The Mask of Zeus Page 16

  She might as easily have got her shoes covered in snowflakes while walking across the Empty Quarter. Dobie sat heavily down on the bed where she’d died and stared once again at Sabiha Metti’s photograph. Outside the circle of light where it lay, he seemed to sense a darkness inexorably closing in on it. On it and on him …

  I’m lonely, Dobie thought. Lonely and very confused. I wish I were back home.

  8

  Kate liked London for much the same reasons that Dobie would have given to account for his dislike of the place, but didn’t in fact go there very often, and when she did found it more and more difficult to make her way around it. London Bridge – of comparatively ready access via the tube station – didn’t actually seem to be falling down but the rest of the joint was and a vast number of interested parties, clearly sharing Dobie’s opinion rather than hers, were intent upon accelerating the progress of its deterioration, improving substantially on the efforts made by Hermann Goering and the Luftwaffe some fifty years ago.

  As a former medical student at Guy’s Kate was well habituated to the rabbit-like dodgings and jinkings through which as of necessity you proceeded from one ward to another and which might later be trusted, though not implicitly, to carry you past the various houses of ill repute (though this, too, was a matter of opinion) lying to either side of the narrow streets you circumnavigated while returning to your lodgings. All that, and various other attempted gropings, she had been prepared to accept in those days as good clean fun, it being easy to regard these things in such a light when you’re young and healthy and sufficiently agile. But now it was all concrete blocks and metal girders and roped-off passageways and small dilapidated newspaper kiosks seemingly dedicated to quite different forms of Human Bondage; it was reassuring, however, to find that if you wanted to get anywhere you still had to walk, all other forms of transport being either intolerable or inoperative. The offices of Perriam and Webb, publishers, weren’t all that distant from the bridge, being located appropriately enough in Clink Street just beyond the Stoney Street junction, but were surrounded by ditches and wired fortifications of so impenetrable a nature that Kate finally arrived there ten minutes late for her appointment and, having in the last stages of her journey surmounted four flights of stairs, somewhat breathless.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Ms Walters said. ‘The lift’s been out of order for three weeks now. Sorry about that. I always feel the exercise helps to keep me in shape but you look as though you don’t have to worry too much about that.’ She allowed Kate a few moments to savour the implications of this decidedly double-edged compliment and, while so doing, to sit herself down in a horrifically creaky armchair. ‘It’s Dr Coyle, isn’t it? Are you a medical doctor or the other kind?’

  ‘I’m a GP,’ Kate said. ‘In Cardiff.’

  ‘Then you’d like some coffee I expect.’

  The effect of this non sequitur as a follow-up to the previous double entendre left Kate a trifle nonplussed; she crossed her legs – having every reason to be confident as to the effect of these – and gazed rather blankly around the room.

  It was a very small room so this didn’t take long. The plaque on the desk said DEIRDRE WALTERS EDITORIAL ASST but otherwise the desk and the office itself reminded Kate quite vividly of Dobie’s little rabbit-hutch in the Old Buildings of the university with its surreal chaos of papers, scripts, files, folders, dog-eared books, journals and miscellaneous paperasserie strewn with a fine careless rapture over shelves, chairs, side tables, filing cabinets and of course over the entire surface of the desk itself. Dobie, she thought, would have felt immediately at home here. She didn’t. Or not altogether. But at least the coffee seemed to be drinkable. ‘I was a little late anyway, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Ms Walters said comfortably. Such of Ms Waters as was visible over the desk was plump and practical and bespectacled and very young – considerably younger than Kate, certainly. Kate decided that she didn’t really approve of those oversized Spanish earrings and thereafter felt a little better. ‘I’ve no other appointments this morning. I’m not really sure I can be of much help because as I told you over the buzzer I’ve never actually met Mr Seymour but—’

  ‘Perhaps there’s someone else here who has?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Webb, but you see Mr Webb has left us.’

  ‘What about Mr Perriam?’

  ‘Well, there’s two Mr Perriams actually. I suppose it should really be called Perriam and Perriam now but it’s hard to keep up with all these changes.’

  ‘Which one do you work for?’

  ‘Oh, I work for Perriam.’

  ‘I hope he’s nicer than Perriam.’

  ‘Much, much nicer. Perriam’s a bit of a turd actually.’

