by Polly Samson
‘Sometimes it’s best not to poke the sleeping bear,’ she says and I tell her that my brother would agree. She’s easy to talk to, a good listener, and I find myself unloading my worries about Bobby, his moods and barely restrained violence.
‘He hasn’t been right in the head since we left London,’ I say, and immediately regret it because it seems disloyal.
Marianne thinks he may be depressed and promises to take me to see Kyria Stefania in the hills above Vlychos, who gathers medicinal herbs for miraculous teas that she says work wonders whenever Axel is blue.
I don’t mention that I want to be a writer because she doesn’t ask. It’s Jimmy she wants to know about so I tell her he’s here to see what he can do with his book idea and I boast about the poem he had published in Ambit.
‘Oh, bad luck that he’s a writer,’ she says with a small laugh.
‘What do you mean?’ I start to explain that Jimmy does other things, that he paints, that he’s one of those annoying people who excel at everything, but she continues:
‘Axel says it comes with the job: the woman always ends up in the book. Look at Charmian about to be exposed by whatever it is George has written. And Axel’s last novel is about me; in fact he ends up almost murdering “me” in a jealous rage. Can you imagine having to read stuff like that?’
There is not a trace of outrage while she tells me this; instead a soft glow has settled on her face.
‘And it’s so explicit that Aftenposten refused to review it, so you can guess what sort of things Axel has written. But that hasn’t stopped it being popular and now it’s being translated into all the other languages and being made into a film. And the teenage actress who plays me will be the first Norwegian to show her breasts on the movie-house screen so Axel’s expecting that to cause a scandal when it’s released …’
She rolls over and gently removes a large black ant from the juice bottle and sits up. ‘The director thought I should test for the part but Axel wouldn’t hear of it.’ She pulls a sad-funny face as she crosses her arms over her chest. ‘Axel says the girl who plays me in the film has much bigger ones than me.’
She sees my eyes settle on her scar and prods it with her finger. ‘This was a gift of our long journey from Oslo. My appendix almost burst. We were on a little dirt road out of Delphi, bump, bump, bump, my God, the pain, but somehow, in the middle of nowhere, Axel manifested two angels. He had a vision, did a detour and boom, there in his headlights, all in white, two sisters from a medical centre. Axel thinks the surgeon was most likely a horse butcher, he fainted when he cut me, but pfft, here I am. Quite honestly, I’m surprised Axel hasn’t made himself known to you, Erica. Sexy dark-haired girls with puppy-dog eyes have always been his thing.’
This last bit gives me quite a jolt. The American painter in the red shorts certainly fits the bill and it makes me giddy to think Marianne’s description might apply to me also. I widen my puppy-dog eyes at her and we both laugh to ease the tension and she asks me to excuse her suspicious mind.
‘I’m really not his type, you see. And not clever enough either. One year he drove me so crazy with one of his brain-box brunettes that I went to Athens and had my hair dyed black. And now I will tease him forever because that was when he asked me to marry him.’ She touches the wedding ring on her finger, as though checking it’s really there, twists it around.
‘I hope now we have our little baby I can be enough for him,’ she says and my heart wrenches when she tells me that she was so sad when Axel left Norway that she was unable to make milk for the baby. ‘He had to get out for tax reasons,’ she attempts to excuse him. But she knows what he’s like and everyone’s been a bit awkward around her since she got back to the island. ‘Axel’s pretty way out,’ she tells me with an exasperated sigh.
While she’s talking I’m convinced my pulse is racing but keep my face as immobile as I can manage. ‘I know how it is,’ I say. ‘I see Jimmy looking at other girls all the time.’
She snorts and dismisses me with one of her pffts.
‘We’re getting married,’ I tell her, and she shakes her head at me, makes her eyes merry.
‘You’re children. You should have fun in the playground while you’re young.’
We both stare out to sea for a while and I think about this, about how sure I am that for as long as I live the only man I’ll ever want is Jimmy Jones. Knowing this makes me sad for my mother and for Charmian having an affair and I wonder how it will be when everyone gets to read George’s bitter account of it, and if out of decency I’ll be able to resist. Then I look at Marianne sitting beside me and hope with all my heart that Patricia will soon leave the island.
