The Walled Orchard (50 page)

‘Who was that?’ Phaedra asked, putting her head round the door of the inner room. ‘One of your drinking pals from the Theatre? I hope he wasn’t sick.’

‘Sick is putting it mildly,’ I said. ‘My love, we are in a lot of trouble.’

‘What do you mean, we?’

‘We, as in I am going to be executed, and you are going to be left destitute when they confiscate all my property to pay the informer.’

‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘what have you done?’

‘I haven’t done anything,’ I snapped. ‘That’s the aggravating part of it.’

Phaedra sat down next to me. ‘What are you supposed to have done?’

‘Smashed up the statues.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ she said, relieved that I had been worrying over nothing. ‘I can vouch for that. You were in bed with me.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t really think that’ll be enough to convince a jury,’ I said. ‘Now if I could prove I had been in bed with the prosecutor, and the presiding magistrate, and the entire Council, I might just stand a chance. You, no.’

‘But it’s the truth,’ Phaedra said. ‘Do you think anyone would seriously believe that I would perjure myself just to protect you?’

‘You’d be amazed,’ I said. ‘No, there’s only one way out of it, and I can’t do it.’

‘What, for God’s sake?’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘Don’t be idiotic,’ said Phaedra. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘That man just now was Demeas, the informer. You know him?’

‘I’ve heard of him,’ she said. ‘He was behind that big trial of the people who were supposed to be smuggling in perfume from Corinth. And it wasn’t from Corinth at all, you know. Any woman could have told you that. It was just the cheap stuff they make down on the coast and put up in those little bottles.’

‘Fascinating,’ I said. ‘Anyway, Demeas has got it in for me and Aristophanes because we mentioned him in plays, and besides, we’re still alive. He wants one or the other of us for his next production.’

‘And?’

‘And, of course, he wants the other one as his key witness. That was what he was here for just now; offering me the choice.’

‘You’ve got a choice?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought you said we were in trouble.’

I frowned. ‘We are. You do speak Greek, I take it? Trouble. Serious danger. Material risk to life and property.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Phaedra. ‘You hate Aristophanes. I’d have thought you’d be overjoyed.’

‘Inform on him, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s the problem,’ I said, and I threw a handful of charcoal on the fire. ‘Look, Phaedra,’ I said, ‘you know me. Normally I wouldn’t hesitate. I’d inform on my own father to save my own neck, you know that. But not Aristophanes. I just can’t.’

‘But you hate him,’ said Phaedra. ‘He’s your worst enemy in the entire world. He slept with your wife. He tried to sabotage your play. For God’s sake,’ she remembered, ‘he’s even guilty of the damned crime.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘And if you think,’ she said, ‘that he’d hesitate one minute before informing on you just because you saved his life in Sicily. .

‘How did you know about that?’ I asked.

‘… then you’re a bigger fool than you look. Don’t you realise, you’re a witness against him, and the rest of them, come to that?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s good, isn’t it? It might stop them informing on me if they stop to think that I can do as much for them.’

Phaedra shook her head sadly. ‘You just don’t think, do you? You don’t seriously imagine they’ll believe you when you point to the chief prosecution witness and say, “Actually, it wasn’t me, it was him”? That’s the only way you could tell it to the jury and they wouldn’t believe you.’

‘True,’ I said. ‘It’s not looking good, is it?’

‘But you idiot,’ said Phaedra, ‘why can’t you do what Demeas wants you to? Just go to him, now, and say you’ll do it? Has Aristophanes got some sort of spell on you or something?’

‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘I promised the God I’d look after him.’

‘What was that?’

‘I said I promised the God. Dionysus. Why do you think I hauled his worthless body half-way across Sicily? My duty to Comic drama?’

‘Is this some sort of ridiculous male all-buddies-together oath?’ she replied. ‘I’ve heard about that sort of thing.’

‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I actually did promise the God. In person. That’s why he spared my life in Sicily; so that I could look after Aristophanes.’

‘Are you drunk?’ said Phaedra.

‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ I said. ‘listen.’ And I told her about the God; how I had met him in the stable during the plague and then after
The General,
and then in the walled orchard.

‘I thought so,’ she said when I had finished, ‘you are drunk.’

‘You stupid bitch,’ I said, ‘I’m telling you the truth.’

‘Now you listen to me,’ said Phaedra, leaning forward and grabbing my tunic with both hands. ‘I couldn’t give a damn whether they kill you or not, but I’m not having my son grow up an oarsman, and I’m certainly not going to spend the rest of my life selling greens in the Market Square just because of some ridiculous oath you and Aristophanes may have sworn to each other in Sicily. So pull yourself together and act like a grown-up for once.’

‘Phaedra,’ I said, ‘just let me explain, one more time—’

‘Oh, you’re pathetic,’ she said. ‘You deserve to get killed.’ She let go of me, marched furiously into the inner room, and bolted the door.

‘Phaedra,’ I called after her.

‘Later!’ she shouted back through the door. ‘When you’ve sobered up.’

I sat down by the fire and tried to think of something. But my options were limited. I tried putting myself in Aristophanes’ shoes. It was a safe bet that he would get a similar visit from Demeas if I wasn’t on Demeas’ front step first thing tomorrow morning clamouring to give evidence. Now, would Aristophanes be put off by the fact that I actually had been a witness, and could presumably give a more convincing account of that night’s activities as a result? Probably not, for the reason that Phaedra had given. Since he had been there, he could paint an equally evocative verbal picture, and since he was the accuser and I was the accused, the Athenian public would be bound to believe him. There is a theory that we have several different laws in Athens, each one dealing with a separate offence. This is not true. Whenever a man appears in the dock, nobody bothers to listen to the charge the official reads out. They know that the accused is really charged with being guilty, and that is one charge on which they will always convict. And in Athens, the sentence for being guilty is usually death by consumption of hemlock.

Which left only one alternative: flight. It is pathetically easy for an accused person to escape from Athens. This is not sheer fecklessness but deliberate policy, since it confirms the fugitive’s guilt without wasting valuable jury time which would be better employed in the more important task of convicting the innocent. It also means that the Public Confiscator can step in quickly to seize the criminal’s property; there is a lamentable tendency among people nowadays to spin out their trials in order to give their relatives time to get the bulk of their fortunes safely over the border.

So I could run for it, if I chose to do so. Where would I go? I would be faced with the horrible prospect of earning a living for myself, in Megara or Boeotia or somewhere like that. It’s all very well for the Alcibiadeses of this world to jump ship and escape; they can take their pick of major cities and royal palaces, all competing to provide shelter and a pension for life to a useful and well-informed traitor. When a nobody like you or me has to escape from his city, he has to take what work he can; and unless he has a valuable skill or craft, this is likely to mean something unpleasant, probably connected with the care and upkeep of pigs or the harvesting of arable produce. We Athenians are not liked in Greece as a whole; we find it hard to get work. Now my only skill is the composition of plays, and the market for what I produce is limited to one city. Beyond that, I would be lucky to get seasonal work picking olives or grapes, and that is not my idea of life. Things have changed, and I know I’m old-fashioned, but I still believe (and everybody thought so then) that a man who has to depend on another man for his living, whether you call him a servant or an employee or whatever, is in reality nothing more than a slave, taking orders and doing what he is told. A man without land is a man without freedom, and without freedom there is no point in being alive. Even when I was on the run in Sicily, I had freedom; that was all I had.

So I wasn’t going to run, and if I stayed I would have to inform on Aristophanes or die. Now I called on my soul for a little good advice, but that usually eloquent spirit pretended not to hear me, and I was on my own. After a lot of thought, I saw what I had to do, and it seemed to make a sort of sense.

There had to be a reason why the God had chosen to save me, out of all those men, in the plague and the battle. I knew what that reason was; to protect the son of Philip, for as long as I lived. Now the God had so arranged matters that I had to die in order to keep him alive; but that at least explained why I had survived the plague and the battle, and in an illogical world you tend to cling to whatever explanations you can find. Now we were talking about that clever fellow Euripides a moment ago. By and large I detest his work, which is brash and modern and clever for the sake of being clever; but there is one scene of his which I must confess I like.

