A Theatre for Dreamers

by Polly Samson

  I kept going, beyond the gorge to the top road where the ruins of Ghikas’s house crowned the hill, blackened arches like Gothic aqueducts across choppy charred timbers and collapsed floors. The path was peppered with black grains; burnt shutters still lay among the broken-down terracing and scorched scrub.

  I walked straight past, like it would be bad luck to linger. I remembered with a shiver Leonard telling me that he had cursed the place.

  There was nobody about; far below me the sea was as blue as enamel, the sun low enough in the sky to turn the bare boulders bronze. It lit the barley stubble of my valley, made gold-dust of the air. Donkeys threw long shadows among the scrub of its far terraces and the cockerels called as I settled on my familiar ridge. A muleteer came clattering, all hooves, dust and proud machismo, whiskers and waistcoat. A pair of curly-horned rams roped, one either side of his saddle, were bellowing, sheepdog yipping and mule trumpeting in protest. Once the hullaballoo faded, the silence came on all the greater for the violence of its interruption. I watched tiny jewelled beetles in the dust at my feet. I let myself weep about the end of my marriage, and I gulped the scented air.

  I was empty of tears when I saw him at the prow of the hill. He was strolling with his dog; his easy amble and strong shoulders made me recognise him several strides before he ground to a halt and pulled off his cap.

  I jumped up. He couldn’t have looked more astonished. ‘Is that really you?’

  ‘Oh no, not you as well. Marianne didn’t recognise me either,’ I said as we fell into one another’s arms, laughing.

  ‘Ten years!’ I was still trying to take it in. At first I thought I’d only imagined it. It felt like I’d willed him since I’d only that moment been thinking about him, wondering if he still came in the summers with his bag of Aegina clay.

  I had replayed so many times my last night on the island, it had taken on the shifting quality of a dream. It had been a breathtaking hike to Dinos’s house. I’d never climbed to the top of Mount Episkopi before and was surprised by the valley where gorse and scrub gave way to almond and olive groves and barley fields and pine forests with their hidden orchestras of goat bells. I carried Cato in a basket all the way. The house was so high up you could see the sea on both sides of the island.

  Dinos was Bobby’s friend. I barely knew him but he never for a moment made me feel shy. He gave me a tour, stopping at the kiln shed to show me what Bobby had been working on. Small figures sprawled among marble-sized stones, some in attitudes of relaxation, chins resting in their hands, or face down; others with wings and exultant expressions. Inspired by something Charmian said to Bobby, Dinos told me, about people being either Daedalus or Icarus.

  I took Cato from his basket, told him he’d be happy up here. Dinos and I didn’t stop talking, not that night nor for a minute the next morning and all the way down through the blossoming almonds to the ferry dock when I left for England. He gave me a bowl he’d made for me, and it makes me sad that I have no idea what became of it.

  Now here he was again. Dinos, standing right in front of me with his knapsack and his dog, a decade gone by and not looking like he’d aged a day. He was grinning and offering me water from his flask. I almost had to pinch myself to check I wasn’t dreaming. He told me that Cato still reigned at Episkopi. He offered me his hand when I said that I would like to come and see him. There was magic to this spot; I always did feel the pull of it but never more so than at this moment. In the very place I’d first found him, my little black cat was returning the luck.

  Thirty

  I change. I am the same. I change. I am the same. I change. I am the same. Leonard painted it in gold around the mirror in his hall. I can’t imagine it isn’t still there.

  There was a night he nearly had me mesmerised. I was almost giddy when we’d finished dancing and he spun me around to face myself in that mirror. My head whirls a little and my eyes swim with memories. He had to keep his hands on my shoulders to stop me squirming away but all I could see, as he held me in front of it, were the candle’s twin flames reflecting in his khaki-green eyes – anything but look at myself. He was pretty stoned, the whites of his eyes were pink, he was standing so close I could hear him swallow. His hand slipped from my shoulder to my collarbone, slipped again and I let it. His breath was growing hot on my neck, and the guilty thrill that had hatched inside me at the rocks was taking powerful flight by the time Marianne came in a gust of air and broke the spell. She had her lamp and a bundle of firewood and for several weeks refused to speak or even look at me. He changed, he remained the same. The words he painted around his mirror were honest and true.

