by Polly Samson
I was mortified to see that I had left a trail of snot and tears on Charmian’s suede coat. ‘Really, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m just glad to have run into you, to know you’re OK.’ She indicated the station. ‘Are you catching a train?’
I smiled and shook my head. Fortune had presented the perfect moment for this meeting. ‘I’m on my way to picket British Transport HQ,’ I said, raising a zealous fist.
‘Good for you,’ she said.
‘We’re protesting about that Family Planning Association poster being banned from the Tube stations,’ I said, well aware of the good light this was throwing on me.
Ah, yes. She had seen it on the news.
‘Fancy giving in to religious nutcases, and besides, what sort of a God is it that wants to foist unwanted babies on to women?’ I continued and she gave me the look I’d been craving, the look that said I was a true daughter, if only of the revolution.
My heart was skipping like a schoolgirl with a crush. I’d have given anything to detain her. I pulled at her sleeve. ‘It’s outside their headquarters, not far from here. Why don’t you come?’
She glanced at her watch. I laid out my wares, piling one shiny thing after another. ‘You haven’t told me yet about the children. And we can talk about Hydra. You missed a big drama with Axel when Patricia finally showed up. He had that air hostess on a stopover, really bad timing … And did you hear that Magda was carted off to prison because her ex-husband scarpered without paying taxes? … And Greg Corso came back for a while and drank himself so stupid he fell in the harbour …’
I kept going until she was shaking her head at me, telling me I was incorrigible. ‘I’m supposed to be on the ten o’clock train to cook lunch in Stanton but I think, for this, George can spare me,’ she said, taking my arm as we crossed the road. We were both sighing for Hydra, for the spring flowers that were blooming without us and for the gossip of the port, as the No. 27 to Baker Street pulled in to the stop.
‘Though, I must say, it’s very peaceful at Charity Farm. The entire village is golden sandstone, like it’s been carved out of cheese, and I’ve become quite the lady of the manor, albeit one who rolls up her sleeves and helps with the lambing …’ She was acting the part of jolly countrywoman, telling me amusing stories about the local characters, a fox that she kept hidden from the local hunt in the woodshed, an orphan lamb that she fed with a bottle, Didy’s fat Labrador. We settled at the front of the bus. I already knew that her eyes would be sad, I could tell from the false chipper tone of her voice. ‘I have a lovely big study all to myself with a view across the valley, great drifts of daffodils …’ she was saying as I paid the conductor.
She was more up to date than me on Hydra’s dramas. She’d recently received ‘a marvellously gossipy’ letter from Didy. She told me that Marianne was making plans to go back. ‘Everyone’s agog, waiting for the next instalment. You know, which house she will choose to make her home: Axel’s or Leonard’s?’
I thought of Marianne’s sweet smile, the devotion in Leonard’s eyes, his lighting of the Shabbat candles in her honour, his compact brown body and warm hands, his lovely house, Hydra. ‘Cohen is crazy about her. It seems like a fairy tale, the way it’s all worked out.’ I couldn’t help sighing.
‘If it’s a fairy tale, it’s a dark one and I’m not sure she’s quite out of the woods yet,’ Charmian said. ‘She and the baby are stuck in Oslo waiting for her divorce, but our Canadian pal has buggered off to Cuba, so if she comes it’ll be alone in the hope that he’ll join her and go down on bended knee. One thing I know about Leonard is that he’ll never make a promise he can’t keep so thin chance, I’d say.’
I was thinking of the house, of the room at the top freshly painted for the baby, burning with envy despite what Charmian was saying.
‘Sam Barclay’s been keeping up his own lovelorn correspondence with Marianne. He reckons she still holds a flame for Axel. She told him that her best option might be to try to make it work with the father of her child. Silly girl, she does rather cling on where there’s not a shred of hope, doesn’t she?’ Charmian arched a brow at me. ‘You know she always suspected you of having it off with Leonard?’
‘No, nothing, nothing ever happened,’ I spluttered, as the blood rushed to my face. ‘Really! Nothing at all.’
