by Polly Samson
He snatches a look inside his handkerchief before stuffing it away and, with an exaggerated shrug and a curl of his lip, Jean-Claude returns his attention to the girls.
Men are sorting nets; a black cat snakes around Jimmy’s legs; boxes of fish are unloaded from boats; the chip-chip-chip of the stonemasons continues above our heads. George shakes his fist to the heavens.
‘They’ve been perfecting that clock tower for bloody years. I wish they’d stop now, most of us don’t need a constant reminder of the bloody earthquake.’
‘I read about that in Charmian’s book. I’d be petrified if the quayside started turning to jelly beneath my feet,’ I say. ‘You don’t think there’ll be another, do you, George?’
George drags deeply on his cigarette and twists me a grin. ‘Ah, don’t you worry your pretty head about that, Ricky; she exaggerated to discourage tourists. Our Charm has never been averse to turning a little tremor into a full-blown bloody earthquake.’ He turns to the others: ‘So you’re all here for painting in the beautiful light?’ and they nod.
‘I’m not,’ I say.
George cocks an eyebrow. ‘Well, what are you here for then, little Ricky of Bayswater?’ I feel the blood rush to my face while he waits with his cigarette stuck to his lip. Mum used to say that I was a pearl and the world my oyster.
‘Oh, Erica’s a striptease artiste.’ The drink seems to have gone straight to Jimmy’s head. George ignores him, continues his discomfiting stare.
When Mum handed me the money she told me she wanted me to follow my dreams. Out of nowhere I blurt it, the thing I’ve never said out loud, ‘I want to write books—’
George snorts. ‘You’d earn more as a stripper. I work fifteen hours a day, seven days a week and still my food’s on tick from the great Saint Nikos. He’s the same …’ He gestures at Patrick’s retreating back. ‘And Paddy is bloody good but the poor bastard can’t get a whiff of publishers’ ink. Go buy yourself an ostrich fan before it’s too late.’
I mock putting my hands over my ears and see that Edie is wearing her sulky face, telling Bobby: ‘Hey Daddy-o, I’m not planning on sleeping on the beach tonight.’ Bobby blames me with a look. Jimmy’s eyes have wandered to a slim woman in red shorts who is clambering aboard a caique, his hand absent-mindedly stroking the black cat.
I try again with George. ‘Did Charmian actually say if there was a house for us? I mean, that’s what she told me in her letter …’
But I’ve lost him. He’s ready for another bout with Jean-Claude, this time swivelling around and addressing himself to Janey and Edie: ‘Has Frenchie here told you yet about his mate Jean-Paul Sartre? Doesn’t usually take more than a minute …’
Janey and Edie look up at him like startled does as he warms to it, cigarette waving in his hand.
‘There was poor old Sartre just wanting a quiet café au lait while he chowed down on important questions of existentialism and phenomenology but, no, along comes Goldilocks here …’ George is now playing to the entire agora. He stands to make himself heard.
‘When will you ever stop this?’ Jean-Claude spins around and hisses to silence him. It’s then I notice his gold earring and have to stifle a giggle. Turns out I know this little Frenchman from the pages of Charmian’s book. He’s a figure of fun in a G-string of knotted paisley handkerchiefs, a scandalous seducer who eats raw eggs and sleeps on a goatskin rug. ‘A little curly dog on heat’ was how she described him. If I’m not mistaken, his flashy white teeth will turn out to be screw-ins. I long for him to smile.
But Jean-Claude’s eyes are levelled on his aggressor and he isn’t smiling. There is a long silence. The audience holds its breath. It seems even the stonemasons have put down their tools.
‘Ferme ta gueule, George; it’s you who is always boring everyone with your war reporting like you is some ’emingway. Pooft! For the ’undredth time. How many countries was it? How many stamps in your passport? Sixty-three, wasn’t it? But when was the last time you got further than Athens, eh? Alors!’ And with a contemptuous whistle he turns his back. Edie and Janey lean in as he audibly whispers: ‘So what if I fucked his wife …’
Four
Charmian Clift squints into the darkened room from a sunlit hatch in the ceiling, her face framed in a furious cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘Not now! Go away, go away, whoever you are …’ At the foot of the ladder a large brown and white dog is barking at me and simultaneously wagging its tail. ‘Max, stop that,’ she yells.
