All right all right all right! Keep your curls on, I shall look for her!
Why the old goat cannot go and find the girl himself I do not know. Or I do. It is a show of lordship, merely, he does it without thinking, and does it to all of us, to you as well, though you hardly know it, or have forgotten the effects. How I deplore him. I can almost hear it, my resentment, a mosquito whine, thin and furious. He is the very perfection of egoism — how would he not be, given who he is? — entirely self-absorbed yet wholly unself-conscious. Why do I jump to his whims as I do? Because I must. Because I am afraid of him. Because he would do to me what he did to his father Cronus, fling me headlong from Olympus to the lowest depths of the universe and leave me chained there for all eternity, lost to myself in the darkness under the world. Yes, yes. Zeus is not what you would call a loving father.
I am in the house. I would so much rather have stayed out there with Benny and Ursula and her suddenly wrought son. Now I shall not know what they do and will have to rely on hearsay. Only sometimes am I omniscient.
Here she is, look, the lady Helen, walking swiftly through the house, whistling. She wears a loose silk sleeveless dress, a type of shift, or tunic, girdled at the waist, light blue in colour, very familiar and characteristic, we know the original model well. Look how she moves, a swirl of Attic blue and gold. She has two, quite distinct, walks, one her own and the other that she must have learned when she was training to be an actress. In the learned one she moves with what seems a stately languor, each foot at each step placed carefully heel to toe in front of the other and the hips loosely swaying. A closer look, however, shows that there is nothing loose or languorous here, that on the contrary she is as tense as a tightrope artist aloft in a powdery crisscross of spotlights, inching along with a fixed and lovely smile, not daring to look down. Her other walk, her own, is altogether different, is a kind of effortful yet exultant plunging, her head held forward and her thighs scissoring and her arms bent sharply at the elbows, so that it is not a tightrope she seems to be on now but a pair of skis, or even roller-skates, even the old, cumbersome kind, with thick leather straps and grinding metal wheels — do you remember them? I think it is the roller-skater my father prefers — among Olympus’s lofty ladies there are none but tightrope walkers — since in this mode she appears so impetuous and self-forgetting, qualities he prizes highly, in a mortal girl.
She veers to the left and through a doorway and into a room where she comes upon Roddy Wagstaff, and stops whistling. Roddy is sitting on a straight-backed chair beside a pair of french doors, all alone, one knee crossed on the other, an elbow cupped in a palm and a lighted cigarette cocked at a quizzical angle in his lifted fingers; he looks as if he were sitting for his portrait. “Sorry,” she says, not sounding so, “were you meditating?”
Roddy does not rise, only puts on a chilly smile and inclines his head an inch, to the side first and then down; she almost expects to hear a click. “Not at all,” he says. “I was doing nothing.”
They do not know each other. They met only once before, that weekend a year ago when Roddy was first here at Arden, and then they hardly exchanged more than a neutral word or two. Roddy seems to her a figure from another time, interestingly outmoded. He is handsome, too, in a thinned-out, strained sort of way. He has the appearance of a painting that has been over-cleaned, brilliant and faded at the same time. He cannot really be interested in Petra, surely not.
“Nothing is what people mostly do, down here,” she says. It comes out sounding more sour, more petulant, than she intended. Roddy’s look narrows to a keener interest.
We are in what is known as the music room, although there is no sign of an instrument of any kind, not even a piano, and it is a very long time since anyone has made music here. This is another corner room — for all that it is built in a simple square the house seems to boast more than its share of corners, have you noticed? — this time with two pairs of windows on two adjacent sides. The french doors open on to the lawn, a different stretch of it from where we were a moment ago, with other trees, and no figures to be seen. The walls are painted a pale shade of blue. There is a large and ugly sideboard and, between two of the windows, against the wall, a chaise-longue on which Helen now subsides and drapes herself in an effortless pose, drawing up her legs and setting one hand behind her head and dropping the other into her lap and raising her chin as if for something to be set balancing on it. The colour of her dress is very like the blue of the wall above her. She looks at Roddy along her handsome nose. Have I mentioned Helen’s nose, the way it descends in a vertical line from her forehead, like the noses of so many of my female relatives? And have I said that she is short-sighted and will not wear spectacles because she is an actress and actresses do not wear specs? My besotted father sighs, leaning heavily at my shoulder. He dotes on that slight droop in her right — no, her left, is it? — eye, finding it a sign at once of languor and allure.
She and the young man speak of this and that, desultorily, with intervening silences in which they seem to trail their fingers, as if they were drifting in a skiff on a shining calm grey river. They are conscious of the summer day outside, its soft air and vapoury light. She mentions the play she is to be in, and tells him about her director, who is impossible. He nods; he knows the fellow, he says, and knows him for a fool. She notices his nails, bitten to the quick. The tremor in his hand makes the thin swift vertical trail of smoke from the tip of his cigarette waver as it rises. “Oh, a fool,” he says, “and a fraud along with it, everyone knows that.” To this she says nothing, only lowers her lashes and smiles. A breeze comes in from the garden and the curtain of white gauze before the open half of the french doors bellies into the room like a soundless exclamation and listlessly falls back. The scent of roasting bird penetrates here, too. A hollow rumbling noise comes up out of Roddy’s innards — he too has travelled, he too is hungry — and he clears his throat and shifts quickly his position on the chair and recrosses his legs. “And such a notion of himself,” he adds, widening his eyes.
Helen, I see, is wearing gold sandals, not unlike Dad’s, with gold thongs crossed above the ankles. Her legs are pale, and her knees are bony and splotched a little with red — is this a flaw? My father will have none of it. He knows those knees.
She cannot think, she says, why the play is called after Amphitryon, since Amphitryon’s wife Alceme, her part, is surely the centre of it all. “You could review it, when it opens,” she says. She smiles. “I would expect nothing less than a glowing notice, of course.”
“Oh, of course,” he says, and looks away, somewhat quickly.