‘Oh, always so much intrigue on Hydra. How I miss it! You’d think all these months away would leave space for writing, but I’ve never felt less inspired in my life.’ She craned to the window, to look down on the grey, greasy streets and pedestrians, the businessmen all hurrying to somewhere they didn’t want to be.
‘The only writing I seem to get done is letters about the children’s schools. It’s exasperating, truly. They’ve been lumped in with dimwits because no one thought to warn us about the eleven-plus, which, of course, the Greek system did not prepare them for. So I write like some wretched Cyrano de Bergerac for George to put his big manly signature to, and that’s the thing I really resent, that a letter from a father is taken more seriously …’
‘Outrageous.’ I was glad enough the subject had changed, and told her how I’d been refused a bank loan because I couldn’t produce a husband or a father to sign for me. I hadn’t been asking for a fortune. Just enough to pay key money on another filthy room. She held out an arm and, when I rested my head, stroked my hair, told me how good it was that I’d stopped mooning around, that I was fired up and ready to join the fight.
My boyfriend’s sister Nina waited at the railings, all busy and bossy with her leaflets. She worked for the Family Planning Association and had rung me earlier that morning to nag me into coming. I was impatient with introductions, would rather have shoved Nina under a bus than have Charmian suspect my presence here was anything other than activist zeal. We were each handed a placard on a wooden stick, END THE BAN in block letters, and I steered her well away from Nina, to where a baby-faced copper swooped and offered a light for her cigarette. We didn’t shout, but stood against the railings in a group of a hundred or so, men as well as women, looking cross and holding up our banners while the newspapermen took our photographs. Charmian’s smart coat was not out of place; many of the women around us sported full mink.
We stamped our feet and talked about women’s rights to contraception, and the irony isn’t lost on me today that, though I didn’t yet know it, the cells of my son were already busy dividing inside me.
‘Only when the scientists come up with that pill they keep promising will women’s liberation be a possibility,’ I remember Charmian saying.
Once the photographs had been taken, she and I crossed to the Star and Garter to use the loo. It was still early and the ladies’ saloon was empty. We settled in a crimson plush nook and she shook out a Capstan Full Strength.
‘Don’t even think about paying,’ I said, when she suggested that since the wind had been chill a tot of cognac might be medicinal.
‘Better just the one, though. George will be working himself into a frenzy imagining what I’m up to if I don’t get on the next train,’ she said, and I noticed her hand shook as she lit the cigarette. ‘And I really don’t want him to get ill again. He’s had pneumonia for most of the winter, poor bugger.’
The brandies were small; I should have got doubles. ‘Talking of George’s fevered imagination,’ I said, overcome with an urge to mock him in revenge for so soon snatching her away, ‘has the dreaded novel been a success? Was he the toast of the town?’
More than anything I wanted her to know of my most glorious action, to lay down with a flourish what I’d done with all those copies he had left on the island to defame her. But she was wincing and swallowing her brandy. Miserable that I’d even mentioned it.
‘I don’t know which upsets me more, if people read it or if they don’t. It’s humiliating for me if they do and humiliating for George if they don’t.’ She looked to the bottom of her empty glass with a sad shrug and called to the barman for another. ‘The only thing I dread about Closer t
o the Sun is our children coming across it.’
‘Well, if it’s any comfort, I kept my promise. I haven’t read a word of it,’ I said, almost bursting with the effort of not blurting out what I’d done with his books.
She snorted. ‘But, Erica, why should I give a fig if you read it, or not?’
I don’t think she noticed how lonely that made me feel, how it stung. I reached for my glass but it was mysteriously empty and she was still talking. I remembered my elation at the rocks, how I whooped as I sent them flying, one after the other, flaming orange against the sky, and watched until, sodden and swollen, they were carried away by the waves. I’d done it for her.