I step out from the shadows of the long, shuttered room. She gives a yelp and throws a hand to her mouth as I proffer my ratty old textbooks and a jar of peanut butter like they’re religious offerings.
‘Oh crikey, yes, of course. It’s Erica, isn’t it?’ she says as the dog slumps beside me to the floor, watching her with hungry eyes. ‘I’m ashamed to say I forgot you were coming and only got back myself this morning.’ Her voice is clear and bright but her skin has that over-scrubbed look like it’s been rinsed with tears.
‘I’m sorry, it’s all tremendously stressful here at the moment,’ she says. ‘Please forgive me for not meeting you.’
She swings herself through the hatch and perches on the top step to study me. A faded blue and white cotton skirt bunches around her legs and her feet are bare.
‘The bank manager in Poros was delayed by a funeral and made me miss my boat …’ she casts her eyes theatrically to the room behind her ‘… and now there’s hell to pay.’
She hugs her knees through the skirt. Her feet and ankles are long and slim, her hands as large as a man’s but graceful. Her mouth is as generous as I remember it, ‘Look at you all grown up! Oh my goodness, how fast time flies,’ but a missing or brown tooth spoils the glamour of her smile. She sees me notice and pulls her hair to conceal it.
Her face is free of make-up; sunlight stripes her strong bones, giving her the air of a warrior queen as she comes bounding down the wooden steps, ‘Here, let me get a good squiz at you,’ and grasps me at arm’s length.
‘Connie’s girl. I remember you as a shy little thing with a lisp. Do you still have one? Oh, sweetie, I can’t tell you how sad I am about your darling mum.’ Her eyes are green as bottle-glass and swimming with tears.
She smells of warm things: cinnamon and toast, campfires, polished oak, Nivea, tobacco. She rocks me as she did the first time we met and for a moment I’m back on the staircase in Bayswater, a frightened little girl finding comfort in the arms of a stranger. Then, just as now, I want to stay in the warmth of her embrace, simply breathing, but all too soon she releases me.
‘Crikey, Erica! Look at you! You’re the image of her.’
Her skirt is nipped in by a wide leather belt; it swirls from her waist as she moves. She throws open some shutters. Rafters are festooned with bunches of herbs and plaited strings of alliums; a dresser is stacked with blue and white china. The light comes dappled by the courtyard’s leafy trees and vines, and falls on unwashed pans at the sink and a family table with tales to tell of a clumsy breakfast. A three-legged cat eats from a frying pan. Flies swoon in spilt jam.
Charmian flaps her hands at the cat. ‘Tripodi, get down!’ She pulls her dark hair free of its shoelace.
She looks nervy, and so altered from the Charmian of Palace Court that I start to doubt my memories. She gives her hair a quick comb-through with her fingers.
‘Everyone got going early this morning. Zoe’s taken them for a hike to the beach at Limnioniza so George and I can make some sort of progress on this nightmare book of his,’ she tells me while Tripodi snakes around her bare legs.
‘Look, I brought everything I could find,’ I say, untying the string from the books and bathing in her smile. It had taken up most of her letter to me, her worries about the shortcomings of Shane and Martin’s school. Apparently Martin was wretched with the science teaching and, though they had Homer backwards and forwards, she felt they really ought to know their Shakespeare.
At the sight of the bo
oks she forgets her haste. She clears a space for them among the mess.
‘You darling, darling girl,’ she says as she swoops on my Latin primer.
She puts me in mind of a panther, the way she prowls and purrs, all proud posture and wide, high bones, her eyes slanting and well defined. I’ve brought meat to her cubs.
‘I found some of Bobby’s too. Here’s some of his O-level science ones and I apologise now for all my hopeless scribbles in the margins of The Tempest.’
Charmian wipes her eyes on her sleeve. It gives me an ache that her children’s education can reduce her to tears. Her children haven’t even cleared away their own breakfast things.
‘Oh, I am such a terrible sook!’ she says. ‘Anything can set me off.’
‘Charmian,’ I say. ‘Did you manage to find a house for us to rent?’