We smile at each other and Marianne stands and pulls on a bright orange dress. It is made from some sort of floaty material and she can see I’m admiring it. ‘Silk. Axel bought it for me in Rome,’ she says, fastening a row of tiny buttons. ‘We were young and in love, on our way here in his little Beetle motor car. I think I must look good for him now I’m back with our baby, not all gameldags and mamsen.’
The sky is mother-of-pearl. She reaches to refasten a couple of pins in her glinting hair; the sun behind her turns the orange dress diaphanous, and I think Axel must need his head examining.
‘Tell me, what are they wearing in London. Is it all culottes like in the magazines?’
It feels like an age since I left. The buttoned-up wool coats, court shoes, girdles and splashed stockings of wet, grey pavements seem a lifetime away. ‘Edie’s better at knowing about fashion than me,’ I say. ‘None of my clothes even fit me any more. I was much fatter when I left London.’
‘Get Charmian to take you to meet Archonda, she’s a good seamstress,’ Marianne advises and, rolling her towel, flatters me by saying how good it’s been talking. She’s in a hurry now to get the baby’s milk, tells me she’s worried that if he cries Axel won’t be able to work.
‘Axel Joachim can nearly sit up all by himself, you know, a good strong boy just like his pappa. Axel thinks he looks like a Buddha. He calls him “the little man”.’
She scoops her few bits and pieces into her basket and I realise that I’ve learnt much about Axel but very little of Marianne herself.
‘Tell Charmian I’ll come with the baby as soon as I can. Or maybe one night you will be my babysitter?’
I am alone now. I roll down my swimsuit and spread myself on the warm ledge, waiting for the others to return from their swim. The sun sinks low over Dokos island, turning it black as a sleeping whale. There’s the simple thud of the gri-gri boats and behind my eyelids everything swims as orange as Marianne’s dress. Jimmy spins like a gold coin against the sky and falls to the water, scattering sun-dazzles as he surfaces, and I’m thinking, what does he see in me? I have no idea who I am. I seem to have hatched while no one was looking. And just for this moment, I am veiled in a golden glow of loveliness bestowed by a Scandinavian goddess who considers me a love rival.
I feel a great surge of affection the following morning when Marianne comes clacking down the hill in her wooden-soled sandals.
Jimmy and I are sitting outside Katsikas with the usual crowd awaiting fortune’s blessing. Bales of flattened sponges are being unloaded from wooden carts at the dock, the men sweating in the heat of the noonday sun. Some fishermen are stretching their nets at the water’s edge, the usual cats hanging around as we pick over morsels of octopus that Sofia brings to the table from the grill. I watch Marianne as she clops up the steps to the bakery, a large basket in the crook of her arm.
George is drinking brandy. He calls to one of the fishermen and raises his glass in greeting. The fisherman stands from darning his net and George offers him a drink. Panayiotis declines but shakes all the men’s hands when George introduces him. I remember that Panayiotis is the dancer. Like Nijinsky in his cups, Charmian once said. The tautness of the body beneath the shirt is at odds with his blackened teeth and the lines on his face. When he smiles the fisherman’s brown face creases into
a child’s drawing of the sun. He’s talking enthusiastically in Greek and George nods to show he understands. ‘Tha Thume, we’ll see,’ he says as Panayiotis wanders back to his nets and Charmian reaches across and covers George’s hand with her own. He looks sulky. ‘The next few nights he reckons their lamps will suck up the fish like magnets,’ he says. ‘Ah bloody hell, pass me a smoke.’
‘Time was George used to go out with the night boats,’ Charmian explains as he taps a cigarette from the packet.
‘The sea at night is very cold on the chest,’ George says, cigarette wagging. ‘Doctor Spoilsport in Athens advises against it.’
‘Do you think he’d take me? It’s kind of what I’m thinking about in my work,’ Jimmy asks, while as if to illustrate old Spoilsport’s point George succumbs to a bout of coughing.
