A Theatre for Dreamers

by Polly Samson

  Sometimes the girl is wild. It’s like she stores it all up for the evenings she gets a babysitter and joins us at Xenomania or down on the port. She and Leonard never stop touching; little things: his hands cup her heels when she’s worn out from dancing, his fingertips leaf through her hair, he plants kisses on her brow, the tip of her nose. His reverence borders on the religious when he’s looking at her. At Lagoudera she whirls across the floor and he watches with a great grin on his face like he’s found his own salvation in her happiness. Her face gives him more pleasure than any face he’s seen before, he says. He told me once that he sits in the moonlight and watches her sleep.

  ‘Axel wants nothing but for Patricia to be patched up and returned to him. He’s agreed to give Marianne the house in exchange for a divorce,’ I say, pleased that our island dramas interest Didy enough to want to know more.

  Twenty-Five

  Didy and I meet again at ouzo hour, when a milkiness hazes the horizon. I’ve come straight from the beach beneath the ruined castello. The sea spangles silver, mauve and tangerine as swimmers take their evening plunges from the rocks at Avlaki and Spilia. Whoops fill the air as a clattering of kids race donkeys through the port, scattering cats and pigeons and Captain Yiannis’s carefully constructed pyramid of oranges, some of which roll into the sea. The cats seem to have multiplied overnight. Didy is surrounded by the most pitiful crew: torn ears, missing eyes, scabrous maws mewling with whiskers a-droop, the very experts at sniffing out a soft heart. She sits with her legs graciously crossed. ‘A ladies’ salon’ is what she called it, and as I join them I feel clumsy and salt-crusted in my swimsuit and patched shorts.

  Didy looks immaculate, despite many difficulties with pumping the water and the recalcitrant seep-away up at Spiti Heidsieck, and beside her is an equally neat young woman with a satin hairband who I guess to be the daughter from her first marriage.

  ‘Annabel Asquith,’ the girl confirms in her bored English voice as she holds out her hand. Tassos provides forks with the cakes – ‘how delightfully bourgeois,’ says Charmian, who has made an effort with coral lipstick and her hair pinned beneath her widest-brimmed hat. Her left wrist is cuffed by a bracelet as chunky as Didy’s, but where Didy’s is gold and tinkling with charms, hers is heavy bronze.

  ‘It’s part of a Tibetan prayer wheel that was given with great ceremony to my dashing husband, by the Dalai Lama himself,’ she says when Didy asks. She says that she hopes their friend Jane hasn’t only gossiped about their poverty and rows.

  ‘Sixty-four countries, wars, famine; he stomached the lot and told the world about it. By the time he married me he had double, treble the readership of any other correspondent in the whole of Australia,’ she says, turning the Tibetan symbols around her wrist. She wants Didy to know the unbroken George: ‘He met Nehru, Churchill, Mao and walked beneath a black umbrella with Gandhi by the River Ganges.’

  Annabel retreats behind dark glasses while Charmian boasts and, having shaken my hand, calls me ‘cutie’ as one might a child.

  I’m glad I’ve got my big, fat book with me. I’ve finally got around to the Simone de Beauvoir and I see both older women smile as I lay Charmian’s copy of The Second Sex on the table.

  ‘Since Jimmy’s been gone I’ve had more time,’ I say and to Charmian: ‘Now I wish I’d hit him over the head with it. I should have read it when you first lent it to me.’ It’s dog-eared and tatty, I’ve been carrying it around for so long.

  Charmian picks it up and opens it. ‘Let’s see what the library angel has to offer,’ she says and stabs her finger at the open page. ‘I’m not much into prophecy but I often find de Beauvoir comes up with the goods.’ She starts to read aloud where her finger points: ‘“No one is more arrogant towards women, more aggressive and more disdainful, than a man anxious about his own virility …”’ falters and snaps the book shut, hides behind her hands. ‘Oh what a sook I am,’ she says and dabs at her eyes. ‘So tremendously silly to blub. Whatever must you think of me?’

  Didy shoos Annabel to track down her siblings, requests more ouzo, including one for me, which is reassuring as I’m not sure if she meant me to buzz away too. Oh God, what with me and now Charmian, Didy will think we’re all ready for the nuthouse with all this crying.