She appears not to have heard me as she springs on another book. ‘Oh, and Hoetzinger. Martin loves reading about the Middle Ages. It’s not so very different from the life we lead here, though I’m yet to see anyone’s head on a pike … and Bradley on Shakespearean tragedy; you have brought an oasis to a desert, Erica!’
Upstairs George is coughing and stomping.
‘Oh, but I can’t even offer you a coffee. I really must get back to the work. George has been finding this book so terribly impossible and now you’ve come across us in the middle of a breakthrough.’ She plants the briskest of kisses on my cheeks.
‘About the house,’ I try to insist, panic rising.
‘It’s tough on him that to write this book well means revisiting the trauma of his first nervous breakdown, so I’m sorry but we are rather governed by his flow.’
‘But the house?’ Is it rude to keep interrupting while she’s telling me about George’s book? Probably.
‘It’s set against a nightmare of a journey George made as a war correspondent in China. Now he’s stuck and I have to make him relive it, every heartbreaking mile of the famine road to Liuchow, and force him back among the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were all starving or dead and rotting where they’d fallen. Can you imagine dredging that up?’
‘It must be very depressing for you too.’
She frowns distractedly towards the hatch and shakes her head.
‘You’ve no idea. Sometimes I’m stamping my foot while he suffers, because I’m not getting on with my own work at all and my words will insist on bubbling up. But on a day like today my own book seems so trifling by comparison. If there’s a good novel from George it may save us. So every day I sit on a step beside him and painfully squeeze what he needs me to squeeze out of him until it’s down on paper. It’s better done before he hits the grog so please forgive me if I fly now.’
That smile, the house, the dog, the creative disarray; it all makes me swoon. There are pictures, icons, a bone-handled knife mounted above the door. Icarus flies; admirals line up along the wall.
I notice a familiar etching hanging from a nail above the piled-up sink. ‘That’s Rembrandt,’ I say. ‘Mum has the same one. The fat oriental merchant. Once she made me a hat like his, with a feather and a jewel …’
Charmian stops in her tracks. ‘Oh yes, it’s lovely, isn’t it? I’m glad Connie got to keep hers. Joel sweetly bought one for me when he bought hers—’
Her hand flies to her mouth. The space between us vibrates. I reach for the back of a chair. ‘Who is Joel?’
She wags a finger at the fat merchant.
‘I’m getting carried away because half my mind is upstairs with George’s book. I mean, of course, I bought it for her; it was from a place near the British Museum. I bought one for each of my women friends; this edition had somehow been nicked on the plate-mark so they’re worthless to a collector.’ Colour has rushed to her cheeks. ‘But, you know what? If a woman has to be stuck in the kitchen, it might as well be with a Rembrandt on the wall.’
She turns away and I follow her across the flagstones, across bright woven rugs. She throws open another set of shutters. In one corner a gilded birdcage spins from the ceiling, beneath it a covered well. Charmian perches on the lid. The birdcage is studded with glass jewels.
‘No birds, just the cage,’ she says, and I can see her thoughts gather as she fiddles with her rolled-up sleeves. The shirt is washed thin, white cotton, possibly one of his. Her shoulders are formed from noble bones and maybe that’s what makes her one of those women your eyes can’t help but drink in. Like Mum.
‘Was Joel her lover?’ I try to make it sound light but she’s not fooled, only shakes her head. Upstairs George is pacing up and down. I tell her about the money Mum left me, about the car, but Charmian simply raises an arched brow, says: ‘How very intriguing.’
‘George tells me he found you rooms at the Poseidon Hotel last night,’ she says.
I nod, blinking back tears, appalled at how powerfully I want her to hold me.
The birdcage throws colourful patterns to the wall, plants reach towards her from their pots, her skirt swishes as I trail her back to the kitchen.
‘It’s Easter Friday now, which is, you know, quite a thing here … so I’m sorry but I probably won’t get your keys until Christ has arisen. But it’s a nice house and not too many steps up from the port.’
I tell her it’s OK to wait though really I’m dreading Bobby. He’s already threatened to make me pay for everyone’s rooms at the Poseidon.
Charmian is saying, ‘You’ll have fun with the festival,’ but George is hollering, and she bolts again for the ladder. ‘I’m sorry. Inspiration is a flighty mistress.’