  ‘Well, now we’ve got that little matter cleared up—’

  ‘You see, actually,’ Ms Walters said, deciding to come clean, ‘I’ve only been with P and W these past four months. Actually. Before me, you see, there was someone else; Anthony Pollock his name was, well, it still is of course, and I think it was Anthony who arranged this Cyprus guidebook thing, though Patricia may have finalised the contract before she got here, or no, I mean after, don’t I? So just possibly it’s Anthony you should be talking to; he’s with Connor and Cunningham now, or Patricia … But of course she’s on holiday. So it’s all a bit difficult.’

  ‘This Anthony Pollock. Is he a bit of a turd?’

  ‘Frankly, yes.’

  ‘Then I don’t think I’ll bother.’

  ‘No, being a doctor, I expect your time’s pretty well taken up with … And I don’t mean to say that nobody here is concerned about Mr Seymour’s present position; of course we are, he’s one of our authors after all and he does seem to be in a fearful jam. The trouble is we don’t know much about it and we certainly haven’t heard from him in quite a while, not since before my time here anyway, or been in contact with him or anything like that. And he’s abroad, you see. So it’s all very tricky.’

  ‘Authors,’ Kate said, ‘must be almost as difficult as patients.’

  ‘Authors are patients as far as I’m concerned. Publishing their books is only a temporary cure. Almost at once they’ll go and do the same thing again.’

  ‘You can’t have many authors on your list who’ve murdered their wives. And confessed to it.’

  ‘I have quite a few authors whose wives wouldn’t at all mind murdering them. But that sort of thing has to be discouraged, I suppose. More’s the pity. Would you like some more coffee?’

  Ms Walters had a rather high squeaky voice that seemed none the less to have no very great penetrative quality, like a Chinese ballistic missile. Perhaps they all developed voices like that, working in these tiny little boltholes. Kate looked out of the window, where behind walls of tarnished brick some ten yards of one of the murkier reaches of the Thames was foggily visible. ‘I suppose,’ she said, clearing a pathway across the desk for the hospitable cup and saucer, ‘it won’t do his sales any harm? The publicity?’

  ‘What publicity? There hasn’t been any. Whoever gets to hear of what goes on in Cyprus? Maybe if he’d done a proper book … But anyway we’re an old-fashioned firm in some respects. Perriam wouldn’t like it. Nor would Perriam. Besides, if we started puffing authors who’d murdered their wives they’d all be doing it. No, we have a very decided negative error policy on that issue, I’m afraid.’

  ‘If it were a novel …?’

  ‘That might be different. But a guidebook, and in my view not a very good one at that.’

  ‘Hard to sell on a sex-and-violence ticket.’

  ‘Hard to sell, period. And as far as I can make out he hasn’t sent us any fiction for something like three or four years now. Of course he’s still very young and Anthony reckoned that if we took the Cyprus thing we could tie down his future work on the contract and that’s just what Patricia’s done. But of course—’

  ‘Problematical.’

  ‘Yes. However,’ Ms Walters said, brightening, ‘q
uite a few people have done good work in quod. John Bunyan, for instance.’

  ‘Oh? I haven’t read much Australian literature.’

  ‘How very enviable. But Mr Seymour isn’t Australian. Is he?’

  Kate had found herself getting involved in this kind of a conversation with increasing frequency since she’d started going around with bloody Dobie. It was of course Bunyip that she’d been thinking of, not Bunyan; who was this Bunyan anyway? She hadn’t come here to talk about Bunyan. Or Bunyip, either. ‘The point is,’ she said, her small face expressive of a fixed determination at long last to get to it, ‘I have this friend in Cyprus right now … Professor Dobie …’

  ‘Oh, if Professor Dobie would write a book for us, that would be an altogether different matter. I don’t know if you think he could be persuaded …’

  Dobie was indeed and to Kate’s certain knowledge the author of several books, mostly dealing with the applicability of inconceivably complex mathematical calculi to unutterably remote or even downright impossible physical contingencies. But this, she assumed, was not at all the sort of production that Ms Walters had in mind. Seymour she no doubt regarded as a common-or-garden criminal and – what was far worse – a failure; Dobie, on the other hand, was very widely regarded as having not only murdered his wife but having got away with it. Kate was naturally familiar enough with the contemporary yuppy’s worship of success, but she still found it hard to get accustomed to being in so close a relationship to a national hero. ‘Unfortunately, Dobie doesn’t have any literary gifts.’

