The Revolt of Aphrodite Read Free Page A

The refining of false time is the issue.” I did not leave any instructions about how to deal with the piggybank. It was enough to go on with for people like Nash. I waved them goodbye in a fever of health.
    In the southbound train I read (aloud) the Market Report in The Times, intoning it like a psalm, my breast filled with patriotism for Merlins.
    MILAN
    The bourse opened quiet yesterday but increased buying interest spread to a number of sectors including quicksilvers, properties, textiles, and insurances, giving way to a generally firmer trend. Towards the close there was brisk buying of leaders with Viscosa and Merlin prominent.
AMSTERDAM
    Philips, Unilever and Royal Dutch opened lower but later met some demand on some local and Swiss demand.
BRUSSELS
    The forward market was quiet and prices showed little change.
FRANKFURT
    Reversed the recent weaker trend in initial dealings and showed a majority of gains later: the close was friendly with gains generally up to seven points.
PARIS
    Sentiment improved slightly under the lead of metallurgical shares, notably Merlin, which were firm.
SYDNEY
    Quiet but easier.
TOKYO
    Prices moved higher. All major industrial groups, along with rails, participated in the upturn. Market quarters looking for a significant summer rally found much to bolster their hopes. Among companies reporting improved net income were: Bethlehem Steel, Phelps Dodge, Standard Oil, Merlin Group.
    On the blackboard in the senior boardroom of Merlin House I had left them some cryptic memoranda for their maturer deliberations like
    motor cars made from compressed paper
    paper made from compressed motor cars
    flesh made from compressed ideals
    ideas made from compressed impulses.
    They will take it all seriously. So it is. So it is. Really it is.
    Watching the trees go by and the poles leap and fall, leap and fall, I reflected on Merlin and on the F. of F. The Fund of Funds, the Holy Grail of all we stood for. Nash had said so often recently: “I hope you are not thinking about trying to escape from the firm, Charlock. It wouldn’t work, you know?” Why? Because I had married into it? Vagina Vinctrix! At what point does a man decide that life must be lived unhesitatingly ?Presumably after exhausting every other field—in my case the scientific modes: science, its tail comes off in your hand like a scared lizard. (“The response to shadow in the common flat-worm is still a puzzle to biologists. Then again, in the laboratory, inside a sealed test-tube the gravitational pull of the tides still obtains, together with the appropriate responses.”)
    Yes, he was right, I was going to try and free myself. “Start” Koepgen used to say wryly, sharply, lifting his glass, little drops of ouzo spilling on to the cheap exercise book which houses the loose nerve ends of poems which later, at dead of night, he would articulate. “Tap Tap, the chick raps on the outer shell in order to free itself—literature! Memory and identity. Om.”
    * * * * *
     

     
    B ut before leaving I did what I have so frequently done in the past—paid a visit to Victoria Station, to stand for a while under the clock. A sentimental indulgence this—for the only human fact that I know about my parents was that they met here for the first time. Each had been waiting for someone quite different. The clock decided my fate. It is the axis, so to speak, of my own beginning. (The first clocks and watches were made in the shape of an egg.) Seriously, I have often done this, to spend a moment or two of quiet reflection here: an attempt perhaps to reidentify them among the flux and reflux of pallid faces which seethes eternally about this mnemotopic spot. Here one can eat a dampish Wimpy and excogitate on the nature of birth. Well, nothing much comes of this thought, these moments of despairing enquiry. The crowd is still here, but I cannot identify their lugubrious Victorian faces. Yet they belonged I suppose to this amorphous pale collection,