  They apply to me too. I carry my old age like a cloak, am glad of the steps that keep me almost as spry as the girl who lives within its inconvenient folds. I put my fist to the sky in defiance as I’m hit in the face by a spattering of rain. The sea looks flat as hammered iron. It will take more than a few raindrops to stop me swimming later if I fancy it. I think about the beans that I have simmering with a ham hock at home, about my son and the little ones coming for Christmas, about our cosy house with its store of winter wood. Thinking of my son and grandchildren fills me with spirit more powerful than grief or any other ache the years wish to throw at me.

  The rain on my face has a salt tang. I stop at a gap between houses and watch as the sun breaks through a tear in the clouds and falls on the sea. I climb on. I can’t seem to shake thinking about Leonard and Marianne now both of them are dead.

  I saw less and less of Marianne over the years. She got married to her boss in Oslo, and acquired stepdaughters and a Buddhist guru. When she died I wondered if her husband felt sidelined when the letter that Leonard wrote to her as she lay dying was shared with the world.

  Charmian was right about Marianne’s blind optimism; she clung on long after hope had slunk away. Leonard left her waiting for years.

  She was still hanging on at his house the first summer I came here with my son. Axel Joachim was only a couple of years older than my boy so I hoped they’d be friends. I remember I had been to Hamleys, had bought a boxed game of Risk especially. I chivvied my son all the way down from Dinos’s house, telling him all I could remember of this bright older boy. I mentioned fishing, masks and snorkels, donkey races, flying kites. Axel Joachim had been to boarding school in England so there wouldn’t be a language problem. I was sure they’d have fun.

  Leonard’s house was unchanged: the writing around the mirror in the hall, the table with its treasures and cracked monastery bell, the white walls and woven rugs. A gang of Scandinavian students were making breakfast in the kitchen, a boy in his trunks and two slender girls with sunburnt noses and shoulders. Victoria was the one who spoke the best English. She apologised about the mess everywhere, explained that Marianne wasn’t home. She poured coffee and spooned several sugars into a mug.

  ‘I was here the summer Marianne and Leonard met,’ I said. I caught myself in the mirror, a smile twitching my lips. ‘It doesn’t feel so long ago.’

  The others milled about, slurping cereal. They were playing one of Leonard’s old Chuck Berry records, and their languid choreography gave me a sharp pang for the freedom I’d tasted over a decade before. Victoria was telling me that Marianne hadn’t been around much for the last few days. She seemed irritated and, thrusting the coffee cup into the reluctant hands of my son, insisted he go upstairs and tell that lazy oaf Axel Joachim to get out of bed if he wanted breakfast.

  After what happened next I had to stifle my disapproval whenever I ran into Marianne, but it always lurked and rumbled, dark and unstated, as though the meeting of our sons that summer had poisoned any chance we’d be friends. It was hanging there between us the last time I saw her, which was many years later, on a gusty October day. We bumped into each other at the post office and paused to sit outside the Pirate Bar, drinking hot chocolate, both of us shocked with the news of Martin Johnston’s death. Shane’s suicide, three years after Charmian’s, had been incomprehensible, and now M
artin had done it too, though he’d taken a little longer and used alcohol as his poison. We walked together up the lane to Australia House and stood at the well in disbelieving silence.

  A last few blossoms clung to Charmian’s bougainvillea which had flourished and cracked its pot. Someone had planted an anchor in concrete beside the front door. An American woman owned the house now, I knew that, and yet I couldn’t quite bring the curtain down on the Johnstons. I hoped they might haunt their house forever. If I could only stop crying and concentrate hard enough they’d be here in full flow, Martin squinting up at me from his microscope, Shane’s skirts twirling, George pulling Charmian to his lap. All I had to do was walk through that door and make myself useful. I remembered how badly I had wanted to belong, how I’d tap-danced and sung my way through every audition for a role in her family.

