by Tanith Lee
And then he goes out and leaves Nick standing on the tiles, with the drink in his hand and the view of trees and sea at his back.
Shadows shorten in the room and on the grass outside. There is no sound in the house that he can hear. Outside the scratch of crickets, but even this he is unsure of. The noon sun passes over and begins obliquely to dazzle to one side. Well over an hour has passed, Nick thinks, but his watch is acting up. (He remembers again Laurence’s watch, the Angie-watch he had changed into at Nick’s, with that curious gutturally sexual laugh. After he had hidden the Roman pin in Nick’s bathroom.)
It drifts to Nick in a harmless, foolish way, that perhaps after all he did die when the knife went into him. And all this insanity - past and here and now - is some scrambled invented afterplay in the final instants before utter nothing swamps him forever. Only then does he sit down.
He puts the barely tasted drink on the tiles.
What is he going to say to her, when - if - she comes into the room? Assuming, of course, his last moments are still providing a script.
But evidently, there is only one thing to say to her. Really he need not even say it. Even if his life has not, the book has reached its last page and should now close, is already closing. The book had ended anyway, all those years ago when he was eighteen. The rest had and has been an ultimate chapter. And then - a sort of afterword.
The shadows are starting to stretch again, in the opposite direction.
The house is surely empty.
Everyone has gone away.
“Mr Nick, you will come. We serve lunch.”
The fat woman in tight black has returned. She stands in the doorway, exacting participation.
“What time is it?” he says.
She ignores him.
He can hear noises in the house again; he glances at his watch, which shows four. This seems unlikely, the watch has gone crazy, that is all. The light is wrong for 4 p.m., even for 4 a.m. And they would never, here, would they?, introduce lunch at such a late, or unformed, hour.
He stands up and the woman turns briskly and paddles off down the red-tiled hall in her flat shoes.
Nick goes after her. He realises he has left his drink three-quarters full on the floor of the other room. An offering then for the god - who is it here? Bacchus… no. The Greek name. Dionysos.
The large dining room has two glass doors standing open on another sunny courtyard with flowers in pots. Two of the room’s remaining walls are bare and white, but the third seems composed of grass, a dense green, cut in the sort of patterns that appear on antique Greek vases.
At a big polished table, ready laid with glasses and cutlery, seven people are already seated.
It is a scene from a play.
Nick enters stage left of the French doors.
And they all look up or round at him, and some of them smile, but no one speaks or rises.
Five of these people Nick does not know. There are a pair of young women, between twenty and twenty-five, he thinks. They have short black hair and faces he guesses to be French, as indeed they are for they will speak in Parisian accents. They wear designer jeans, ankle-length tough rough leather boots, like a boy’s, Roland Mouret tops, one pink, one black, and are almost identical, except the slightly thinner one has pierced ears, with little red drops, like spilled wine, dripping from them. They are also holding hands; sisters or lovers. The other couple, a man and woman, are jovial, well-off and American. Though in their fifties, he guesses, they are energetically slim, and have the same perfect teeth as the girl he had known in Athens. The other stranger possesses a young, dark, clandestine foreignness. He is preoccupied with scowling, less at Nick than at everything.
Then there are the two known ones.
Facing Nick as he enters is Joss Lewis, his father, whom he has not seen, (aside from, at best, a couple of disordered journalistic photographs in the late ‘90’s) for more than a decade. Joss seems no older, and more or less as he did in the dream on the plane. He is, as then, expressionless, and too - although he focuses straight ahead on Nick - Joss stays completely still save for one slow blink of his eyes.
To Joss’s right is Kitty, or Kirri, or whoever the fuck she is.
She has on a plain white blouse, what looks like a pale grey skirt. Her nails are red, as is her mouth, and her hair. Unlike Joss she has only gazed briefly at Nick. She has given Nick a strangely complicit smile, then lowered her eyes. Round her neck the same gold pendant winks as she raises her wine glass and sips.
One of the French women lights a cigarette. Nobody objects; there are ashtrays laid along the table, ready.
Then Pera has bustled up to a single empty chair, pulled it out, and stands grimly behind it.
Nick goes to the chair and sits down.
The big Greek reappears and is pouring wine into a glass by Nick’s allotted place.
The American man leans across the table. He extends his hand. “Hi. I’m Clyde. And this lovely lady is my wife, Shelley.”
