked of swanning through the olive groves. Some chance. We’d hardly started menstruating before we were pushed off on our first tour. Pindus, Helicon, every wretched little mountain between. Honestly, I knew every temple dressing-room in Greece by the time I was fourteen. We might get booked in as the Glorious Muses. All we really were was the Delphi Dancing Girls. Most of it was about as much fun as playing Pittsburgh on a wet Sunday night.”

  He makes an appropriate gesture of prayer, for forgiveness.

  “Pig. Anyway, my mother had this boy transferred off the mountain the month before. Two of my sisters had complained about something they’d seen him doing, I was never told quite what. Apparently he was being rather beastly to one of his ewes. That was it, of course. Out he went. I can’t imagine why he should have crossed my mind that particular day.”

  She reclines a little farther back, and raises her knees; then extends one leg in the air, turning and inspecting the slim ankle for a moment, before bringing it back to its partner.

  “Actually… oh well, there was something, I suppose I’d better tell you. Again, by pure chance, one day before he was given the boot, I was walking on my own and happened to pass near his beech tree. It was terribly hot that day, too. I was rather surprised to notice he wasn’t there, though all his smelly old sheep were. Then I remembered, Olympus knows why, that there was a spring not far away. It came out of a cave and made a little pool. Actually it was our pool, it was supposed to be a kind of combined bath and bidet for my sisters and myself, but never mind. Anyway, I had nothing better to do, all this was in that absolutely marvelous time before the alphabet and writing was invented – my Zeus, if we’d only realized. We should be so lucky.” She throws him a dark look. “So I went to the pool. He was having a bathe. Naturally I didn’t want to disturb his privacy, so I stepped behind some bushes.” She glances at the man on the chair. “Is this boring you?”

  He shakes his head.

  “You’re quite sure?”

  He nods.

  “I was only fourteen.”

  He nods again. She turns on her side, towards him, and curls up her legs a little. Her right hand smooths the sheet.

  “He came out of the Pierian Fountain – that was Aunt Polly’s prissy name for this pool – and sat on a rock beside it to dry. And then – he was only a simple country boy, of course. Actually, to cut a long story short, he began… well, playing with a rather different sort of pipe. Or syrinx, as we called it. He obviously thought he was alone. I was frankly quite shocked. Disgusted. It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen naked men before, at my aunt’s in Cyprus.” She looks up. “Did I tell you she lived in Cyprus?”

  He shakes his head. She goes back to smoothing the sheet.

  “Anyway. As a matter of fact I’d always thought their little hanging things looked rather silly. All that horrible pelt surrounding them. I couldn’t understand why they shaved their beards every day, but not that. Why they couldn’t see that my aunt and her woman friends and me looked so much prettier.” She looks up again. “I suppose you did notice?”

  He smiles and nods.

  “She hates anything that spoils natural line. On purely aesthetic grounds.”

  He opens his hands.

  “I suppose you think it’s just one more freakish thing about me.”

  He denies it, but there is this time a faint hint of a shrug as well; of a secret doubt conquered by a polite refusal to argue. She eyes his bland expression, then sits up on an arm.

  “It’s a sculpturesque thing. My aunt has all sorts of brilliant artist friends. They all agree.” He opens his hands. “And it’s not just the visual side. It’s the plastic aspect as well.” He nods. She scrutinizes him. “You do think it’s freakish, don’t you?” He gives her a slightly embarrassed smile, and looks down. She watches him a moment or two more, with a slight frown, then pushes herself up and kneels erect on the bed, facing where he sits, her thighs tightly pressed together. “Look, I haven’t forgiven you one bit, and don’t get any ideas, but because this is a tutorial and you don’t seem to understand the point I’m making, I give you permission for one quick assessment of… that latter aspect.” Her hands reach down and trace two lines. “As a matter of fact these are called after my aunt. Aphrodite’s dimples.” She looks up. “That was her name.”

  He nods. Now she puts her hands behind her back, staring at the wall beyond him, like a schoolgirl waiting to be awarded a prize. He rises and goes to the bed and sits on its edge beside her; then brushes the tips of his fingers across the plastic aspect.

  “I do it with a special depilatory. It’s herbal. A little man at Ktima. Near my aunt’s home.”

  A silence. Then her hands suddenly come around and give him a sharp push away.

  “I was asking you to appreciate external form. From a purely artistic standpoint. You’re worse than a child. It’s absolutely impossible to have a serious conversation with you.” She turns and sits back as she had originally, with her arms folded, back against the pillows. “Pig.” She kicks sideways with her left foot. “Oh sit there. If you must. But keep your hands to yourself.” He stays on the edge of the bed; bends; then straightens, looks into her dark eyes.

  “Pervert.”

  He moves a fraction closer up the side of the bed.

  “One can’t give you a single inch.” He leans an arm across her waist. She raises a hand to keep him firmly at that distance. “Just because I haven’t got any clothes on, it doesn’t mean you have to behave like a Neanderthaler. The analogy I was trying to suggest was the classical symposium. You’ve just invented a completely nonexistent light-panel. Why on earth you can’t make a second bed or an Attic day-couch as well, I simply don’t know.”