  ‘Quite unnecessary,’ Ms Walters said firmly. ‘Hardly any of our authors do. In fact the whole problem is one of finding authors who can write badly enough to satisfy the general public and at the same time …’ She paused. An idea had obviously struck her. ‘Or is he difficult?’

  ‘Dobie? He’s by far the most difficult man I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Oh, dear. But then men are, aren’t they? So you may as well have one who drives you up the wall all the time, so you don’t have to … What exactly was it that he wanted to know?’

  ‘He wants to know about something called the Mask of Zeus.’

  ‘The mask of what?’

  ‘Zeus.’

  ‘You sure he didn’t mean Zorro?’

  ‘No. I mean yes. I mean no, not Zorro. Zeus.’

  ‘Well, there you go. That’s not something I get asked about every day; people don’t come up to me and … I mean it’s sort of original, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Oh, he’s an original all right.’

  ‘One might even say eccentric.’

  ‘Indeed one might.’

  ‘So OK. What is it?’

  ‘What? What’s what?’

  ‘This mask thing you said.’

  ‘The mask of Zeus.’

  ‘Yes. That. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought you might.’

  ‘Might what?’

  ‘Might know.’

  ‘About the …?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘No. Well, if it comes to that, neither have I.’

  Ms Walters picked up a ballpoint pen as if wondering what it was doing there and, having studied the tip of it, put it down again. ‘This is all getting a bit too much like Question Time in the House of Commons. I suppose you’re going to tell me next that Professor Dobie doesn’t know, either.’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t. But he thinks there may be something about it in the book, I mean in this guy Bunyip … in this guy Seymour’s bloody book, for God’s sake. If you follow.’

  ‘Ah,’ Ms Walters said. ‘I’m with you now.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ Kate breathed deeply and through her nose.

  ‘It just may be that I can help you on that one. The proofs came back from indexing only the other day. So let’s,’ Ms Walters said, searching for and discovering the telephone under a pile of discarded directories, ‘see what we can do. Provided the copy editor’s somewhere round, we could be in business.’

  The copy editor was indeed around and came up with the goods and Kate was able to make her way back to Paddington with some ten or twelve photostatted pages tucked away in her handbag. At least it would be something for her to read on the train.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE ZEUS MOSAIC

  The famous decapitated statues of Salamis may indeed have been the victims of eighteenth-century head-hunters, impelled by the urge to ‘collect’ relics of classical antiquity for the Western European market. But no such simple answer suggests itself to the Mystery of the Missing Mosaic. You can’t put a mosaic into a sack and walk off with it. And possibly for that reason a number of the Salamis mosaics survive in place, ravaged by the droughts and rains of a couple of millennia but with much of their cunning intricacy intact. Yet at some time in the past two hundred years one of the largest, and probably the most remarkable, has vanished. Under the ground, like Salamis itself? Into the sea, like the harbour fortifications? Who knows?

  At least three earlier observers of the ruins have left written confirmation not only of its existence, but of its size, magnificence and subject-theme. But none of them – unfortunately and annoyingly – describes its exact location. Since prior to the recent excavations and restorations this would have been like describing the position of a given burrow within a rabbit warren, this is understandable; nor would it have occurred to any of these witnesses that an object of such immense proportions might later be somehow unaccountably mislaid. Ten metres by five is probably a reasonable estimate.

  Since by common consent the mosaic depicts the figure of Zeus engaged in the bedding of one of his numerous lady friends – or possibly Hera, his wife – it may be assumed that its probable location lies within the temple of Zeus and beside the Agora. All that remains of this temple, however, is the high podium and inchoate masses of buried and half-buried rubble. It’s possible that some relatively recent collapse or subsidence has covered the Zeus mosaic under tons of loose and shifting earth and that future excavations will bring it once more to light, as was the case with the much smaller dove mosaics of Soli, to the west of the island. It’s also possible that the god is at this moment conducting his amours somewhere else entirely.

