Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) (27 page)

‘Did I understand Grip-tight to say that you had roughhouses here once a week?’

‘Ana bless me, yes! Often two or three times a week. There’s a lot of women who enjoy a good free-for-all scrap, but we always get them to the dormitory sober and with their black eyes and swollen lips doctored. You see, as children we’re kept under perpetual restraint and when we grow up we keep to custom voluntarily, but Ana doesn’t like us to die without a taste of liberty.’

‘I should have thought that the licence came rather too late. What happens, for example, if one of you falls desperately in love with a young man from outside? How is she to satisfy her passion? Or doesn’t the case ever arise?’

‘If this were Friday Eve,’ said Butterfly, ‘you’d never have asked that question. I can assure you we’re not starved in any way. Bee-flight conjures up ass-imps for us and transforms them into the young men of our choice; and she turns us into young girls sometimes, just for the fun of it.’

‘What about the old men?’

‘They have their fun, too, but since they’re nearly all impotent they mostly resort to what we call little piggeries with their imps. Ana is generous: she looks on and laughs.’

Grip-tight was still hanging about expectantly. I couldn’t think of any new bad little games for her but I remembered two or three old bad little stories from my Erica period which went down very well. She and Two Cows slapped me on the back enthusiastically and called for more. ‘Another day, ladies, another day!’ I pleaded.

Bee-flight took me to the men’s room, where I showed my pass once more and was hospitably received. ‘If you have time,’ she said, as she rejoined her friends, ‘come and see us again before you go home.’

I looked around me. Except for some revoltingly erotic frescoes on the walls and the absence of newspapers and magazines, the place reminded me of the smoking room at the Athenæum, not only in shape and size but in its leather and oak furnishings. The frescoes, which would have made the House of the Two Brothers at Pompeii look as respectable as the parlour of a Bournemouth lodging-house, were delicately executed in yellow, violet and a particularly poisonous sweet-pea shade of pink. Little piggeries indeed! And I had fondly believed that old age dulled the sexual appetite!

‘Have a cigarette, my boy,’ said a tall emaciated ex-captain, offering me his case. ‘We smoke at all hours here.’

‘Thanks, I’ll know where to come in future,’ I said, lighting one. ‘What’s all the excitement over there?’ I nodded towards a table at the end of the room around which a crowd of elders was gathering.

‘Oh, nothing much. Tiger-Tiger, one of our ex-recorders, has just invented a naughty little toy, thoroughly against custom, and the boys are having fun with it.’

‘What sort of a toy?’

‘He calls it a model steam-engine. It’s a reconstruction in gold of a machine of the Late Christian epoch that turned up in a quarry some years ago. Tiger-Tiger’s not entirely satisfied with it yet, but it works. Most ingenious. You pour ordinary water into a tank at the back and heat it up with a little fire of brandy, and it whistles, and the steam jets out and the wheels turn round. He’s a very clever fellow. The other day he discovered how to make paper, at least he swears it’s paper; but something seems to be wrong because he’s made ink too, and the ink soaks the paper when he writes on it.’

‘What’s your particular interest, if I may ask?’

The ex-captain smiled and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I lived an energetic life before I retired. Here I like to stand by the fire warming my backside and doing a bit of reading: I’ve learned to read since I came here. Mostly I read contraband books written by elders. There’s quite a library of those in the billiard-room, apart from the usual Hundred Volumes. At the moment I’m interested in astronomy; a great many rediscoveries have been made lately about the distances and weights of the stars. Just imagine, the stars can actually be weighed – isn’t that a surprising fact? And, of course, quite at variance with our mythology. We’re hoping one day to be able to reconstruct a small telescope; so far we’ve only managed to get hold of a single well-preserved lens, but we need two. Optical glass is quite beyond our power to manufacture. You don’t happen to know anything about the process, do you?’

I shook my head. ‘And if I did,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’d tell you. Isn’t it more fun to find things out than to be told them?’

He assented, though with some disappointment.

‘Have you made any re-inventions of a later age than my own?’ I asked. ‘I’m from the Late Christian.’

At this point an appalling hubbub broke out next door: a hoarse male bellow of agony soon drowned by hysterical female screams. The ex-captain smiled at me, drily: ‘That’ll be young See-a-Bird being initiated into the ways of the house. If I know Bee-flight, she’ll put him through his paces pretty savagely: he’ll think his last hour has come.’