  He smiles. She smolders.

  “I know men who’d give their right arms to hear this very personal chapter from my autobiography. Why I should pick you of all people… I’ve a jolly good mind to stop.” He waits. “And I would if I didn’t know you’d go around saying I chickened when it came to it. You’d just love that.” She looks past him. “Anyway, you’re not going to get out of hearing it now.”

  She folds her arms a little tighter still; then, avoiding his eyes, goes on.

  “I now know that by pure chance my visual initiation was being conducted by an exceptionally well-endowed young male. In some peculiar way I found my disgust changing to a sort of pity for him. He was rather like you. Such a flagrant narcissist that one couldn’t really apply ordinary standards. It’s always been my weakness. I’m much too softhearted with mental cripples. Anyway. In the end I wanted to go and ask him to be gentler with himself. He seemed to be doing such peculiar, brutal things. I thought he was angry with it or something. Of course I didn’t, I was too shy. I was only thirteen. I slipped away in the end, I tried to pretend it had never happened. But I’ve always had rather a vivid imagination. Been retentive of images.”

  She breaks off. “You’re not even listening.”

  He looks up and nods.

  “If you think that gives me the least… oh I don’t know, I give up.” She raises her right knee. “I suppose children… go on. Thirty seconds’ free period.” Her hands go back behind her head again, and tilting it back resignedly on the top pillow, she stares at the ceiling, then closes her eyes. Near the end of the thirty seconds, taking advantage of her shut eyes, he kisses along the beautiful young Greek body to a throat whose only rival is Nefertiti’s; but when he bends for the mouth her hands catch his shoulders and push him back again.

  “No.”

  He stays leaning over her. She sinks a little deeper into the pillows, as if trying to escape from him, and stares somberly up at his face.

  “You’re not going to stop me finishing,
so don’t think you are.”

  He nods.

  “If by some miracle you can get your mind off that eternal one track it runs along, perhaps you’ll remember that all this began in my meadow.” He nods. “To be perfectly frank, when I’d finished oiling myself I lay on my tummy, in the innocent way schoolgirls do.” Her eyes survey his. “If you can picture that. How defenseless I was, how exposed.” He looks slightly aside, frowns. “Oh God, you’re impossible. You’re like all your age. Words are just grey porridge to you. Nothing’s real until you see it on television.” He shrugs, a victim of fate and history. She hesitates, lets out a breath, then twists around on her stomach, with her head turned sideways on the pillow. “Perhaps you can get some dim idea of the scene now. As a matter of fact this wasn’t quite all. By an extremely unfortunate chance a little tussock of grass was pressing into me and I was trying to rub it flat with motions of my hips. I realize now I was unconsciously laying myself open to misinterpretation.”

  There is a silence, broken only by another sigh of impatience from the narratress. She continues.

  “They’re such cunning brutes, he must have crept up in the undergrowth. And there’s something even worse about them, they’re telepathic, they can read minds. It’s something to do with their animal half. So he not only saw what I was doing, he must have also known what I was thinking. Then, at a most… embarrassing moment, just as the imaginary young shepherd was doing something to me I’m too modest to specify, and which of course I would never have dreamed of allowing in reality – to my horror I felt the intruder’s hairy body and… something else lower itself on my innocent twelve-year-old olive-oiled bottom.” There is a silence. “Oh honestly. Do you always have to be so literal-minded?”

  He kisses the nape of her neck.

  “I wanted to scream, to struggle. But I knew it would be in vain. It was either surrender to his lust or be murdered. Actually he wasn’t violent at all. He did bite my neck, but only in play. Then he started to whisper things. Wicked things, but I forced myself to listen. Things about other women, other girls – even, I was amazed to hear, about the very one of my sisters, my eldest, who’d made the most fuss about the shepherd-boy. She’s actually the most incredible hypocrite. If historians only… but never mind.” She pauses a moment. “As a matter of fact after a bit he didn’t feel quite so awful as I’d expected. He had lovely brown skin, and the furry part of his body was much nicer than you might think. Not coarse at all. Like mohair. Or angora.” She pauses another moment. “Nor did he squash me to death.” Her listener raises himself a little. She twists her head and gives him a mistrustful glance back up out of the corner of her eyes. “Nor did he do what’s running through your overactive mind. Actually he had the decency to turn me around.” A few moments later she resumes, staring up into his eyes. “I was beyond resisting by then. Mere wax in his hands. I could only stare up into his lascivious, lecherous eyes. If you can imagine that.”

  He smiles down into her dark ones, and nods.

  “It’s not funny.”

  He shakes his head.