  What seems certain is that, wherever he may be, he is conducting them in an extremely uninhibited manner. The last person to have recorded his impressions of the Zeus mosaic appears to have been the British traveller William Bryce, who visited Famagusta in the summer of 1798. Being not only British but British to the core, he professed himself to be both deeply impressed and profoundly shocked, this in language that may recall to us Dickens’s later diatribe on the Roman Colosseum. ‘Surely,’ he writes, ‘we need seek no further cause for the sudden collapse of this once great city nor regard it as worthy of any other fate! Hardly can we suppose that any but a race of decadents could admire, adore, nay worship the depiction of the depraved and debased liaisons of a pagan deity! Yet may we still marvel at the paradox lying inherent in the Roman nature and seized upon by a greater and later bard than Virgil: – as Antony’s infatuation for Cleopatra presages the fall of the greatest of the ancient Empires, so does the mindless and savage lust here delineated in all its crudity presage no less colossal a fall, no less inevitable a decline: – that of the Salamis of Constantine the Great, shaken by earthquakes, riven by sea-raiders, and in the end – alas, we must say deservedly! – destroyed.’

  Doubtless the unmistakably injured tones of this eighteenth-century Mary Whitehouse will suggest to us a reason for the lack of later comment by less jaundiced travellers; Victorian susceptibilities must be borne in mind, and Islamic attitudes also. The stricter forms of fundamentalism have never been practised in Cyprus, but it was, of course, an Islamic state and part of the Ottoman empire; it’s therefore not at all impossible that, faced with the protests of the ineffable Bryce and his like, the civic authorities took the appropriate steps and that, as a result, the offending depiction was not
merely sealed off from public view – like the Pompeii frescos – but deliberately buried or even dug up and, in Bryce’s words, alas! destroyed …

  It may well be that the activity displayed in the Zeus mosaic, or more exactly the manner of its portrayal, would be offensive even to some modern tastes. The Italian art historian Giacomo Marinetti, who visited the site some eighty years earlier in search of surviving relics of Venetian rule, spoke with disapproval of ‘open and naked copulation … a scene of unbridled and indecent lust …’, but also confirmed ‘the combined power and subtlety of the overall composition, dominated by the shades of blue and black … the sense of tremendous physical energy conveyed … the faded yet still glorious coloration of the flesh.’ He was indeed moved, he tells us, to make a detailed sketch of the composition; this also has seemingly disappeared, but he further and interestingly claims that his sketch was known to the famous (or infamous) Vasari, who used it as a basis for one of his highly pornographic pseudo-Classical reconstructions of the sexual encounters of Greek gods and human mortals. Of these, the most likely candidate is the well-known depiction of Neptune enjoying the rather over-opulent favours of Gaia, though we must then assume Vasari to have replaced the figure of Zeus with that of the fishtailed sea-god to suit his own dubious purposes. There can be no doubt at all that the original representation in the mosaic was that of Zeus (or Jupiter); the identity of his partner, on the other hand, has not been clearly established.

  However, a curious and unique feature of this mosaic, commented upon both by Marinetti and Foscolo (another Italian observer), is that the male figure is clearly masked. Masked figures, both male and female, are of common occurrence in Greek representations of ritual orgies and symposia on urns and pottery fragments, but always in an unequivocally human context; masked divinities are unknown in such depictions, and such a concept might have had much the same effect upon Graeco-Roman susceptibilities as the visual representation of the act of sex had upon William Bryce – who clearly saw it as little short of blasphemous. According to Marinetti, moreover, the mask worn by Zeus here is neither the formal black face-covering of the orgiast, granting anonymity, nor the animal-mask sometimes worn by those engaged in the acting-out of some form or other of fertility rite; it is, Marinetti says, ‘simply moulded to the form of a bearded human face of a certain severe or militaristic aspect … bearing the marks of an innate dignity disfigured by the intensity of a momentary passion.’ Since it is normally the purpose of a mask to conceal rather than to reveal emotion, this struck him as being strange: ‘Perhaps,’ he adds, ‘the mask may serve the obverse of its usual purpose and … serves to give a human semblance to that cold divine indifference the god’s features might otherwise have untowardly revealed.’ (An idea to be, curiously enough, taken up by Yeats in his ‘Leda’ sonnet and elsewhere in his work.)