  ‘Dead, and all by their own hands,’ Marianne was saying and I told her how years before, in London, my mother had suspected Charmian might kill herself and had confiscated her sleeping pills.

  ‘Shane and now Martin, it’s too much. I think the children paid the price for our freedom, really I do,’ Marianne said as we started walking back through the lanes. I thought about the relatively boring safety of my own childhood and the sacrifice my mother made to provide it. I had met her lover, the good doctor Joe Leitz, by then. His club had dim lighting, strong whisky macs, low-slung leather furniture. I made up my face and hair to look like her, made him clutch at his heart when I entered the room. His pass was gallant and, mortifyingly, exactly what I had hoped for.

  Marianne was talking about Axel Joachim. ‘You remember, he was such a sensitive child, so intelligent; maybe I should have given him a more stable upbringing.’ Her voice was quiet and miserable. She reached for my hand. ‘You know, since his relapse last year, the doctors say he will never live a normal life.’

  There were rumours. I had hoped with all my heart they weren’t true. I didn’t want her to think people had been talking behind her back.

  Her shoulders had become hunched with the years, her breathing wheezy. She retreated inside her shawl. ‘He was desperately unhappy at every school I sent him to. After Summerhill, New York and then Switzerland, he couldn’t fit in anywhere, so when he was fifteen I let his father take him travelling to India. I should never have let him go. I mean, his father was almost a stranger to him. I wasn’t there to protect him when crazy, idiot Axel gave him LSD …’

  ‘Oh, Marianne, I’m sorry …’

  ‘And now our special boy has been in one clinic or another for most of his life. I think every parent should know about this, Erica,’ she said and her eyes were pleading. ‘You should write this for the newspaper. For some fragile souls just one trip can turn out to be a cul-de-sac in hell.’

  I thought of Axel Joachim, the day I left my son at her house, wondered if he hadn’t already been on the path. The girl Victoria had been rather bossy and, having despatched my son with the coffee, told me it was best if I went away and fetched him around sundown, when there was a chance Marianne might be back.

  I left a copy of The Female Eunuch I’d brought as a present for Marianne. I’ve no idea if she read it because I managed to avoid her for the rest of that summer.

  Marianne still hadn’t returned when Dinos and I came back for my son. Victoria seemed a little dazed and I think it was only the sight of us standing there reminded her there were kids in the house.

  ‘You know, I didn’t come to Greece to be Marianne’s babysitter. It’s like she has some sort of tunnel vision. She doesn’t see her son, or even his need for food. Her sights are set only on this French photographer she chases on his merry cha-cha around the island.’

  I found my son with Axel Joachim in his den on the top floor. The air was thick with dope, the shutters unopened, the box of Risk still in its cellophane. There was music blaring from a radio, screaming guitars, overflowing ashtrays. Axel Joachim sat cross-legged and skinny on his bed, wearing only his underpants and a string of glass beads. A single icon of Saint Thaddaeus was hanging at an angle off the wall. Axel Joachim had a fat spliff between his fingers, his shaved head thrown back from the rigours of air guitar, and was having such a ball he hadn’t noticed that my darling boy had passed out on the floor.

  For years after that Dinos and I had a back and forth time of it. My heart ached more acutely each time I went away, but my son belonged both with me and with his father in London. I joined a housing association in Notting Hill, sharpened my pen and my wits with jobs at Spare Rib and Time Out. At home I placed a gardenia and a little sandwich on a desk where I blackened pages of my own, and another decade passed with the island and Dinos existing mainly in my dreams.

  These days, when I’m alone at the crest of my valley, I don’t often cry. It’s still as inviting of introspection as the first time I sat down, there’s no vista more peaceful, but it’s not a place for tears any more. Halfway down the far hill a tumbledown shack with chickens and netting is the only addition; breezes still ripple the silver lake of olive trees in its hollow. The sun has come streaming from the clouds and I can smell the good earth and feel its warmth on my face.

  I despair of every tear I cried for Jimmy Jones, at my younger self’s blind desperation, and then I chuckle to think how scary he must have found my attempts to steer him down the aisle. But in 1960, which in reality was almost half a decade before the sixties began, how was a rudderless, motherless girl to know lust from love – or, as Marianne once remarked, love from service?