  “He made me open my legs… I did fight a little then, but he was too strong, too excited.” She closes her eyes. “I can still feel it.” Again she is silent for a few moments, then opens her eyes again on his. Her ankles cross and lock themselves together on top of his legs. “It was ghastly: unadulterated biological domination. My tender eleven-year-old mind hated every moment of it. Every brutal inch of this abominable violation. I decided I would never forgive him. Or his sex. That from then on for the rest of my life it must be war, war to the hilt against all male things. I would torture and torment every man who crossed my path. Oh I might let them believe I enjoyed their caresses, their kisses, their fondling hands. But deep down I remained, even as I was being deflowered, the eternal virgin.” She gives him a solemn look. “I forbid you ever, ever to tell a soul about this.”

  He shakes his head: never.

  “I did once tell someone else. Like a fool.”

  He conveys surprise.

  “Of course he had to blab it all out at the next opportunity. And from the usual male-chauvinist angle. When it was so obviously my story. I may be a lot of things, but I’m not just an idiot pair of nymphs in some fancy Frog poet’s afternoon off.” She adds, “Present company, please note. And if you’re wondering why he made me into two, he was blind drunk. As usual. His name was Verlaine.”

  He shakes his head quickly.

  “Or something. One of that lot.”

  He tries to mouth the correct syllables. She contemplates him.

  “Your arms ache? Well you should jolly well have thought of that before you had that ridiculous doctor in the same posture. You’re like all pornographers. As soon as it’s a question of his lordship’s pleasure, reality flies out of the window.” She looks at his lips, then into his eyes again. “Honestly, I begin to find you almost more unpleasant dumb than talking. You can speak again now. If you absolutely must.” But she goes on before he can open his mouth. “And as long as you don’t think the carnal side of this conversation has any bearing whatever on my real opinion of you. Or on my metaphorical disgust for all you and your sex stand for. And don’t think I haven’t seen through your painfully obvious maneuverings to get me into this position.” The legs behind his lock a little more firmly, and she sinks slightly lower. “I’m not enjoying it one bit. And I don’t suppose you are. I’m sure you’d much rather be having some boring discussion about the parameters of contemporary narrative structure.”

  “Have a heart. Actually, my arms are killing me.”

  “You can get on your elbows. But no more.”

  He lies with his face just above hers.

  “I want to kiss you.”

  “Well you can wait. I haven’t finished about what happened on the mountain yet. Now I’ve forgotten where I was.”

  “Being deflowered one afternoon. By a faun.”

  “They’re not like ordinary men. They’re tetrorchid, if you must know. They can do it again and again and again. And he did.”

  “Always the same way?”

  “Of course not. We went through the whole alphabet.”

  “But you’ve just said it wasn’t –”

  “If it had been invented.”

  “Twenty-six times?”

  “Wake up. We’re in Greece.”

  “Twenty-four?”

  “Plus several diphthongs.”

  “Them I can’t quite see. In context.”

  “And you’re not going to. The point is this. For all my outrage and anger and the rest of it I had to admit he was a superb lover. Superbly imaginative. The exact opposite of you, in fact.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “You’re not in a position to know. I thought each time would have to be the last. But each time he’d find some new way of exciting me. He made me want to be like him, a wild animal. It went on for hours and hours… and hours. I lost all sense of time. From sigma onwards I could hardly do anything, I was so exhausted. But I didn’t mind. I’d have been happy to go back to alpha again. With him.”

  She falls silent.

  “That’s it?”

  “You haven’t been listening at all.”

  “I have.”

  “You wouldn’t just say ‘that’s it’ in that odiously amused way, if you had. You’d be apologizing for ever having had the nerve to suppose your own puny imagination could equal a real-life event such as that.”

  He reaches a finger and traces the outline of her lips.

  “You must have been a phenomenal eleven-year-old virgin.”

  “I hadn’t finished up all the olive oil. If you must know.”

  He taps her nose. “That’s a flagrant pinch from the Carmina Priapea.”

  “My own unique and shatteringly sensual experience happens to predate that stalely obscene collection by at least two thousand years.”

  “I’ll believe the lying on your stomach.”

  She leaves a silence
; and the more he smiles the more she, so to speak, unsmiles.

  “Are you trying to imply I made the rest of it up?”

  He amusedly taps the nose again. “You know as well as I do that satyrs were always pure myth.”

  There is a minute contraction of her eyes, and even what seems a darkening of the already dark irises.

  “Oh yes?”

  Still he smiles. “Yes.”

  “You’re hurting my breasts.”

  With a sigh he pushes himself off her body again. Behind him he feels her legs unlock. Then she folds her arms and stares up at him. It is as if a cloud has passed over her, an abrupt phasal change taken place. And still he smiles.

  “I adore it when you pretend to be angry.”

  “I am angry.”

  “Come on. A joke’s a joke.”

  “Are you saying you don’t believe a word I’ve said? Is that it?”

  “We’ve talked enough.”

  “I want an answer.”

  “Come on.”

  “I wish you’d stop using that stupid cliché.” Her face is totally without humor. “Do you or do you not believe what I’ve just told you?”

  “Metaphorically.”

  She stares coldly up at him. “This is the way you want it now, is it?”

  He no longer smiles. “I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about.”