  ‘I should be celebrating: George has at long last finished his torturous novel and it leaves me free, maybe even to do a little of my own writing, but unlike de Beauvoir my freedom comes at a price,’ Charmian says, sniffing and snatching the new ouzo from Tassos’s tray and downing it before it touches the table.

  Didy orders her another. Not the best idea, in my opinion.

  ‘I’d be fibbing if I told you Jane hasn’t mentioned something of your difficulties. It’s what makes her such a good storyteller, she can’t stop herself …’ Didy is saying while Charmian blots her eyes and blows her nose.

  ‘Sometimes I think it would be easier if I didn’t have such strong urges,’ Charmian says, adding with a darting smile, ‘To write, I mean …’ Her hand shoots to the side of her mouth with the missing tooth.

  ‘I don’t know how you manage any of it,’ Didy says. ‘But give in to your urges because your books are marvellous.’

  Charmian reaches for a cigarette. ‘It would be so much more restful, and much better for George, if I were to surrender to living more “Greekly”, as I’ve come to think of it, like Marianne, or Carolyn or Robyn or any one of these lovely young women who are happy to serve their brilliant menfolk. I envy their basking in reflected glories, the blind eyes they turn when the genius strays, in a way that I never could with George.’ She empties her glass and points to the book on the table. ‘I think Simone de Beauvoir is interesting on women like Marianne and the rest of them. Doesn’t she say that the freest women in all Ancient Greece were the hetaeras? They may have been courtesans but it was the lower-ranking dicteriads and auletrides who took the brunt of the fucking while the hetaeras’ independence, culture and spirit made them near equals.’

  I gesture to Tassos, a silent plea not to bring her more ouzo.

  ‘Actually, Marianne was thoroughly miserable when I saw her earlier today,’ I say, as soon as she pauses to light her cigarette.

  ‘Well, it can’t be very pleasant the way Axel refuses to bond with the boy …’

  I shake my head. For once it’s not Axel.

  ‘Oh, I do hope she’ll be joining us. Jane spoke so warmly of her, said what a marvellous cook she is,’ Didy says while Charmian smokes and waits for me to tell her what happened.

  There was no more putting off getting water and I’d trailed Bobby to the wells through the hottest part of the day. My time with my brother has become precious now it is no longer infinite. While I’m glad Trudy’s at last over all the hideous complications of her operation, it means he’s abandoning me. I was trying not to whine. ‘But why? Why do you have to go all the way to America?’ I already knew why. Making Trudy well has been his project. Turns out he has a gift for nursing after all. ‘The night she nearly died from that fever I made a pact with the universe to never leave her,’ he tells me. Her family doctor is in Boston, so that’s where they are going. But what about me? All he can do is shrug. I want to grab what I can before he disappears. ‘You’re always saying that family is an outdated concept. Does that mean we’ll never see each other again?’ I wailed as we waited at the well, wringing what I could from him.

  I went on alone through the dung and the dust to return a couple of gramophone records to Marianne. I could hear the sound of Leonard’s typing from the upstairs window, but apart from sudden bursts of cicadas, and those clattering keys, all was silent. There was a peculiarly melancholy atmosphere inside the house, the shutters were closed and the smell of trapped incense was almost sickly.

  I noticed the baby was sleeping beneath a net in his cot and the little white dog lay slumped at the foot of the stairs with his chin on crossed paws. Leonard’s sixpenny cap was hanging with his guitar from the nail. An Egyptian vase lay i
n two jagged pieces on the stone floor in a pool of water, among scattered stems of mountain yarrow. On the table, a sheet of paper with something in Norwegian scrawled across it, many crossings-out and an angular script; the crusts that had been cut from a sandwich; an empty glass; a full ashtray; a knife. I crouched down to put the gramophone records away and found her curled into the space between the shelves and the cabinet. She was bleached out from crying. She put her finger to her lips, asked me not to make a sound.

  ‘Sshhhh,’ Charmian says. ‘Here comes Marianne, now.’

