Lindsay Clarke - The Return from Troy

‘I should have struck him,’ Telemachus said. ‘I should have tried to knock him down.’

‘And got a bloody nose for your pains? Believe you me, your father wouldn’t have seen much sense in that! That Antinous is twice your size, boy. And he’s old enough to know better. Just hold your water till the master gets home. He’ll teach him respect soon enough. Now on your way. Do as your grandfather says. Your mother’ll be looking for you, and there’s feasting tonight. So put a cheerful face on. And be grateful to the gods you’ve got a father to admire.’

Not for a long time had anyone on the island seen the lady Penelope look as blithe and beautiful as she did at the feast that night. True, there were a few moments when Laertes and Queen Anticleia first came into the hall wearing all their finery and with garlands in their hair, and the three of them embraced one another in a small squall of tears; but there was more relief and gratitude in their weeping than regret for all the lost years of the war, and those moments were quickly over. Soon the old king was to be seen tripping featly in the dance as though twice that number of years had fallen from his shoulders and his heart was young and strong again. All the old men of the court danced with him – Mentor first among them, stamping his feet and clapping his hands, while the women called out, laughing as the pace quickened. The eyes of Telemachus brightened with excitement, and once the hall grew quieter, I struck my lyre and opened my voice in the song of praise to Lord Odysseus which I had been harbouring for many weeks, waiting for just such an exalted time as this.

The hall must have fallen silent around me but I was conscious of no one and of nothing there. As though I had taken a deep draught of wine, the god came into me and in those rare moments I was left with no sense of my body’s boundaries; with no sense of my self at all, if truth were told, for I was as much an instrument in the god’s service as was the lyre in my hands. Nor was there any space left in which to be astonished that such a thing should have happened in the company of others, even though the god had only visited me before when I sang alone in the high places of the island, looking down across the empty acres of the sea. And so, for a time that might have been no time at all, but a kindly gesture of eternity towards my mortal life, I and the god and the song were one; and I knew that my fate had come upon me and I could never again be quite the same.

The applause rang loud and long when the song was ended. I saw tears in the eyes of Eurycleia, the old woman who had nursed Odysseus when he was a boy. Mentor and the other lords of the island were beaming with approval. For a time my heart swelled with the pride and pleasure of that moment. Then the god went out of me as swiftly as he had come, and I was left empty and disarrayed like a soiled garment when the hot night’s dance is over and done.

I saw Telemachus looking at me with a kind of wonder from where he sat, fondling the ears of the dog Argus, but I could not hold his gaze. Only later when, with her customary tact and grace, Lady Penelope sought me out, not merely to commend but also to counsel me, did I begin to recover my senses.

‘Your song was a good song, Phemius,’ she said quietly. ‘The Lord Odysseus will be proud to hear it on his return, and your father will be prouder still … if the sea-gods have spared him.’ Then she crouched down beside me, right there at the edge of the hearth, and studied me with such tender concern that I scarcely knew where to put myself. Stammering out an awkward phrase or two of thanks, I made to stand, but was stopped by the gentle pressure of her hand. ‘I see what has been given to you,’ she said, ‘but there is always a price to pay for such gifts. I think you should go alone from the hall soon and make an offering to the god. And you would be wise to ask for his mercy as well as his strength.’ Rising gracefully to her feet, she rested the tips of her fingers on my head and added, ‘I feel sure that this is what your father would tell you if he was here.’

I was still not much more than a boy in those days, and I see now that I had less understanding of her words than I believed at the time. But I had a youth’s impatience to be taken seriously, and that, above all else, was the gift that those words conferred on me. I had loved Penelope before, as all the island did, with warm affection and regard; now I was lost in adoration of her. And so, as I stood alone under the night sky, making my solemn offering to the god as she had bidden, I truly had nothing more to ask of life than the right to sit for the rest of my days at my lady’s feet in the great hall at Ithaca and serve her with my gift.

Telemachus and I quarrelled around that time. Four years divided us, so his behaviour sometimes felt petulant and childish to me. For his part, he took my lapdog devotion to his mother as a rebuke to his own, sometimes cruel efforts to detach himself from her care. I suppose he was trying to accelerate his growth into manhood in order to ready himself for his father’s return, but the effect was to turn him into a cross-grained prig whose fractious moods drove his mother close to distraction. One day our exchanges became so vehement that I told him I would have nothing more to do with him until he apologized both to his mother and to me. But he was too proud and intransigent for that, so Telemachus withdrew into a tight-lipped solitude on which only the patient old swineherd Eumaeus was sometimes permitted to intrude.

The loss, as it turned out, was as much mine as his. I tried for a time to get along with Antinous, Eurymachus and the other young men who hung about the taverns of the town, but they were all older than me, and too much idle comfort had made them sophisticated in ways which left me feeling uneasy and gauche. By contrast, there had always been a bond of kinship between Telemachus and myself; our tastes were similar, our imaginations were fired by the same stories, we were both happier listening to the chime of goat-bells in the hills or the sound of the wind working off the sea than to the prattle of the town. So I missed my friend in those difficult days. Probably more than he missed me.

Yet if Telemachus and I were despondent, so too, as the weeks dragged by, was everybody else. Even though we knew our hopes unreasonable, the feast had generated an expectation that Odysseus would come sailing home with his fleet within a matter of days. Old men whose sons had gone off to the war, and boys much younger than Telemachus, began to gather on the cliffs to see which of them would first spot the mastheads crossing the horizon. There were dawns when I woke filled with the irrational conviction that this was the day when the ships would make port and my father Terpis would be there at the prow, alive and well, singing his vessel ashore. So I would run all the way out to Crow Rock and stand staring out across the blue-green swell with the birds lurching on the wind above my head. But there was nothing to be seen through the haze where sea became sky and the great world lay beyond our own small clutch of islands.

Late one afternoon, when all the others had long since lost interest in the vigil, I heard a sound among the rocks behind me. I turned expecting to find nothing more than a sheep tugging at the rough grass, and saw Telemachus staring at me, his mouth tightly drawn, his eyes uncertain. We both remained silent, neither quite ready to make the first conciliatory move. The wind bustled about our ears. The concussions of a stiff swell against the cliff shook the air.

‘There’s been news,’ he said at last, as if to the stones.

‘Of the war, you mean? Of the fleet?’

‘Does any other kind matter these days?’