  Marianne may have been a poor role model but for a while Charmian really had been the mother I needed. I remember she came looking for me the night after Jimmy Jones fled, when I thought the whole island might dissolve in my tears.

  I was winded with misery and shock. Dusk was descending. She had brought whisky and figs and sat down beside me, hugging her legs through her skirt. My eyes were puffy and sore. Her concern was balm more soothing than the pills Bobby had been making me swallow.

  When I asked her how she knew where to find me, she unscrewed the top of the whisky and took a gulp before answering. ‘It’s very strange, isn’t it? It’s almost as though there’s some sort of thread that pulls at me. I wish I could explain it,’ and she took another swallow, and gave me a troubled and troubling smile.

  I told her my intention was to follow Jimmy back to London and demand a showdown and she hooted with derision. I sniffed and snivelled while she painted a picture for me of my life as Jimmy’s wife, told me it was a blessing I’d seen his true colours.

  ‘Think how your mother was tied to that kitchen in Bayswater. Darling, I know she dreamt of something less earthbound than housemaid’s knee for you …’

  The last of the sun bled into the sea; the purple twilight was balmy. ‘Before George became ill we used to walk together up here in the gloaming. We used to sit right here with a bottle of wine and plan the next day’s writing …’ She gave me a broken smile. ‘I wish I could feel again the enchantment, everything golden, thistledown and barley, stone and dust, the life we’d made …’ and she sighed as though all her dreams had already been dreamt.

  She shook herself out of it, gathered me closer, kissed the top of my head. ‘Darling, don’t waste your tears on that very ordinary boy,’ she said, and the combination of the whisky on her breath and her warm scent made me forget that I was completely alone. She rocked me in her arms while one by one the stars lit the sky.

  I used to think it was one-way, my hunger for Charmian. Once Bobby had put it into my head that I was an annoying mosquito, I watched myself carefully. I tried not to be greedy but she gave herself generously. She caught me when Jimmy threw me away, steered me through bad times with Bobby, came back from Piraeus with a white leather-bound notebook and insisted I write every day. She fed me Brahms and crab sandwiches while she nagged about contraception, and took me so often under her wing. Wrung-out, hung-over, tired or just hungry, there was always a haven at the house by the well.

  She’s wit
h me still in the tea towel I keep draped at my shoulder, the shoelace I use to tie back my hair; she’s with me in the food that I cook and on every page that I have fought to blacken.

  A few years after Martin’s death a friend of Dinos’s in Australia sent a news clipping that made me feel so peculiar I had to lie down halfway through reading it. Jennifer. Did I only imagine she’d called me that name on occasions? I still can’t be sure but I do think I picked up on something.

  The face on the page told the story. The dark-haired woman with striking bone structure and generous mouth was almost a dead ringer for her mother. Her name was Suzanne Chick and she had written a book. She was the same age as me.

  The daughter’s eyes were familiarly up-tipped and soulful, my own too blurred by tears to read on. Charmian’s face leapt at me, ashen with terror. We were outside Johnny Lulu’s and she sprang at George who was rearing away and holding up his hands like she might strike him.

  Jennifer was the name of the cat that he had threatened to let out of the bag, I’m certain of that now. It was the day I found Cato, the festival; he’d been drinking all day. She was flirting with Corso who was making her giggle and Big Grace was sniping that his wife only had time for men. Not so, I had started to say … and bang, the public performance. George with pointing finger, playing to the crowd: ‘Ah, but there’s a special reason she has so much time for little Ricky here – isn’t that right, Charm?’

  My heart was breaking as I read on. The daughter had been told her mother died giving birth to her. In a fundamental way, perhaps she had. Charmian had called her Jennifer. She was relinquished, along with her name, at three weeks old. The matron’s beloved brother and his wife were without children. Charmian was nineteen and unmarried, with nowhere to turn to but the hospital’s charity. She was unusually beautiful and vigorously healthy; she spoke with a cultivated voice. She didn’t stand a chance.