Sophie and the Sibyl (8 page)

‘Both Sardis and Pergamum were situated inland, I believe,’ said the Sibyl, manifestly capable of conjuring all biblical history out of her massive brain in an instant. ‘Lucian mentions both cities. But at that time Ephesus was a considerable port. The earthquake, which buried the town, filled the land between the arena and the sea with rubble from the mountain. Many of the great cities on the Anatolian coast ceased to exist because they became separated from the Mediterranean by increasing undredged silt. Lucian speaks of the docks in his comments on the Christians, and he certainly embarked at Ephesus when he returned to Rome by sea. The Seven Churches established by the time of Trajan’s campaigns between
AD
98 and 117 were often located in ports, and St Paul travelled frequently by ship. He was shipwrecked on the rocks of Malta and immediately set about converting the island to this new faith.’

The Sibyl sipped her tea and took a moment to reflect.

‘Lucian compares the new religion to a plague, spread through the waterways. All seven churches of the Apocalypse were established in the provinces over which he was governor: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and the unfortunate lukewarm Laodiceans.’

She stretched forth her cup towards her husband and uttered a rich, warm laugh.

‘My tea is in imminent danger of becoming a Laodicean!’ Her huge pendulous face lit up like a young girl’s, mischievous, merry and comical. ‘“I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth!”’

Max dreaded the fate of all those found to be lukewarm.

‘Poor Lucian,’ continued the Sibyl. ‘The infection clung to his rocks and terraces, taking root and growing fast. The games were eventually banned; the temples ruined and abandoned.’

‘But was the old religion worth saving?’ asked Max, thinking aloud. He gave up trying to follow the Sibyl’s sympathies and set about wolfing cake.

‘Now there’s a good question, Polly! And posed with the candid open-mindedness of a free-thinker, if I may say so, Max!’

The unfortunate Max munched his cinnamon and raisin cake in horror. For here was conclusive proof that he sat among advocates of that dark doctrine, which teaches that man is dust, and nothing but dust.

‘Yes, it is a good question,’ said the Sibyl, unperturbed, ‘and much depends upon how we understand the rise of Christianity, for if we view all new religions as a voyage towards the idea of God, then the Jews hold a special place, not only because of their unusual monotheism but because of their emphasis on human responsibility. The great strength of the Olympian gods lies not only in their all too human fallibility, which reflects the imaginations of their creators, but also in the pagan emphasis on the holy nature of the earth in their representation of divinity. We have sacred groves, sun gods and water nymphs. The ancients worshipped the world before us. Poseidon and Apollo rule the waters and the skies.’

She turned confidingly to Max.

‘Since Mr. Lewes purchased a microscope we have not ceased to wonder at the miraculous organisation of those tiny worlds hidden from our ordinary sight. Not unlike Mr. Meyrick’s paintings, although we have never yet come across the little people. I believe that in a remoter time the gods represented and celebrated our link to those unrevealed worlds within worlds.’

She paused to accept another cup of tea, smiling tenderly at Mr. Lewes’s fingertips.

‘And the earth is filled with treasures that we would be wise to treat with reverence. But in our own time we see them clearly with the eyes of science: our geologists, naturalists, and, of course our extraordinary Mr. Darwin, the beauty of whose
Origin of Species
never ceases to enthral us. No, it is the human endeavour of shaping our own history which determines the rise and fall of our religions. We create the gods we need.’

Max wondered if he would actually survive the conversation. He changed the subject.

‘I am to join an archaeological expedition to Anatolia led by Professor Kurt Marek in the spring. Pergamum is one of the places where we obtained permission to begin our researches. We shall hunt down biblical truth by digging it up.’

Both Lewes and the Sibyl turned upon him with expressions of transfixed and startled interest.

‘Well now, Polly, here’s a turn-up for the books! Our Max is not content with challenging received opinions of antiquity, he intends to retrieve his own version with a shovel!’

