Sophie and the Sibyl (28 page)

‘
Le pin d’Alep!
’ cried Sophie, pointing out the Mediterranean pines and transforming the landscape into a French lesson. ‘
Le bois est très résineux, mais fragile, car hautement combustible.
’

‘
Combustible? Was ist combustible
?’ The boy’s dark eyes went blank.

‘
Feu!
’ roared Sophie, miming terror and asphyxiation in the middle of the bush.

‘
Feu!
’ yelled Mustapha, delighted by the charade. ‘Run!’ And he hauled her up over the rocks.

‘
Romarin
! Rosemary, and in flower.’ Sophie broke off a sprig, pausing for breath, and handed it to Mustapha who accepted it with reverence. ‘And that is
primevère élevée
. Look, Max. Primulas, here in the wild.’

Purple floods of dwarf iris ringed the ancient stones.

‘
Églantier
, a wild rose. And
épine noire
. That’s also a rose.’ She stood like a god in her garden, dispensing names. ‘Broom. The yellow flowers are broom. Repeat after me, Mustapha!’

But the boy wanted to show them the small secret theatre, overrun with sheep, who scattered to the left and right, hopping up the aisles like an audience, dissatisfied with the performance. Here was an entire city, buried in foliage. The dissolving white walls, fluted columns, broken neatly into segments, as if sliced by giant armed hands, a strange ornate stone seat, still fixed in the pavement, the clear remains of narrow roads, guttering, doorways, small rooms, now filled with rubble, crickets, birds, and the spreading wilderness of scentless rose. Sophie and Max walked the lost streets, arm in arm, anxious not to lose their footing in the unstable mass of white stones. The antique world, instead of coming closer, leaping to greet them across the centuries, suddenly became unreachable, a vanished place, which left no whispers and no echo. Sophie felt the strange mystery of receding time most strongly in the theatres, the markets and the baths. The voices and songs of the people who lived there had sunk into eternal dark, united with all things for ever lost.

She shivered in the warm sun.

‘Max, this place is empty. Even of the ghosts. Let’s go back. Mustapha!
Viens, viens vite!
’

They set off back down the hill.

About a month later, Professor Marek, yelling with unchecked euphoria, pounded across the sunny wastes of the Greek city, now free of winter floods, followed by a stream of workmen, all dusty and delighted. A bas-relief of extraordinary beauty had emerged from the trench inside the
temenos
, the sacred spaces of the sanctuary. A draped thigh and a colossal sandalled foot came surging out of the damp earth. As the afternoon wore on a woman’s arm, clamped to a shield, reeled backwards into the gouged cavity. An Amazon? Athena herself? The workmen scraped gently at the murky stone. The Professor himself, small trowel and grimy brush in hand, deliberately uncovered the clenched marble fingers. The resurrection continued, day after day. They had discovered the frieze encircling the altar. And it must be extracted, piece by precious piece. Max set off, armed with financial incentives, to negotiate the immediate removal of their treasure. Sophie and Mustapha sat on the crates, drawing each article for the excavation record, as it rose up from the grave.

‘But what does it represent? What is the story in the frieze?’ Even as she sketched each partial figure, every weapon and each severed limb, Sophie could make no sense of the violent action accomplished before her.

‘Hermeneutics, my dear Sophie,’ said the Professor, busily wiping a filthy hand on a rag, ‘is merely the art of not being fooled. It is our method of determining the genuineness and the history of an artefact from a diversity of signs. I have my own ideas concerning this battle. For that this frieze describes a battle I have no doubt. But we are in no hurry and we do not need to speculate. We will wait and see what secrets the earth has yet to give up.’

A plague of mosquitoes settled on the marshy site in the early evenings. Max insisted that Sophie should retreat from this danger and return to the guest house by the sea, despite her protests, buttoned gloves and veils. Professor Marek agreed with Max, the site was now no place for a lady; the decision became suddenly inexorable. And so she spent her days dawdling in the pretty rowing boat with the white prow, too hot to read, while Mustapha fished in the shallows.