  She doesn’t look like she has a care in the world. She’s changed into her striped skirt, walks with a swing she only has when she’s free of the baby. She stops at the corner to chat to Magda. I see them both laugh. At the table beside us an airline crew has settled with some bottles of cold beer. The women wear false eyelashes and pearly lipstick, tightly fitted dresses that look incongruous at the waterfront. The pilots have placed their peaked caps on the table and I watch as they swivel around to check her out. She feels their eyes, turns, notices the familiar insignia and smiles. ‘Oh, you’re Scandinavian Airlines,’ she says. ‘What brings you to Hydra?’

  Didy and Charmian take one look at Marianne chatting away and dismiss my story as nothing more than a lovers’ tiff. They’re elbow deep in Martin’s education. ‘Jane says he’s most certainly Oxbridge material. Is the Greek system going to be enough for a boy as bright as him?’ Didy is saying.

  ‘It’s another of those things I’m trying not to think about,’ Charmian replies. ‘We need George’s new novel to hit the jackpot, and I say that despite its subject matter …’ and, of course, Didy asks what she means and I doubt it’ll be long before the waterworks get going again.

  I turn back to Marianne. One of the stewardesses has a hand on her arm. ‘So you know him? You know Axel?’

  Marianne’s face is contorting. Naughtiness flashes as she catches my eye. ‘You might say that, yes.’

  The second stewardess looks triumphant. ‘There you are, Nita. I said you’d find lover-boy on Hydra.’

  The one called Nita sniffs. ‘Well, he’s a very strange guy. Just disappeared in the morning, leaving me with his suitcase and not a clue what he expected me to do with it.’

  Marianne nods. ‘Typical Axel,’ she says, chewing down on her lip. ‘My husband really is crazy.’

  Nita throws a pair of mortified hands to her face. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she gasps. ‘Nothing happened. Really. He was very drunk and stayed up all night telling me the most gruesome stories about what the Nazis did to his father. I think he really needed to talk about it.’

  Marianne nods sympathetically. ‘Axel’s father owns a sausage factory in Trondheim,’ she says. ‘I don’t think he’s ever met a Nazi in his life.’

  What a relief it is to hear her laugh and such a contrast to earlier when she talked about wanting to die.

  I think it was only because she thought I might disturb the baby or Leonard that she allowed me to coax her out of her miserable cubbyhole. I settled her in her rocking chair on the terrace where she made herself tiny, knees drawn to her chin. She spoke through her fingers. ‘The pain is too much for me. I can’t go through all this again.’

  ‘Is the baby all right?’ I was starting to panic.

  ‘The baby would be better off with my mother in Oslo. What use is a miserable drag like me in a place like this?’

  Through fresh tears she told me that Leonard had been out on the mountain all night, waiting for the sunrise at Profitis Elias. ‘I thought he was with Axel, but when Axel showed up to say goodbye he told me he hadn’t been with him at all. “Ooops,” Axel said, “looks like I’ve stepped in the salad,” and it turns out Leonard saw in the dawn with that Francine. I can feel it all happening again. Everybody wants to steal my man. I don’t know what to do. Maybe lock him in and swallow the key,’ she said, while above us the symphony of keys and carriage return was reaching a triumphant crescendo.

  There’s no trace of tears now and she has the aircrew enchanted. I’ve never seen her flirt like this before. ‘Wow, you fly an empty plane all the way back to Oslo?’ she says, and sunlight flares her eyes.

  Twenty-Six

  Sunshine stalks us. It binds us to the rocks, casts us in bronze. It sharpens shadows, blazes the mountains, strikes the white walls so they almost blind us. We slake our thirst with retsina and beer, live on fruit and salad and bread. The thought of cooked food makes everyone feverish. We take long siestas among the fir trees with our many new friends and bob around in the merciful blue sea making plans for sundown and nightfall. We hop like fleas from bed to bed. Those with houses the least number of steps up from the port find their beds get hopped in the most.

  Even the most disciplined among us have given up pretending to work. The revolutionary poems stay half-written, paintbrushes stiffen in jars of congealing spirit, my notebook grows vague and filled with doodles. The moon rises like yeast from its bowl in the mountains. Beneath us the rocks remain warm from the sun. The breeze is laced with pine and mountain herb and suggestion and as I settle deeper into my crevice the crushed leaves of rock rose are sticky with the smell of churches.