It’s in his
Hercules,
and it comes at the point in the play where the hero, having just wiped out his family because the Goddess Hera has driven him mad in order to spite Zeus, is being comforted by his friend Theseus. Now Theseus says that Hercules has nothing to feel guilty about; the blame lies with the Gods, who made him do it. After all, says Theseus, the Gods have no moral code; they cheat and rob each other, even bind each other in chains. Hercules is furious at this, and turns on his friend. No, he says, I don’t believe that the Gods bind each other in chains, or are capable of any evil; they are pure and holy, and everything they do is for the best.

So, then; whatever Dionysus was up to with me, it was for the best. This took all the weight off my shoulders — isn’t that what Gods are for? It helped me to put aside my feelings of guilt at abandoning Phaedra and my son to a life of misery, for the duty a man owes to the Gods is greater than any mortal duty, and besides, the God would now have an obligation to look after Phaedra and Eutychides, for that is how the system works. I turned this solution over in my mind, and I could find no flaw in it; my only regret was that I had discovered my talent for working out the designs of the Gods too late in life to be able to make a name for myself as a Tragic poet.

As I sat there and stared into the fire, delighted with my own cleverness, Phaedra opened the door of the inner room.

‘Feeling better now?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘So you’ve changed your mind?’

‘No.’

‘I see.’ She breathed out sharply. ‘Because of the God?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re quite mad, you realise,’ she said. ‘I mean, your brain has actually gone.’

‘If you say so.’

She sat down beside me, and neither of us said anything for a while.

‘What did happen in Sicily?’ she said.

I frowned. ‘Is this quite the time for reminiscences?’ I asked. ‘Shouldn’t we be discussing how to get as much of my money out of the country as we can before they send in the Confiscator?’

‘That can wait,’ she said. ‘What did happen in Sicily?’ So I told her. It took a long time — well, you can understand why, if you’ve actually read this far and aren’t just skipping through looking for the speeches. I found it easy to tell her, now that I had reached my decision, and she listened carefully, not interrupting except when she couldn’t follow what I was saying. Occasionally I would stop, for some reason or other, and she would give me a hug and tell me to go on. It was then that I realised that I had made the right decision in accepting her, although it seemed that that decision would not turn out to be terribly important after all. When I told her about the walled orchard and the God, perhaps she understood, I don’t know. When I had finished, she sat quietly for a while, picking at the hem of her dress.

‘Well?’ I asked.

‘Well what?’

‘Does it make any difference, hearing all that stuff?’

She considered this for a moment. ‘It depends what you mean,’ she said.

‘That’s a strange answer.’

‘Yes, it makes a difference,’ she said. ‘No, it doesn’t make a difference where a difference would help. I still don’t understand why you can’t inform on Aristophanes.’

‘Weren’t you listening, then? Would you like me to go back over it?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘maybe you did see the God, or maybe you thought you did; the effect would be the same. Maybe you made yourself see the God.’

‘I don’t follow.’

Phaedra thought for a moment and then said, ‘Maybe you needed to see the God. You couldn’t understand what was going on. If you didn’t find an explanation for all that death and destruction you’d go mad or die. Like when you were a boy in the plague. Your soul needed some way to force you to save yourself when you’d given up and become resigned to dying; so it made you see the God. And in Sicily, it was pretty well the same thing. If you were going to survive when everyone else was dying, you had to see the God. You had to be different — special, even. There had to be a credible reason why the God should spare you and not the others. When you were a boy, that reason was that when you grew up, you knew you were going to be a great poet; that was reason enough for the God to want to save you when everyone else died. Then, in Sicily, you tried the same thing; only now you were a great poet, or as great as you were ever likely to get. It wouldn’t work so well. It worked well enough to get you out of the walled orchard, but it wasn’t going to sustain you across half of Sicily. And then Aristophanes turns up, and your inventive Athenian mind said yes, of course, that’s it. My reason for being alive is to look after the son of Philip.’