‘You know,’ Jimmy says. ‘What lurks beneath the wine-dark sea …’
Charmian flicks him an indulgent smile. ‘I think they leave the more mythical creatures to the deep, but you’d see plenty of squid and octopus.’
George is putting away his handkerchief. He swallows his brandy with a grimace, draws again on the cigarette and growls at Jimmy.
‘There’s a good moon at the moment, if you fancy it. It might even make a man of you. Though a little squab like you might need to ready your guts for the sight of a man biting out an octopus’s eye.’
I find I can no longer chew the chunk in my mouth.
‘They all do it, you know, but give me that over the Turks who turn the poor thing inside out before bludgeoning it to death.’
Jimmy turns to me as I spit into my hand, his enthusiasm undampened. ‘You want to come fishing if they say yes?’
Charmian shakes her head. ‘Dear Erica and I will never know what it’s like beneath the moon in a little fishing boat.’ She isn’t looking her best. There are dark shadows beneath her eyes which, lacking in shine, are the dull green of bladderwrack. She lights a second cigarette from the one she’s about to stub out, takes a drag.
‘I’m afraid these Greek fishermen are far too superstitious to tolerate a woman’s participation; I think they’d rather sink their boats than allow someone aboard without the correct, um, tackle.’
Jimmy returns from the mole smiling and doing a thumbs-up. ‘If I understand the sign language, they’re planning on dynamiting the fish on Saturday night,’ he says and George scowls.
The ferry from Athens is approaching. I live in hope of a letter from my father, if simply to let me know he’s still alive. I’m not the only one with my fingers crossed under the table. Jimmy is waiting to hear if a couple of poems he’s submitted to Ambit have met with the editor’s approval. Patrick Greer expects a new rejection slip to add to his growing collection.
Göran and Leonard are both owed letters from their publishers. They try not to let the terminally unpublished Patrick overhear as they talk about how they each came to have a poetry collection in print. Leonard holds his komboloi dangling at his side. He flicks the amber beads with the dexterity of one born to it as he confesses that he started writing poetry as part of the courting process. He says he thought it was something all men did for women.
‘I must have looked extremely absurd because I wrote all my poems to ladies, thinking that was the way to approach them,’ he says. ‘Anyway, for some reason or other, I put them all together in a book and I was suddenly taken seriously as a poet, when all I was really was kind of a stud …’ Göran snorts as Leonard pauses for a beat. ‘Not a very successful one either, because successful ones don’t have to write poems to make girls like them.’
Marianne’s wooden sandals clack as she crosses the agora. She wears a pleated skirt of faded indigo cotton and a large wheel of bread protrudes from her basket. She waves at us as she enters the store.
‘Good. I guess this means Axel’s spending some time with his family,’ Charmian says. ‘Really, it’s too bloody cruel the way he carries on, especially now there’s a baby.’
Göran agrees, and departs for the post office with Patrick and George, all three convinced that standing there waiting will encourage Giorgios, the sadistic postmaster, to sort the mailbags less slowly. Charmian keeps her voice hushed though there’s little chance of Marianne overhearing what she’s saying from inside the shop.
Leonard pulls his chair closer as Charmian gossips. ‘A couple of years ago Axel came back from Norway, having been thoroughly lionised over some book or other, and he sent Marianne away from Hydra to make way for an intoxicating brunette he’d met at his publication party.
‘None of us could talk any sense into him, not even George. I tried to make him see that his star was only hanging that high because Marianne had put it there, creating a perfect universe for him to write the damn book without once having to worry about food or water or kerosene, or even carbons or typewriter ribbons. It made no difference to the crazy bastard that Marianne was distraught. He’d sent this new woman the train tickets and all he could do was count the days until her arrival.’
Charmian grins and takes another slug of beer, keeps the good bit to herself for a moment. ‘Actually, it was all rather delicious,’ she says, smiling, and it’s good to see a spark of light return to her eyes. ‘Axel’s new woman cashed in the tickets and was never heard of again. Meanwhile Marianne was getting over it all crewing for nice, handsome Sam Barclay on his pleasure yacht Stormie Seas. How could they not fall in love? Axel was stuck here convinced Sam would steal her forever. So, then it was the big gesture, down on bended knee and she, despite all wise counsel to the contrary, accepted. But all Axel cares about is Axel and, brilliant though he may be, he certainly doesn’t deserve to have that young woman tending to his every need in the way she does …’ Charmian downs the remains of her beer in one indignant gulp. Leonard swivels around to face the entrance to the grocery store as she goes on.