I was shocked. ‘But they were lovers, weren’t they? – from what he told me, the most idyllically devoted couple in New Crete?’

‘The lover must be shown the other blade of the labra, as we say, and Bee-flight isn’t going to kill him. We all have to go through this sort of thing when we first come here. But you were asking about reinventions… Let me see. No, nothing of any great interest. We have some information about such machines as the Apporteur and the Cic-Fax, but they’re quite beyond our scope: they need rare metals and a complicated nebular fissive system. Here we limit ourselves to toys: we’re not ambitious.’

‘What is, or was, the Apporteur?’

‘That was an apparatus for creating a temporal discontinuum and photographing scenes of the past within a limited range of time and space; it belonged to the Pantisocratic epoch. And the Cic-Fax was a complicated device, invented a few hundred years later, for the artificial insemination of one species by another, by what they called chromosomic inflexion: several extraordinary new animals were produced that way by the Logicalists, including the bear-rabbits which were still roaming about the Indian Bad Lands a century or two ago.’

An ear-splitting crash from the women’s room; then a temporary silence and a good deal of laughter. Then again See-a-Bird’s frightful bellow.

‘I think they’re extinct now,’ the ex-captain went on calmly, ‘along with the vulture-nightingale and the negro-mandril. Perhaps it’s as well – they did a deal of damage to crops on the frontier farms. Oh, one moment, please – meet Horn-foot, our boring expert in Late Christian psycho-philosophy.

Horn-foot, a bushy-haired ex-recorder with a staccato voice, fired a number of questions at me, about monoidism, nullibrism and trauma-tropical illusion, none of which I could answer although he spoke quite good English. My ignorance vexed him and he said that I ought to be ashamed of myself for knowing so little about the one field in which my age had shone.

I told him not to talk nonsense even if he did live in a nonsense house, unless he wanted to get hurt. That sobered him, but did not stop the flow of questions.

‘You must know something, at least, about the humanitarian concept of progress?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do. I was brought up on it. I should define it as a bumpy journey to nowhere in particular considered as somehow better than the putative point of origin only because it has not yet been reached and because God alone knows either what’s doing there or whether –’

‘Did you ever meet God?’ he interrupted. He seemed displeased that I’d attempted to answer his question.

‘Never,’ I said, ‘though I’ve met two people who claimed to have done so. One was an old Frenchman who was on his way to fish in the river Alys, as they used to call the stream that flows through Sanjon, when he met God, together with St John the Baptist and St Ursula, if you know who they are. The saints told him to give up strong drink and eat only bread and vegetables, and said that if he obeyed, he’d live to the age of one hundred and one and go straight to Paradise. God said nothing but looked wise. My other informant was an English woman scientist who met God in a wood –’

‘What sort of a scientist? Be more precise!’

‘She was an authority on coal – and God told her to write a message to the Bishops of England on his behalf: they were to advocate the use of contraceptives by married people.’

‘What had that to do with coal?’

‘Nothing. I wouldn’t have mentioned coal if you hadn’t made me. She couldn’t give any clear description of God’s appearance but said that he treated her very kindly.’

Horn-foot gave a hoarse laugh.

‘It’s no laughing matter,’ I said. ‘The old Frenchman did live to one hundred and one, though whether he went straight to Paradise I can’t say; and the Bishops did eventually issue a guarded approval of contraceptives.’

‘You’re the ignorantest man I’ve ever met,’ said Horn-foot

‘I’d rather be ignorant than stupid,’ I said. ‘And I’ll trouble you not to ask me any more questions. Run off now and take a dose; you’ve got a foul breath.’

‘That’s the way to talk, youngster,’ said the ex-captain. ‘Let’s make the old gobbler swallow a cake of soap in the wash-room, shall we?’

Fortunately at this point I was whisked away to the billiard-room by a jovial group of elders who wanted me to teach them the rules of snooker. I was only too glad to do so. Under my direction they stained a set of balls with the appropriate colours, and then I showed them how to play and gave a demonstration of trick shots.

