A Theatre for Dreamers

by Polly Samson

  Beneath the pines Angela wears the scowl of an unwilling captive. She sits on a log, cajoling her smallest girl who is refusing to join Daddy and her siblings at the beach. It’s been like this since the boat, little Mari-mou wanting only her mother.

  Ivar scoots past with Lena in pursuit, shouting, trying to dodge her through the low branches. She catches him and snatches the crown from his head and comes laughing and running back with it. Mariora is pulling her mother’s hand; she wants to collect pine cones. Lena is reaching up to crown Jimmy. I’m glad to see that he’s still wearing his shorts. I wish she wouldn’t press herself against him like that.

  This is the first chance I’ve had to ask Angela about Marianne. She’s been stuck at the front of the boat and buried in sleeping children the whole way over. ‘So, Marianne’s with Axel in Athens …?’

  Angela nods. ‘Patricia’s had an accident,’ she says as Jimmy bounds over with a watermelon in one hand and a cleaver in the other like they’re a sceptre and chalice, the feather crown askew. He squats and places the melon at his feet.

  ‘I’ve no idea why Marianne has to go running to Axel, but there it is. She got a telegram from him begging her to come because Patricia is in hospital,’ Angela is saying as Jimmy brings down the blade and splits the melon.

  He drops the cleaver. ‘What? Has something happened to Pat?’

  ‘She had a crash in Axel’s car. It’s very serious,’ Angela says, though the child is rearing and making it difficult. ‘They say all her bones are broken and her lungs are bleeding.’

  The colour is leeching from Jimmy’s face. ‘Oh God, no. Poor Pat. Is she going to be OK?’

  Angela shrugs. ‘Police Chief Manolis has heard talk of a prosecution. Everyone wants to know if the poor lamb will pull through, but all the news is bound up in yards of red tape to do with Marianne’s name being on the car’s papers because Axel was banned from driving, and the Norwegian consulate is involved – a big mess, so of course Axel can’t cope at all and Marianne has flown in like the angel she is. No one seems to know if Patricia will live or die,’ she manages before the little girl pulls her away.

  ‘Oh, good God. Poor Pat,’ Jimmy says again, and it’s unnerving to witness his shoulders heaving as he grips his feather-crowned head in his hands.

  Lena is crouching on a mat showing the two Dutch girls how to whittle a flute and, though Robyn wants to join them, Bim has dragged her off like some sort of caveman and is currently butchering her in one of the tents; at least that’s how it sounds to the rest of us.

  Albin starts fiddling with the radio but the tinny noise does little to drown it out so we all start singing.

  There’s a game of ball, the Scandinavians against the rest of the world, that involves many dunkings – especially, it seems, of Francine. We’re all ravenous by the time Göran has finished with the grouper fish he’s been sousing with lemon and herbs, olive oil, salt and pepper. The fire is lit on the beach, the chunks of fish cooked on spears in the flames and eaten on Anastasia’s good bread with pickled cucumbers. We drink chalky-white ouzo with water and Ivar plays some Woody Guthrie songs on his guitar.

  The sound of the boat breaks a silence that descended on the camp with the amber hour as we sat in a circle and Lena played her flute to the owls.

  Manos hurries us aboard. A squall has come in and the sea has grown choppy. We all lie on the mats at the front and ride it like a rodeo and fall against each other, grabbing for the rail and clinging as the waves slap the boat and cover us in blankets of foam.

  Amethyst clouds gather across the horizon and Francine cavorts at the prow, attempting to keep Charlie’s billowing shirt gathered around her. I silently congratulate myself that I haven’t allowed such aphrodisiac nakedness to ruin a perfect day, though I’ve been tortured by her splashing through the shallows with Jimmy.

  Manos doesn’t want to take the boat around to the port so we pile out at Kamini fishing harbour. Charlie is in a great hurry to walk Francine back to her guesthouse. The rest of us linger while Angelika herds the children and carries the babies up the hill. There’s music at the taverna, the golden glow of lamps through its windows, its yellow awnings flapping, summoning us inside.

  Twenty

  ‘Her thumb had to be amputated, gangrene had set in,’ Marianne is saying as Charmian leans against the counter beside her smoking a cigarette and I bounce Axel Joachim on my knees, singing: ‘This is the way the lady rides, trit-trot, trit-trot, trit-trot, trit-trot …’

  Marianne has been back from Athens a week but this is the first we’ve seen of her and Charmian is lapping up the details. Marianne looks surprisingly cheerful as she stands over the chopping board preparing a sandwich while a faded fisherman’s smock that skims the top of her golden thighs looks like something from Queen magazine or Vogue.