  These rocks and the sea belong to us once the tourists have finished with the sun and gone back to their yachts and hotels. We’re all of us complicit in this freedom and there’s nothing to fear; even wicked Police Chief Manolis seems to have been defeated by the sheer numbers. The music is almost deafening some nights from Lagoudera where girls in bikinis dance outside in the street.

  Leonard sent off the manuscript of his novel on the same day that Marianne despatched the baby to Norway. He says it’s the only copy in the world that’s now winging its way on a prayer to his publisher in Canada. It appears he can think about little else but burning boats and drowned mail. He scans the horizon from his favoured rock, threading his komboloi beads back and forth through his fingers with a look of such anguish I can only suppose it was the I Ching told him not to make a copy before sending it.

  It seems like Marianne has been hiding away since getting back here from Athens without her baby. Now she and Charmian climb out of the water and stand drying off, taking turns to rub a towel through their hair.

  ‘They allowed me to walk right on to the plane with him,’ Marianne’s saying as I stand at the edge and pull off my dress, look around and decide nobody will care if I step out of my pants.

  ‘It was an empty flight, just Nita and Suzie and three men in suits. I almost stayed; it would have been the easiest thing in the world to have just buckled myself in …’

  I can feel Leonard watching me. I turn and catch him at it. He doesn’t look away. I glance at Marianne; she’s noticed him looking. Something starts hatching inside me.

  The sea slaps the warm rocks, but only gently. I plop myself in and flip on to my back and let the waves bob me while I wonder at this thing that seems to come fully fledged with the power to wreak havoc. I squint up at them all ranged on the ledge with the moon and the mountains behind them. I swim back to the ladder. Little Booli crawls across the slippery wet rocks. The seawater makes his underpants droop like a nappy. Charmian’s swimsuit does her no favours and is so worn out it’s becoming transparent. Marianne is a silver sylph in a new yellow bikini. She’s asking Charmian about a recipe for curry and hurriedly hands me her damp towel so that I can cover up.

  ‘He says he wants spicy,’ she’s saying, and I’m trying hard not to condemn her but can’t help feeling shocked that she can be this relaxed when she’s just packed off her baby with virtual strangers. It’s been the talk of the island, the way that it happened. It came out of nowhere, a sudden blazing blast of temper.

  It was Francine lit the fuse. I spotted her over Marianne’s shoulder the day she was busy gossiping about Axel to the air hostesses. I thought to myself, Oh, merde, here comes trouble as Francine mooched over with yellow flowers in her hair and an open book in her hands, which turned out, unfortunately, to be Leonard’s poetry coll
ection.

  Apparently too engrossed to look up, she pulled out a chair and read on. Didy leant across and admired the sprigs of mountain yarrow that were woven through her hair and Marianne’s conversation with the air hostess about Axel’s suitcase came to a screeching halt. ‘Oh, just throw it in the harbour,’ she said, as Francine touched the flowers and laughed.

  ‘Wow. I’ve been up on the mountain all night. I had no idea …’

  Francine ducked her head to free her ponytail of its band, leant to shake out her hair, letting her halter-top fall open along her slim and supple back. Some dry twigs had become tangled in her hair, she had to twist and snake, so there was plenty of time to admire the curve of her spine and to notice the fresh grazes at its bony peaks.

  And that was it. Quick as flash paper. All arranged. The baby would take the empty return flight via Paris and on to Oslo in the care of the aircrew. Though a little astonished by the suddenness of Marianne’s request, Nita and Suzie seemed happy to help, and Johan, the senior pilot, gave it his blessing, though wasn’t paying much attention as Francine was still doing the Medusa with her hair.

  ‘I shall send a telegram to my mamma in Oslo to expect him,’ Marianne said and there was a jut to her chin when Charmian leant over and asked her, ‘Darling, really? Are you sure?’

  Pomegranates split their sides, spill rubies to the steps; the air is musky with hot figs. I sleep every night on the terrace, curled around whoever has fallen beside me. I have burned the letter I finally received from Jimmy Jones. Back to law school he trots with his tail between his legs, a year behind his peers and somehow that’s my fault for leading him astray. My tears have been ill spent.