The barman brought us new drinks, doubles. ‘It was the worst thing George could have done, bullying me, accusing me, making me write in a fury like that. Afterwards, I started to notice that I was feeling almost indignant each time I ran into Jean-Claude with one of his willing muses. It was as though this incredibly romantic thing that George had forced me to write had really happened between us. When we finally got to it, it was nothing like I’d written it. There was no seduction in the bottled sunshine of a windmill, no bed of sweet-scented hay, no butterfly to open its bright wings. It was humiliating, but you know what? I kept going back with my jug of retsina. His squalid room always smelt of the pee he left too long in his pot …’
She laughed and pulled a dejected face. ‘And the bastard never once even pretended he wanted to paint me,’ she said, adopting an enraging poor-little-me pout. I thought of telling her that back in Boston Trudy had been told she would never have children, as a result of her botched abortion in Athens. She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Oh come on, Erica, stop looking at me like that. I’d already been beaten for the crime, I thought I might as well have the fun of committing it,’ she said.
She looked at her watch, shook it as though it might be lying to her. ‘Christ, I really must get to the train.’
The combination of brandy and her rush to be gone fed my fury. ‘And was George right about Greg Corso as well? All that stuff about letting a cat out of a bag,’ I said. ‘It’s always puzzled me. It was the day I found Cato. Corso was there. Look at you! You’re blushing!’
‘Oh, Erica, you’re so nosey. You know what? I used to watch you watching everyone on Hydra and think to myself: there sits a writer. I hope you’re still keeping your journals …’
I nodded, though it wasn’t true. ‘So, Corso?’ I persisted, enjoying the flush his name was bringing to her cheeks.
She chuckled to herself, avoiding my eyes. ‘You remember that night at Chuck and Gordon’s?’ and I nodded to encourage her.
‘After Kyria Polymnia had finished showing us around, I ran into him coming out of the cloakroom. He swept me close, looked me deep in the eyes and took my hand. “I came for you,” he said and when he let go there was something sticky all over my palm.’ She bit her lip, pulled her hair across her face.
I squealed. ‘Ugh! What did you do?’
‘I’m ashamed to say I let him kiss me,’ she squeaked from behind her hands.
‘You know, I always thought George was being paranoid. I didn’t believe a word anyone said about you,’ I said, feeling a clot for the tears that were stinging my eyes.
‘Oh, do stop it, Erica. You should know by now what my views on monogamy are. As I say, anything goes, as long as the sauce is the same for the goose as it is for the gander. Tell me, where is the law that ties me to my husband, when it was he who broke those bonds long ago?’ She was swaying across the table at me, glass in hand. I reached out to steady it. We might have been on the waterfront. ‘In fact, it was your mother caught them sneaking in. Patricia Simeone was her name. His secretary. How original was that?’ She had forgotten all about her train, was starting to slur, calling for a refill and telling me about my mother, about Connie nursing her through the worst, with kindness and by confiscating her sleeping pills. She told me that each night my mother came upstairs and doled a pill out to her with a cup of hot milk.
‘It was as well she did or I might easily have taken the lot. I felt like my head might burst cooped up in that Bayswater apartment with my broken heart and two babies. Our doctor friend Joe Leitz was helpful for a while but George became jealous and made me stop seeing him … It didn’t help that Joe L. was so damned attractive …’ She stopped with a small sigh and I leapt, gripped her by the shoulders like she might make a run for it.
‘Joel?’
She looked me in the eyes and nodded. ‘Yes, Joe L. Your mother’s friend, and for a brief time my doctor.’
‘The friend who secretly bought her a car?’ I said, just to be sure, and Charmian nodded again, told me he’d bought it so that Connie might drive herself to their love nest. I downed my brandy like it might souse my anger. I demanded to know why she hadn’t told me when I asked before. Why she’d insisted on lying to me about everything.
‘Erica, please understand,’ she pleaded. ‘I struggled not to tell you all those times you asked me on Hydra, but you know …’ she reached for my hand, held it to her cheek ‘… she was my friend.’ I wanted to snatch my hand back but it turned out I couldn’t.
