‘Pleased to meet you,’ they both say.
Agamemnon, in the Oresteia of Aeschylus, returns to his palace in Argos, the victor after ten years’ war against the Trojans. He is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra as soon as he sets foot in the hall, walking over the costly crimson tapestries with which she has laid the palace floor as his bitter homecoming tribute. Later she is murdered in her turn by their children, Orestes and Electra, who cannot forgive her for disposing of their father, imperfect though he was.
My children are interested in the ancient Greeks. They have a surprising knowledge of Greek mythology, know its twists and turns, are familiar with its cast of characters. When they talk about it it’s as though they are talking about something they personally remember. I suppose this knowledge can only have come from books, so it is memory in a way. For a child a book and a memory can be difficult to tell apart. All the same it’s surprising, how much they know. Freud viewed the formation of individual personality as analogous to human history: I like this way of understanding a life, as a re-enactment in miniature of civilisation. According to this analogy the ancient Greeks are the formative phases of infancy, in which the psyche is shaped and given its irrevocable character. So it’s fitting, I suppose, that a child should have a special attraction to these tales of gods and mortals, to the joy and anarchy of the early world, in which fantasy and reality have not yet been separated, in which the moral authority of God the father has not yet been asserted and guilt and conscience do not yet exist.
We once visited what is said to be Agamemnon’s tomb, on a family holiday in the Peloponnese. It is a vast conical space dug beneath a hot hillside at Mycenae where bees buzz amid the wildflowers, the tomb itself beehive-shaped, as though in acknowledgement of what is really the only immortality, the return of all things human to the eternal substances of nature. Clytemnestra’s tomb is there too: the two are far apart, for this is a story not of marriage but of separation, of the attempt to break the form of marriage and be free. There are two tombs, just as there were two people: separation is a demand for space, the expression of the self’s need to regain its integrity. The double tomb, like the double bed, symbolises the power of marriage to erase these distinctions. At night I used to wake up and ask myself the question, who am I? For there in the darkness, in the marital bed, I felt myself wheeling on the edge of a black chasm, wheeling with the planets in outer space, hurtling through a blackness rashed with stars. The reality of my room, my home, my life couldn’t seem to anchor me. I was frightened of dying, not because I loved life but because I couldn’t distinguish myself, couldn’t gather together as one entity this self whose existence posited the fact of non-existence. It was like seeing a shadow without being able to see what cast it. I didn’t know who I was: yet ‘I’ would one day die.
On the hot hillside above the tomb I told my children the story of the Oresteia, hardly knowing what it was I was telling them. Does Clytemnestra know that Agamemnon is coming home? Is the murder calculated, a plan shaped during the years of his absence, or is it a sudden, unpremeditated explosion of violence? Yes, she knows: she keeps a guard posted day and night on the palace walls as a lookout. She has had bonfires laid on every hillside between Argos and Troy, waiting to be lit in the event of the warriors’ return. It is the behaviour of a tyrant, a dictator, this obsessive news-gathering, this round-the-clock surveillance. And indeed this is how Clytemnestra’s subjects speak of her, as a kind of Iron Lady, a man in a woman’s body. They too watch for those beacons to be lit, signifying victory at Troy and the return of their king. They are uncomfortable with this female version of power. It is a kind of theft, when a woman behaves like a man, or indeed a man like a woman. There is the feeling that someone’s been murdered, been done away with in the robbery.
Clytemnestra has had no choice but to live and rule without her husband all these years; a working mother, if you will, single parent to her son Orestes and her daughter Electra. There was another daughter, Iphegenia, the eldest, who is dead. Her absence haunts this drama, this family, for in a way a family and a drama are the same thing. Iphegenia died at the very time her father Agamemnon set sail for Troy: the two events are inseparably linked. On that day, Agamemnon and his fleet, all prepared for war, found themselves becalmed in the harbour and unable to depart. There was no wind to fill the sails: the driving force of civilisation, the whole thrusting work of men caught up in the furtherance of their aims, was brought to a standstill by a simple withdrawal of the favourable conditions. They had forgotten that they depended on this favour, this willingness of the wind. They had forgotten to propitiate Artemis, the goddess whose wind it was, as men forget at their peril to propitiate the women on whose willingness their plans and projects depend, for though women don’t fight wars or build civilisation, all is conditional on their willingness for it to be done. Were women not willing, civilisation would be halted. There the men sat in the harbour, armed to the teeth, with no means of getting where they wanted to go. What could they give Artemis to bring her round? How could they mollify her, fast, in order to get going? An extravagant gift was the answer. She liked sacrifices, the blood of virgins, a valuable girl laid on her altar like a cultured pearl. Agamemnon’s daughter Iphegenia, a virgin, a princess, and what’s more dearly loved by her parents, would make a rare present. Especially the love: the goddess would appreciate that, like the special lustre on the pearl of great price. All night Agamemnon agonised, but as Clytemnestra bitterly noted, what he decided came as no surprise. And what is it, the agony of decision where the decision is already made? Had Agamemnon not agonised, Iphegenia’s value would have been diminished. Had he offered her up easily, the goddess might not have been satisfied. The agony was a kind of formality, but it was a perversion too, a misuse of emotion. The next day Iphegenia was led out in the saffron-coloured dress that was meant for her wedding, and lying bound on the stone altar she watched while her father raised a knife and drove it into her heart.
Rupert tells me that his girlfriend, once so clinging and dependent, has found a new lease of life in their separation. She has moved up to London; she is out every night, at bars and clubs and parties. He claims to be relieved: he was the one who brought their relationship to an end, and was prepared to do a certain amount of penance for it. He had expected long, tearful telephone calls, flashes of anger and accusation, pleas for reconciliation. But instead, when he speaks to her — which is rarely — she claims to feel liberated. He’s worried, though; after all, he knows her well. She’s a woman whose sorrows take extrovert and hedonistic forms. Yet the fact is she doesn’t seem to need him, doesn’t call.
Every day he leaves the house early, at half past six, vanished into the pale light of morning amid the seagulls’ cacophonous waking cries. He retires early too, at half past nine. Sometimes I glimpse his male form in the dusky stairwell, clad in a white towelling robe. In the kitchen his ready meals revolve in the planetary light of the microwave oven. He eats on a stool at the counter, turning the pages of a newspaper. Once a month he has a Saturday off and takes his mother out to lunch: she lives not far away. Rupert is her only child; his father left when he was a baby and started a new family elsewhere. His second wife is rich and powerful where Rupert’s mother is fragile and impoverished. He hasn’t seen his father for years. The two of them have moved around the country, drifting like dandelion seeds troubled by breezes, too light and bewildered to find the earth. For a while Rupert attended a choir school. Despite the insubstantiality of his origins, he was discovered to have a strong voice. The school was an upper-class institution: Rupert was given a scholarship. When he speaks of that time he wears a child’s costive expression on his face. The choristers would sing in their white robes from the top of the bell tower. One day one of Rupert’s schoolfellows climbed the tower and jumped off it. I ask whether he still sings and he screws up his mouth in reply.