And the whiskered little man leaped out of his seat to extinguish a flaming tea cake, pounding his guest on the shoulder as he did so. The Sibyl’s calm gaze rested upon Max, intrigued and intent, as if he had translated himself into a phenomenon that surpassed all her expectations.

END OF CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

records the Narrator’s speculations on the Mysteries of Marriage and reveals one or two Interesting Possibilities intrinsic to the Plot.

Max had in fact agreed to join the archaeological expedition under some pressure from his brother, who put up the necessary funds. Wolfgang engaged both an artist and a photographer to accompany the troop of historical scholars, and intended to publish the first photographs of the great temples unearthed, should they be as glorious as was generally supposed. The publisher had cleverly spotted a method of making his recalcitrant brother useful, and, with one stroke, removing him from Berlin’s more immediate temptations. Off you go, Max. I’ll buy you a splendid set of trowels, picks and boots, and suitable clothes for a different climate. The Turks did not countenance gaming tables outside Constantinople, where they supposedly existed for the sole amusement of tourists and visitors. Max’s travelling allowance would be strictly rationed, thaler by thaler, or, if the much-heralded new currency should ever come to pass, a fixed amount of Reichsmarks, donated every month to the Embassy account, and not one pfennig more.

But for Max, as he sauntered away from the Lewes household in the early evening, both consideration of the terms Lewes himself
had
written out for the Continental reprint and the translation rights of 
Middlemarch
, now so nearly completed, and, indeed, the archaeological spring expedition, had all but faded completely from his mind. Two things disturbed his youthful complacency: the sudden, casual emergence of that modern philosophy of atheism, whose contaminated air he had inadvertently sucked in, and the nature of the bond between the Sibyl and her married lover. No god sanctified this union. They stood alone before an ungoverned universe, braided with meaningless accidents and mysterious unseen laws, visible only to science. The Sibyl had staked her all on one man’s faithful trust. And she seemed very far from being a lost and fallen woman. Indeed, she gave every indication that she enjoyed contented happiness with her loquacious, energetic husband, her social celebrity and obvious wealth. Was she one of the wicked, who shall flourish like the green bay tree? This was completely improbable. The Sibyl gleamed from afar, a moral lighthouse, benevolent and wise. She dispersed her radiance to a higher moral circle, far above the general populace, whose ignoble desires rose no further than a moment of sweaty fumbling on the dance floor or an elbow resting on the gaming tables. But if no God watches, judges and foresees our every deed, then why should not evil flourish? For who shall stop us? And the faintly guilty flush Max felt about the throat as he tapped away over the cobbles of the Königgasse was infantile and irrelevant. Take your pleasures, sir, enjoy. Morality is simply the limit of what you can get away with. The God of his childhood either did not give a damn, or did not exist. True, the Sibyl could not be received in decent, English bourgeois company, but actually, who cares? She kept company with ambassadors, intellectuals, aristocrats and princesses on the Continent. Writers travelled from America to sit at her feet. The casino still stood, for a few more months at least, littered with all sorts and conditions of men, peacefully rubbing shoulders at the roulette table, eyes narrowed and fixed, not upon each other, but upon the red and the black.

Max, you will remember, has received a proposition, if not a firm proposal of matrimony, to which he is not averse. But neither is he inclined to follow it up with any degree of haste. He is a conventional man, but lacks those spots of commonness, with which the Sibyl adorned one of her fictional heroes, who chose his wife to match the furniture. Respectable virgins, at least in Max’s eyes, prowled the Assembly Rooms like panthers, dangerous, supple, on the watch. He always took care to dance with every pretty girl in the ballroom. Two dances each. His habits never changed, he loitered, bowed and vanished, wary of the circling mothers, who closed in at once if he led a girl out on to the balcony, or into the dining room to look for ices on the buffet. Max never underrated women’s passions or their cunning. How these unstable waters could be negotiated in matrimony remained a mystery to him.