‘But she was my mother,’ I whimpered, as she carried on.
‘She used to come to me in my dreams … I wanted so badly to protect you …’ She was trying to explain. ‘You were wide-eyed like something that had suddenly hatched, so terribly vulnerable and surrounded by savages. I kept an eye on you, tried not to lecture you too often, as though the boys you slept with were any of my business …’
‘Oh stop it!’ I interrupted with a sniffle and we both managed a rueful laugh.
She gave me her handkerchief. ‘There I was nagging you about contraception and what you should read, a hundred things to do with lentils. I didn’t want you to think that I was trying to take Connie’s place. You had so much to deal with, quite apart from her eternal absence. Bobby’s moods, that awful boy you were so smitten with. It was never the right time to tell you that your mother wasn’t a saint. But look at you now! I can see you’re stronger and that you have a right to know how she managed her life.’
I nodded to the bartender: big ones please. Visions of my mother were pooling behind my eyes. She was kneeling at my father’s feet, scrubbing congealed casserole from the floor. She was shielding me from the man I’d seen in the mirror. We were running at night along a gnarly path through woods. Her hands were shaking as she presented my father with her accounts, a twisted seam in her stocking, sherry on her breath.
My mother reasserts herself, stands from the floor. She drives her secret car, meets her good doctor in the woods.
‘It was our mate Peter Finch she was really out to get that night,’ Charmian was saying. ‘It was Finchy brought Joe L. to cocktails, and boom. “Joe L.” to distinguish him from Finchy’s other friend who was “Joe O.”, a playwright.’
I plagued her for details. ‘So this was the “chance” you believed she still had when you wrote to her?’ I said and she nodded.
‘Why didn’t she take it? Why did she stay with our father if she loved this other man?’
Again Charmian tried to make sense of her watch. ‘Connie believed, with some justification I think, that your dad would have had her declared an unfit mother by the courts if she ran off. She couldn’t bear the thought of giving you up.’
We were out of time. ‘I’m sorry to leave you so rattled but I think my last direct train’s on the hour. I must go,’ she said, as we rose unsteadily to our feet. ‘I’ll tell you everything I remember when you come to the farm.’
By the time we went our separate ways it had started to drizzle. I returned, with my head in a spin, to Nina and her banners and Charmian to her train. ‘To give up a child is a pain that not many women can endure,’ she said as we parted. That has stuck with me, agonising to think of now.
That was the last time I ever saw her. I watched the lovely suede coat become speckled with rain. I regret that I never did visit her at Charit
y Farm, but I had other things on my mind – not least, the beginnings of my son and an uncertain marriage to his father.
Twenty-Nine
It took me ten years to return to the island. I came alone, my son with his father, our first trial separation, the beginning of our end. I boarded the ferry at Piraeus, armed with a bundle of notebooks, longing for Hydra’s big shoulders and wishing for the moon.
In the taxi from the airport, a Leonard Cohen song came on the radio. ‘Bird on the Wire’. I took it as a blessing, wondered if by any chance he’d be there despite the military junta, if his midnight choirs of fishermen would still be wending their way in three-part harmony through the lanes. I knew from something I’d read in the newspaper that in his way he had failed to be true to Marianne but perhaps she would still be there waiting.
I’d lost touch with everyone, moving around as much as I did, didn’t have a clue if anyone I knew would be around. I had mentally prepared myself for the absence of George and Charmian as they’d finally said goodbye to Hydra and been back in Australia for five or six years by then. He got his bestseller, his television series, his important literary awards. The thought that another family would be living in the house by the well was so disturbing I drank several shots of ouzo on the crossing to steady my guts. The last I heard from Charmian, she told me she was writing a weekly newspaper essay that had a wide readership and an impossible mailbag. After that we lost touch. I hadn’t wanted to add to its weight.
There were military police on the ferry, the only sign that Greece was now ruled by the Colonels, but they took their coffees at the bar, lolling and smiling with the tourists.