  She turns to us and raises a thumb. ‘Of course, it is her right hand: the thumb she uses for painting,’ she says. She holds an imaginary paintbrush and I can’t be certain she isn’t smirking as she mimes making tiny and precise pointillist dots on her canvas of air.

  ‘Higgledy-ho, higgledy-hi, and …’ Axel Joachim squeals as I down him into the ditch.

  ‘Sshhh, sshhh, not so noisy please, Erica,’ Marianne pleads, pointing to the ceiling. ‘Leonard says he doesn’t mind if the baby cries but I think he can work better if we don’t make too much distraction, huh?’

  Charmian tuts and reaches to take the baby from me, nestles him to her hip. I’m shocked about the gangrene. Marianne says Patricia’s lucky she lost only the one thumb.

  The cat lies asleep on the table, curled around the I Ching which has been left open and face down beside a page of neatly drawn hexagrams. I lift a glass jar to smell a posy of violets that is tied with a green ribbon.

  ‘Leonard has been so kind but he’s lost enough writing time helping with Barnet while I’ve been away,’ Marianne says.

  Charmian snorts and gives the baby a squeeze. ‘Oh, I see, we’re Barnet now, are we?’ and she hands him a discarded crust to chew on.

  ‘I must say he did tremendously well, despite running out of nappies and having to resort to some rather fine-looking Norwegian damask,’ Charmian says. ‘Has he confessed that he raided the chest?’

  ‘Ah yes, Mamma’s wedding gifts to Axel and me. Silver sauce boats and salmon platters, monogrammed napkins; whatever was she thinking?’ Marianne says, flattening the slices of bread with a rolling pin. She lifts a pat of butter from the cool-water depths of its earthenware jar. ‘I need to tempt him. He’s been working on his novel in twenty-four-hour shifts since I got back. I’m worried that he doesn’t eat,’ and fills the buttered bread with slices of salted beef, tomatoes and cornichons.

  ‘That might be because of the pills he’s getting from the pharmacy,’ I pipe up, longing to sound knowledgeable and join in.

  She gives me a worried glance, nips some rosettes of new leaves from a pot of basil. ‘Whatever it takes to get this book into the hands of a publisher. He says he needs to be purged of the words before he can relax.’ She scatters the basil over the sandwich.

  ‘I know the feeling,’ Charmian says.

  Marianne adds a sprinkling of crushed pink peppercorns. ‘Axel’s the same. In agony! Raving about getting his novel to Capellen the whole time he’s sitting there at Patricia’s bedside. It was the same when I had my operation. He’s got his typewriter across his knees, banging away at it like a crazy man, and he forgets to drip the disinfectant over the bandages. Not eating. Really, I had no choice but to help out,’ she says, taking a chunk of ice from the box and, ignoring Charmian’s sarcastic snort, hacking some pieces and plinking them into a jug.

  ‘Ah, where would these male writers be without their ministering angels?’ Charmian says.

  Marianne settles an unmistakably longing glance at the stairs. ‘Maybe my mother is right and I should be searching for a bourgeois man in the suburbs of Oslo, but this is what’s familiar to me.’ She starts tidying her hair and excuses
herself to take the sandwich and iced lemon tea up to Leonard.

  Charmian sighs and huffs. ‘She’s so happy to serve, so content to sit at the poet’s feet when she should be at the table.’ She settles the baby to play on his mat. ‘Really, Erica, I could despair of our sex,’ she says, lighting a cigarette. ‘Christ, but sometimes I think who am I to talk? It’s so tiring, all the kicking and screaming and demanding George do his share, arguing all the bloody time.’ She takes a hungry drag on the cigarette. ‘I sit on that step by his writing table, urging him on, and often I’m thinking ugly thoughts because my own work can only get done in the margins of his. I’m sorry, darling, I’m ranting. Maybe I’m jealous and wish that the simple pleasures of domestic harmony were enough for me too.’

  She smokes some more. She isn’t finished. ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say to you, Erica, is that you should be very cautious of pinning all your dreams to a bloke, however talented and marvellous he may be.’