And indeed, they are a mystery to me. What qualities in a man and a woman allow a marriage, legitimate or otherwise, to prosper and endure? Never underestimate the power of habit. Most men cease to see or listen to their wives in all but the most general terms fairly early on in the engagement. If the deal has been arranged, as it often was in the nineteenth century, he is more likely to be wondering if he can live with her perpendicular nose and podgy hands than listening to her statements of desire with any great attention. If he has married for love his central preoccupation will be with his own powerful feelings, and the sad necessity of keeping his prick in his pants before the appointed day. If indeed he does. The Welsh have a wonderful tradition called ‘bundling’ – that is, courting in bed. And presumably the knot is hastily tied if the woman falls pregnant. With the lady’s fertility established and the inheritance secure, the marriage may then proceed with celebrations and blessings.

John Fowles, in the first of many books to assault the nineteenth century with the sensibility of the twentieth, which then indeed opened the Neo-Victorian gates to the pornographic gusto of the twenty-first century, mentions the fact that among Dorset peasants in the 1880s, ‘conception before marriage was perfectly normal. Thus premarital sexual intercourse
was the rule, not the exception
.’ (Italics in the original.) Fowles goes on to assert that, in the Victorian period, when a man and a woman of the middle classes were introduced, shook hands and conversed, the possibility that they would go to bed together remains simply inconceivable and not on the table, as he supposes – or hopes – that it is in the modern world. Fowles, writing in the midst of the so-called sexual liberation of the 1960s, 1967, an iconic year, set his novel,
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
, precisely one hundred years earlier. Now, the usual point of writing an historical novel is to measure the distance travelled between those previous generations, and ourselves; sometimes we contemplate the roads not taken, and expose the reasons why. But sometimes we venture down precisely those unknown, un-chosen roads, rewriting history as fiction. This is what might have happened, should have happened. Even if it didn’t.

But Mr. Fowles doesn’t do that, he gives us a good story and a just account of mid-Victorian attitudes, sexual, political and religious. But, in tones that are often patronising and contemptuous, his narrator uses a 1960s set of sexual prejudices, all, to my mind, male, misogynistic, lecherously and vigorously heterosexual, and pre-AIDS, to bash the Victorians as a just punishment for their rampant hypocrisy and sexual confusion. It’s easy to crow, isn’t it, if you imagine yourself in possession of superior sexual hindsight? But I want to challenge Fowles on his own territory. Did middle-class men and women in the 1870s approach one another without a sexual thought in their heads? Surely Max speculated freely on the bizarre idea of the magnificent Sibyl, who radiated
noli me tangere
, except to kiss my gloved hand, and the hairy little scientist, making the beast with two backs? Lewes had three sons, but the Sibyl appeared to be childless. Did the couple use some form of contraception? And if so, what? Had babies been concealed, smothered at birth, or smuggled off? Every gesture on both sides indicated that they were a couple devoted to one another, courteous, fond, and conciliatory to a fault, fussing over each other’s health, comfort and headaches. Max observed it all, at close quarters.

Happy middle-class marriages in every age usually work best with a degree of geographical distance: separate domains, consisting of drawing rooms and gentlemen’s clubs. The Leweses achieved an almost supernatural harmony, whilst maintaining a degree of domestic intimacy, which, in every other couple, leads to a tournament, fought out between Spite and Contempt. Spite is usually the woman’s weapon; many of us have been burned, hanged or battered into pulp for being unrepentant bitches. Contempt is the prerogative of power.

The Sibyl often referred to her ‘sacred bond’ with Mr. Lewes, a holy act of union, an echo of that unfortunate Act which still, at the time of writing, binds Scotland to England. In her letter announcing her changed status to her brother Isaac, she employed a little necessary subterfuge. But she used that fatal and mendacious word – husband.

Rosa Cottage

Gorey

Jersey

26th May 1857

My dear brother

You will be surprised, I dare say, but I hope not sorry, to learn that I have changed my name. And have someone to take care of me in the world. The event is not at all a sudden one, though it may appear sudden in its announcement to you. My husband has been known to me for several years, and I am well acquainted with his mind and character. He is occupied entirely with scientific and learned pursuits, is several years older than myself, and has three boys, two of whom are at school in Switzerland, and one in England.