And it was during one of these expeditions that the boy offered to show her the basilica. A small Greek Orthodox community still worshipped there, although part of the church, now ruined, staggered towards the cliff, destroyed by an earthquake of uncertain date, which everyone could describe but no one could authenticate. They set out by boat down the coast. Sophie shielded herself from the sun, with hat, veil, gloves and parasol, perched in the stern, her covered fingers drifting in the wake.

Their first sighting of the basilica, easily visible from the sea, revealed a collapsed wall and a row of seven perfect Corinthian columns, shining pure marble, the pediment still in place above the central entrance. All around the church wild yellow flowers bloomed in abundance, butterflies circulated above the lavender, grass poked through the cracked walls. The foundations of a larger building protruded through the green, like cracked teeth. They tied up the boat to an unsteady wooden step and climbed the stony path, covered with sheep’s droppings. The sanctuary materialised above them, growing more tragically magnificent as they approached. Standing on the levelled forecourt before the basilica Sophie paused, amazed by its extent. Surely this building once stood massive on the headland, a white landmark for shipping. Now, all around her, buried in long grass, lay a mass of finely chiselled stone, an inscribed slab, a shattered column, the beautiful curve of a basin half-filled with yellow rainwater. Where was the church? They advanced towards the row of seven columns, and sure enough, in the shadows, behind a decomposing wall, stood a small white dome, peeling, but intact, with a wooden door.

‘
Fermez, fermez
!’ insisted Mustapha, for she left the door ajar, as her eyes darkened in the bare, airless space. ‘
Oiseaux, oiseaux
.’

‘Oh, I see. The birds get in.’ But once the door thudded shut behind her Sophie found herself inside a small cave, quite dark, for there were only two slits carved in the dome’s flanks, which let in two blazing splinters of light. Mustapha lit a taper from one of the candles, trickling a faint smoky glow into the dark. The stale odour of incense clung to the walls. Her steps echoed on the stone paving, the dome seized the sound, damped it slightly, then flung back the leather slap of Mustapha’s sandals. And there in the taper’s sudden flare, she began to see them, the icons of the saints, face after face, encased in silver and gold, their vast eyes staring steadily into the dark, their hands raised in formal blessings.

Pax vobiscum
. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. For thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory, for ever. World without end. Each icon, radiant with certainty, gazed, unyielding, at Sophie, who steadied herself with her parasol, and returned the holy stare, curious and unafraid.

‘They are saints,’ murmured Mustapha, indicating row after row of still, identical, shining faces.

‘But you’re not a Christian,’ said Sophie, ‘so how do you know?’

‘It is a holy place for all peoples,’ said Mustapha. ‘
Sacré
. It is tradition.’

Sophie shook herself slightly and touched the smooth walls, which were covered with some sort of white lime. There were no chairs or benches, only a small row of steps and stone shelves on which the icons rested. As she stepped back her shoulder nudged a plinth, the top of which unsettled her hat. Turning round she found herself gazing at a marble row of bare toes, larger than life-size. A gigantic statue, squashed into the corner to the right of the door, took up all the space, and reached right to the roof.

‘Mustapha, bring the light. Who is this?’

‘He too is saint,’ declared Mustapha, scampering across, waving the taper. ‘He is famous saint. Worshipped here. Everyone else is massacred. But he defends and protects the Christians.’

And so at last Sophie looked up and found herself staring into the blank, marble eyes of the philosopher Lucian.

END OF CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

results in a Disturbing Revelation. A Statue is transported to London and Two Characters in this History, destined never to meet, against all the odds, actually do.