  I’m glad she can’t see inside my head. I’m lost in a daydream where it’s me taking a sandwich to Jimmy in an ordered house not unlike this one, with pretty pots and herbs with sunlit leaves on the windowsill. It’s Cato on the table and our baby who lies kicking his legs and gurgling on the mat. I snap myself back.

  ‘I hope Patricia won’t be crippled,’ I say.

  I think of that day in Athens, of Patricia bending to Marianne’s flowers discarded on the floor, graceful and slim as a stem. Marianne is convinced that she was driving that fast because she’d had a row with Axel. It was dawn, around the corner a fruit-seller on his way to market with donkey cart, the wrong side of the road. The car was barely damaged when, swerving to avoid him, she crashed into the bridge. Patricia was less lucky. She had been flung over the bonnet and on to the rocky bed of a dry river below, breaking her hips and collarbone, her ribcage, puncturing a lung. Her face was a mess, her teeth smashed, her top lip torn clean away, infection had taken that precious painting thumb; it was a miracle she survived.

  Charmian is wreathed in irritable smoke. ‘What I want to know is why Marianne went there at all. Was it simply because Axel needed her to sign the papers to do with the car? Or was she hoping for something else? What I don’t believe is this Florence Nightingale bullshit. Do you really think that she’s been there a week to help Axel with the nursing? What, of her rival? And how must poor Patricia have felt every time she swam into consciousness to find Marianne dabbing at her wounds? He has plenty of friends in Athens, Else and Per to name but two, he could have called on any of them for such things …’

  She stops talking as Marianne returns. Marianne pours us some wine, puts out a plate of feta and olives. She clears away the I Ching from the table but keeps it open at the page to show us hexagram 19.

  ‘This is Leonard’s. It’s very clear. He must put in the hours now if there’s to be a fruitful harvest. Spring doesn’t last forever, the work needs to be done before there is a reversal in the eighth month.’

  Charmian smiles indulgently at her until, blushing, she realises she’s lost us and changes the subject.

  She gives Charmian an impish grin. ‘Anyway, never mind about Leonard and me, what is it I hear about you and Corso?’

  ‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ Charmian says.

  ‘Birds have beaks to sing with, you know.’ Marianne becomes a little sprite when she teases, so pretty it might hurt your eyes.

  Charmian chuckles. ‘Marianne, really! He was only here a few days. I went for one midnight dip. You’re as bad as the rest of them!’

  Twenty-One

  The port throbs with tourists and the street cats grow fat. The cicadas are busy breaking a hundred hearts with their songs. We pull our mattresses out to the terrace and sleep beneath the stars, wake with the sun and Cato sleeking in from a night’s hunting to pat at my face with an imperious paw. We pick over platters of fish at taverna tables, or drift from courtyard to courtyard with our records and poems, or take bottles of beer and eat bread and meatballs beneath the tumbling vines of the outdoor cinema in Economou Street that shows Greek films with English subtitles.

  We have all become leaner, our legs muscled from the steps, Bobby and Jimmy’s shoulders almost amphibian from swimming. Sometimes we take a bag of peaches and a flask of coffee to the cave and grab a dip before the port is fully awake, other times we swim late at night and lie naked between the moon and the tide on the still-warm rocks.

  Jimmy works best in the relatively cooler hours of the evening and we go out late to the starlight bar Xenomania high up on the cliffs above the windmill where they play old-fashioned jazz records and an arrangement of low tables and cushioned benches favours comfortable slouching.

  Jimmy and I wait a moment outside to catch our breath. There’s silver laughter, swooping familiar voices. We drift and yet always run into the same people, as though the foreign colony moves with a force as mysterious as the murmuration of starlings. The mountain sheers up behind Xenomania black as the sky. It looks less like a bar and more a lit stage in a dark auditorium, two shadowed trees at the entrance its proscenium arch. George’s words reach us rapid as gunfire, a splatter-attack of laughter and coughing, and Charmian’s jangled: ‘Darling, please, stop there. Let’s not be disagreeable on your birthday!’

  We go straight away to wish him many happy returns. I could kick myself for not making a card. Only yesterday I helped Booli and Shane with the wrapping of a wind chime.

  He’s on growling bad form, despite Nancy Greer, décolletage jellying from cabbage-green ruffles, handing him the last slice from a cherry cake she’s baked especially for him.