They kept me in the billiard-room for several hours, plying me with whisky and cigarettes, and I had great fun in a quiet way until someone beat a gong and the party at once broke up. Men and women crowded together into the entrance hall, where they sang a short hymn to Ana and then, since the rain had stopped and the stars were out, strolled across the road to their beds, leaving their hats on the hat-stands. See-a-Bird was in the crowd, looking like a new boy after a junior common-room rag; I did not venture to catch is eye.

Not feeling in the least sleepy, I stayed behind and spent some time in the library, where I studied the
English Poetic Canon
, which was the only book in English that I could find there. In its Supplement I came across my own
Recantation
, an early poem that I had long discarded as being artificial and insincere, and another more recent one, in the main body of the
Canon
, but clumsily re-written and attributed to ‘the poet Tseliot’. Tseliot was a composite early twentieth-century figure who had swallowed up most of his near-contemporaries, including W.B. Yeats, Vachel Lindsay, W.H. Davies and Rupert Brooke, and was reported to have died of sunstroke at an early age while preaching the gospel of beauty in the streets of Dublin.

When a clock in the hall struck two I went back to the men’s room and fell asleep on the sofa. Yes, a clock, by God! and I hadn’t even noticed it. ‘Clever fellow, that Tiger-Tiger!’ I murmured to the deaf white Nonsense House cat which was purring loudly in my ear. ‘He’ll be re-inventing income-tax next, if Ana doesn’t look out.’

I got up, washed, breakfasted on various left-overs, smoked a cigarette and heard the clock strike in the hall. Nine o’clock already and I had promised Sapphire to come early to the quince-hut! I must have overslept; why couldn’t I have gone to bed at midnight? I left in a hurry. A servant with an ox-cart was passing as I ran out into the lane, and he was terrified: nobody was supposed to be in a nonsense house at that hour, not even an elder. He put out his tongue at me, growled, rolled his eyes and spread out his hands to represent horns, with the thumbs planted at his temples: the correct procedure to be followed by anyone confronted with a strange or unlucky sight. I smiled cheerfully, greeted him in Mari’s name, and waved my passport at him; but he showed no signs of reassurance and walked away backwards, still grimacing and making menacing noises, until he was out of sight.

After cutting across the park towards the Magic House, I hurried round to the stables. ‘I want my horse,’ I told the groom, ‘also the Nymph Sapphire’s mare.’

He saddled my horse and led it out, not saying a word.

‘Thanks. Now the Nymph’s.’

‘I’m sorry, Sir. She no longer exists. Another lady is expected presently, and two more poets to restore our establishment.’

‘Sapphire no longer exists? Who told you so?’

‘The Witch Sally, Sir. She convened a dawn council of neighbouring magicians to which the Nymph was summoned; and as a result, I understand, she has ceased to be a member of the estate.’

‘Is she still in the village?’

‘She died, Sir, and is to be reborn at Dunrena, or so I’m informed.’

I made no comment, fumbled in my pocket for a tip, but finding nothing but my handkerchief and the locket gave him my apologetic thanks instead, and rode off. The impudence of Sally! And why had Sapphire submitted to the sentence? Had she said nothing in her own defence? Surely, if she had told the council all she knew they could never have convicted her. Perhaps I was to blame for this: my suggestion that Sally was the Goddess’s chosen instrument of evil. Evidently Sapphire had decided to accept her fate. I felt outraged.

Near the gate See-a-Bird and Starfish called to me from the shrubbery. I pulled up. ‘Hullo, See-a-Bird,’ I said, ‘how are you this morning?’

He smiled ruefully. ‘Nobody,’ he said, ‘need take notice now of anything I say; that’s a comfort, at least. As you know, I’ve left this house. I came here only to pick up a few things.’

‘And how do you like the other blade of the axe?’

‘I’ll get used to it before long. The first stroke, they say, is the worst. It seems to shear the top of one’s head clean off, just above the eyes. But once it’s struck, pleasant or unpleasant events affect one only indirectly. When Bee-flight was made an elder I felt our separation keenly; now I don’t feel it at all. Last night I was glad that the bed in my cubicle was a narrow one. In her strange way Ana’s very generous.’

‘And you, Starfish, how are things with you?’

He stared at me dumbly, moistening his lips with his tongue and said: ‘My loving congratulations!’

‘Thanks very much, Starfish – but what have I done to earn them?’