In February 1876 two events electrified London’s intellectual circles: the final authentication of the statue of Lucian, discovered in a ruined basilica near Miletus – the very statue that had once stood before the market gates for centuries, guarding the way to the sanctuary – and the first episode of a new novel by the author of
Middlemarch
. The statue, destined to rest in an honoured alcove somewhere inside the British Museum, raised a frenzy of excitement among the learned societies of archaeologists and historians. Was it genuine? Or not genuine? After all, identical copies of Lucian’s image abounded throughout antiquity. Lucian became as ubiquitous as Antinous. Just as the beautiful beloved of Emperor Hadrian transformed himself into an archetypal image of lost youth, so too had the grave authority of the philosopher come to represent wisdom, endurance and the ancient values of the republic.

The circumstances of the statue’s discovery, so piquant and so glamorous, cast a spell over the newspapers. Photographs of the beautiful young Countess and her handsome husband, standing beside the mighty form to give it scale, did the rounds of all the journals. Professor Marek, the acknowledged expert on ancient Miletus, bounded off on lecture tours. The Great Professor, now mighty and famous on the basis of three huge trenches, eighty boxes of coins, pots, miscellaneous jewellery, curved masonry and inscriptions on stones, included passionate demands for money in his discourses. We must save the fragmented giant frieze depicting the Battle of the Amazons, which once surrounded the great altar in the
temenos
! Funding flooded into their expedition account, sponsors popped up like tulips; the ancient world became fascinating, mysterious, and above all, fashionable.

The novel also roused a good deal of turmoil and ferment, for unlike her earlier work, which dealt in ordinary lives, rural truths and the drama of everyday emotions, the Sybil’s masterwork,
Daniel Deronda,
addressed the social struggles of the rich, the not-so-rich and the would-be-rich. The opening, set in a Continental gambling resort, identified as Leubronn, but everybody knew it was Homburg, uncovered a society in flux, the class hierarchies shaken, the pursuit of wealth a naked necessity. And that first encounter between Gwendolen and Deronda across the gaming tables generated a babble of intrigued speculation. Mrs. Lewes wrote to her British publisher, John Blackwood, on 17th March 1876:

We have just come in from Weybridge, but are going to take refuge there again on Monday, for a few more days of fresh air and long, breezy afternoon walks. Many thanks for your thoughtfulness in sending me the cheering account of sales. [. . .]

Mr. Lewes has not heard of any complaints of not understanding Gwendolen, but a strong partizanship for and against her. My correspondence about the misquotation of Tennyson has quieted itself since the fifth letter. But Mr. Reeve, the Editor of the
Edinburgh
, has written me a very pretty note, taxing me with having wanted insight into the technicalities of Newmarket, when I made Lush say, ‘I will
take
odds.’ Mr. Reeve judges that I should have written, ‘I will
lay
odds.’ On the other hand, another expert contends that the case is one in which Lush would be more likely to say, ‘I will take odds.’ What do you think? I told Mr. Reeve that I had a dread of being righteously pelted with mistakes that would make a cairn above me – a monument and a warning to people who write novels without being omniscient and infallible.

Quietly satisfied by the universal adulation that descended upon her, although anxious at how the Jewish theme of the novel, nowhere evident in the first instalment, would eventually be received, the Sibyl gathered her skirts, received her guests, distributed her ardour, spiritual instruction and sympathy in generous armfuls, and braced herself for further huge sales.

Wolfgang Duncker paid £100 for the German translation rights of
Daniel Deronda
, but Tauchnitz pipped him to the post on the Continental reprint, and offered £250, hard cash in hand. Wolfgang remonstrated gently, even called in the old loyalties, but George Lewes proved inexorable. He confirmed the deal with Tauchnitz in a brief letter of polite finality. Wolfgang trotted down the Jägerstraße to moan about the Leweses and their grasping financial tactics. Should he send Max, handsome, charming Max, off to London at once, as a Trojan horse in the subtle war of author’s rights? The Sibyl clearly still cherished a tender regard for his younger brother. She always asked after him, in every letter. All the snow had dissolved into muddy slush. Wolfgang shook himself, standing in his brother’s hall, removed his outdoor shoes and settled into the new pantoufles, neatly labelled with names for regular visitors, that Sophie had arranged beneath the ancestral bench.