  He stuffs his mouth with the cake, speaks in a rain of crumbs and coughing. ‘Yeah well, forty-bloody-eight and what have I got to bloody show for it? Up to my arsehole in debt, oh brother, yes. Look at me here, the great success. Marooned on this rock without the fare out, chained to the bloody typewriter by all the people who depend on me, like some old donkey to the millstone.’ He is set to go on but Charmian stops him by throwing her cigarette packet at his head.

  ‘Oh do stop feeling so sorry for yourself, George,’ she snaps. ‘Though if we’re to tarry with so many sorrows let’s at least get another bottle to drown them in.’ She has a locked sort of smile that comes with a great blinking-back of tears. George’s eyes are narrowing as he dabs at his mouth and she flinches as he takes a breath, the menace so palpable that Jimmy springs between them.

  ‘Man, it seems to me you’ve got plenty of good stuff going on.’

  George grabs Jimmy by the arm, thrusts his ravaged old face at him. ‘This is what it looks like, Writer Boy. You sure you want this, eh?’

  Patrick Greer is slumped at the far end of the table, birthday-cake crumbs in his beard. George is as drunk as I’ve ever seen him. He shoves Jimmy towards Patrick with school-bully force.

  ‘Buy this Irishman a drink and he’ll give you some bloody good advice about trying to live by the pen on this godforsaken rock.’

  Patrick obediently waves a sheaf of papers in his hands, ‘Rejection slips, all of them,’ and adds with a melodramatic burr, ‘I keep digging away but where are my nine rows of beans? I should just throw in the shovel and go back to teaching.’ He’s still slurring away as we retreat, using Trudy, who comes in a chattering group with Demetri, as an excuse to escape.

  Demetri is rattling off something in excitable Greek to the cook, Alexeos. Carolyn and Robyn nod as though they understand every word. Bim bounds over to George, inciting another stinging attack, this time of some pages Bim has recently given him to read.

  ‘You spend more time with your hands in girls’ panties than you do with them at your typewriter and it bloody well shows,’ George says, and Charmian begs him to stop being such an oaf. Luckily Robyn is out of earshot and doesn’t hear this assessment of her husband’s ability, but now she’s coming back, trailing Demetri and Carolyn from the kitchen where they’ve been inspecting the remains of Alexeos’s catch.

  Robyn
looks especially prissy tonight, her myopic helplessness magnified by the librarian glasses. Bim has enough vim and vigour for both of them, though even he is deflated by George. Luckily, Alexeos is on their tail with two jugs of wine and keen that we should all try the spider crab.

  Trudy throws her hands to her mouth. Her formerly lustrous red hair hasn’t seen a hairbrush in months. She’s flopped down beside me, fanning her face with the menu. ‘What I’d give for a bottle of Coca-Cola and no rotten mosquitoes,’ she says and she looks so washed out it’s hard to remember the Titian beauty of the springtime who skipped across the rocks pursued by a cloven-hoofed Jean-Claude Maurice.

  Behind me Bim is pumping Charmian for news of Patricia. She tells him Patricia is waiting to be flown home to the States to be put back together. ‘Whereas Axel’s Karmann Ghia needs only a new bumper …’ she says while Trudy goes on about the island’s culinary deprivations, unzipping her shorts and complaining that the olive oil is making her fat.

  ‘… Meanwhile Marianne’s had a letter from Axel, a cruel and heartless letter. He makes it very clear that he will be following Patricia to the hospital in Chicago. Says he’ll wait a lifetime for her.’

  I turn away from Trudy, catch Bim leaning towards Charmian with his elbow to his knee. He uses the heft of his shoulder to block George who keeps trying to interrupt.

  ‘Does Axel know that Leonard’s moved right in on his wife? I mean, those tennis sneakers were under Axel’s desk almost before he’d hoisted a sail,’ Bim says.

  ‘It’s true that I don’t hear much chattering of the keys coming from Leonard’s own digs when I walk past these days. But Axel doesn’t have the capacity to either wonder or care. He’s moved on. That’s what’s so hurtful. All he can say to Marianne is that …’ here Charmian stops to take a swig from the wine that Bim pours, screws up her eyes and says in an approximation of Axel’s accented voice ‘… my heart bleeds for you, my little wife; I feel for you and suffer with you and the thought of little Axel growing up without me gnaws at me.’