‘You know, she makes their little house so tremendously pretty. She finds these bits of lace and embroidery in the old market at Piraeus. There’s always dry wood neatly stacked for the fire, something yummy in the pot, ice for his drinks. And every morning, before he starts work, on his desk there’s a little sandwich and a fresh gardenia.’
Leonard scrapes back his chair and strides to the open door of the grocery. He sweeps his sixpenny cap from his head as Marianne moves into the light.
‘Would you like to join us?’ he says. ‘We’re sitting outside.’
Ten
I scribble a few words in my notebook. There’s still ink in my mother’s fountain pen. ‘I’m in such a good mood. Last night in bed Jimmy told me we should find a way to stay on Hydra forever and we talked about how our children will walk up the hill to the school by the well from a white-painted house all of our own and how Jimmy will learn to sail and have a little boat like Axel’s.’
Jimmy’s very brown and his hair has grown long and curls like a gypsy boy. I look at him and chew the pen more than I write with it. His own notebook is filling up with sea creatures; allegorical tales of love and war, he says. I can’t wait for him to read something to me. In his corner of the terrace Bobby breaks a yolk on a saucer and on a sheet of glass he arranges tiny pyramids of pigments and paints in egg tempera. Beasts with twining tentacles and slippery skin look out at the world with the sorrowful eyes of human saints.
It seems everyone but me is in the grip of creative fervour. Edie and Janey spend hours cloistered upstairs, sewing costumes for Trudy’s party, secretive as brides, an old boat awning, once red, now a sun-bleached chalky pink, falling from the ledge between them. Out on the terrace Jimmy decorates our linen sacks in flesh tones which he plans to fix with real fig leaves at the front, while behind he’s painted us realistic and rather shapely bare bottoms. Later on he wants us to gather vines and flowers for our headdresses.
Bobby takes a break from the easel. I join him to help sort through some stones that he’s been collecting from the beach. They are mostly no bigger than marbles. The greens are like jade and malachite and c
heese mould and lichen. There are reds in all shades of the butcher’s; sienna and bronze and grey with white marbling and bone-white and pure-black obsidian. The sea here is so clear that you can swim well out of your depth and still all these colours shine up at you like jewels through the water. Out here on the terrace they look dusty and incongruous, heaped up among the flaming geraniums. Bobby empties another pocketful at our feet. I’m willing to do anything to be close to him. This has always been our way.
Bobby and his ideas: it’s easy to get drawn in when you have none of your own. For as long as I can remember I’ve been his willing assistant, my pockets crammed with snail shells collected in the park, painting macaroni or cutting shapes from magazines, grinding pigments, boiling glue with zinc to prime his canvases.
We’re companionable, children once more. Jimmy’s moved across the terrace to the table to play poker with Marty, a six-foot-five Texan with an impressive drawl. We have batteries for the radio, which we keep tuned to the Armed Forces radio station from Athens. It’s mainly country and western but this pop song comes on that’s been in the charts and we know the words and sing along. At each chorus, Jimmy swings around to sing at me: ‘There will never be anyone else but you for me. Never ever be, just couldn’t be, anyone else but you.’ And I look at him there in the luminous air with his cards fanned to his chest and believe him.
Texas Marty’s another painter and seems to have more or less moved the great bulk of himself into Janey’s room, though she doesn’t consider him her boyfriend.
Bobby doesn’t exactly know what he plans to do with his growing collection of pebbles. ‘I’m trying to figure it out. They’re the fragments of an idea,’ he says in his preoccupied way. ‘You know how it is. I’m simply laying out my materials.’
This strikes a chord; ‘That’s how I feel,’ I blurt, and my sadness rushes in like a tide. ‘I’m like all these pieces and I don’t know what the whole is supposed to be …’ I flick a round black stone towards a pile of its friends.