She turns with her foot on the first step, a hand to her heart. ‘And really, Erica, thank you for the books.’
I shrug, helplessly overcome with an impulse to do the washing-up. Something cracks. She swoops and throws her arms around me, pats my shoulder while I sniff back tears. Says: ‘Hell, you’re only a girl. Connie’s little pearl. You know that’s what she wanted to call you? She told me that your dad insisted on Erica …’
I am failing with words, failing not to cry; I manage only to wail about how beastly Bobby is being to me. I’ve made her shirt wet with my tears. She fetches me a soft cloth and a glass of water from an earthenware jug but as I blot my face and gulp at the water George again roars her name.
‘We’ve only got daylight to work in before Zoe gets back with the kids, but it’s Epitaphios tonight so we’ll see you at Kamini. It’s a lovely bay and you can walk with the procession from the village. It’ll be magical, I promise you, bring candles. Come here for dinner later,’ she says, her foot to the step. ‘But right now I have to wring some more words out of the poor blighter up there.’
I hear them talking as I turn to leave and she calls down, ‘Look, George says there’s no need for you to waste money on the hotel, you can doss up here for a couple of nights.’
‘There’s five of us,’ I call back.
‘That’s OK. It’s only beans and greens, it’ll stretch, and if you’ve got sleeping bags you can line up on the terrace in your cocoons like cosy pupae. It won’t be the first time.’
‘No, nor the last,’ George barks. ‘It’s like a bloody youth hostel round here.’
‘If you need anything before then, help yourself in the kitchen,’ she says.
Something crashes to the floor and she yelps. I roll up my sleeves and look around for soap to wash the dishes.
Five
George and Charmian’s children are pretty free-range, tumbling in and out with bread they’ve stolen from taverna tables. I was away at school and barely ever met them as tots in London and now Martin is a gangling twelve-year-old with a nervous habit of squinting his eyes when he speaks and Shane’s natural expression makes her look like she’s thinking bad thoughts about you from behind her flaxen fringe. She’s only ten but already she dresses like her mother, with her waist cinched in and a swing to her hips. She and Charmian row because she refuses to speak anything but Greek while they are struggling to encourage their youngest, four-year-
old Jason, or ‘Booli’ as he’s known, to learn English. Shane boils with mischief while Charmian cooks and breaks up fights between the older two that turn swiftly physical, the angelic Booli wiping his face in her skirts, babbling in Greek. Pans boil over, gas bottles run out, Tripodi the three-legged cat comes in dragging a rat that isn’t quite dead, and we all heap our bowls from dishes that Charmian brings to the table.
Very few islanders speak anything but their own language, which comes as a shock, as does wine from the barrel cheaper than lemonade, and the three warning flicks of the lights at the port each night before the island is plunged into darkness. There are no cars, not even bicycles; the streets are too precipitous for wheels.
‘On this island the sea stands in for the grave during Epitaphios, because that is where their men have been buried,’ Charmian explains as we gather at the harbour of Kamini among the candled masses on Good Friday. The priests come intoning from the mountains and the catafalque, glittering with icons, is carried into the water on the shoulders of six handsome pall-bearers. Women and children step forward, set lone candles for their drowned loved ones into the sand at the water’s edge. There are shiny red eggs in the shop, displays of palm leaves and lilies from Athens. The following night there is so much incense at the Easter Mass that the priests keep coughing, which gives Edie and Janey the giggles. I step away from them, find myself at Charmian’s side. She reaches for my hand and squeezes it. The heat from the candles and incense burners is immense, the priests chanting, the congregation swaying as though in a trance. I’m so swept up by it all I almost kiss the icon.
‘Christos Anesti, Christos Anesti.’ George is so roaring drunk by the time Christ has arisen that Jimmy and Bobby have to carry him up the stairs to his bed.
The smell of the feast is in the air as we leave George sleeping off his hangover. We pass lambs and goats turning on spits in the streets, and through the clanging bells take possession of a house up the hill with neither electricity nor running water. The freedom to do as we please is going to be harder work than we anticipated. Charmian has kept the Easter candle burning all the way up from her house and uses it to mark a sooty cross beneath our front door.