Nick shakes hands with him, beams back and beams at beaming Shelley. “Nick.”
The French women regard Nick from their smoke with covert indifference. The other unrecognised man angrily averts his eyes and picks at a piece of bread on a side plate.
Joss speaks suddenly. Nick finds he has forgotten Joss’s voice, or rather has remembered it wrongly. Like his face it is expressionless.
“Did you have a good journey?”
“Yes,” says Nick. It is obvious to him somehow that it is useless to be polite, or attempt intimacy - thank you, Dad simply does not fit this Mad Hatter’s Lunch.
And Kitty-Kirri anyway gives a soft laugh. Then turns and speaks quietly to the Greek man, her companion in the village. Her spoken Greek is perfect, Nick can hear that. She utters it as only a Greek would. Obviously. She is half Greek.
The first course consists of colourful salads, olives, and cold imported caviar. The Greek man, whose name is now revealed, (when Joss speaks to him, in English) as Stephanos, serves everyone, nimbly assisted by a skinny, gazelle-like girl who appears less than fourteen.
Since this is a scene from a play, Nick cannot shake off the idea that all of them, except his father and Kitty-Kirri, are actors hired for the occasion.
He has assumed his father will have been expecting him by now, as Kitty-Kirri will have been. Mad Jonquil of Marylebone would have let them know. From her looped wire of handwriting Nick himself had initially read, along with location details, that Kitty was here ‘with yor Dad.’
The dishes are removed. Slabs of hot lamb appear with oiled rice and mint.
Nick eats a little, as he ate a little of the salads and fish-eggs.
It now looks to him, when he risks a sidelong stare at his father, as if Joss is gradually aging in front of him. The old man must be seventy-five, surely. He begins to look seventy-five, if only by degrees, like a slowly speeded-up film.
Very infrequently, Joss says something encouraging about the food, to his guests. These utterances are like what? Lines learnt by a clever parrot?
Kitty talks to Joss exclusively in an incomprehensible if coquettish undertone, as if they are alone in a crowded restaurant. It must be she has made him her fourth conquest from the Lewis family. She will have had them all now, then.
Clyde and Shelley meanwhile chat enthusiastically to Nick about the painting course. They, it transpires, are star pupils, like the French women and the moody Pole or Romanian, whatever he is, who refuses to talk at all. Clyde even vaunts this man as “quite a genius”. (Nor does that elicit any response from him.) As for the French, they too have begun to chatter to each other in darting glissandi - Tu - je - oui - non - alors - alors - waving their narrow hands as they light up between every plateful - mouthful - of food.
After the lamb there are pastries, halva and loukoumi.
Nick has grown tired, literally exhausted by lying about his interest in painting and the potential of the landscape and endless ruined temples. He is becoming hypnot
ised by the patterned grass wall.
When will this end? What can he do?
Has Joss become senile, does he not even recollect Nick is his son? But then why should he? - neither had meant much to the other. And yet, had Joss been wounded by the indifference of his children? After which had arrived this slenderly curvaceous young woman, with her Claudia hair and her Claudia skin and her Claudia eyes, her scarlet nails like Claudia’s in the heyday of the fifties… Does he flinch now when Kitty-Kirri makes her hair red and her nails white instead? Does he put up with it, even like it - adventures Claudia herself might have tried and never did?
Despite the open doors, there is so much smoke in the room from the cigarettes, Nick’s eyes sting. He recalls Jonquil’s baking tray full of burning paper, and the old woman coming out with her bleach bottle.
Clyde and Shelley have given up on Nick and are murmuring together. Nick looks straight across at Kit Price and says to her, “I want to talk to you. Once this meal is over.”
“Oh.” She glances at him again. There is something after all quite odd in her eyes. Not apprehension, nor malice. Not carelessness. “Yes, all right. It’s why you came, presumably. All this way.”
The glitter of her pendant catches his eye. For the first time he sees what it is. On a gold chain a broad gold ring, a wedding ring maybe, that is what it seems to be. Has Joss proposed to her - is she going to marry Joss? Or has she already married him but somehow will not put the ring on her finger?
A stray fact slips iridescently across his thoughts. Her skirt is not grey but white, like her blouse. She wore white when he saw her before, in the village. And white is the colour for mourning in Greece - or has been - some legend or custom, he cannot sort out what it was or is or how he knows. Kitty-Kirri then is in mourning. Is it for Laurence, killed by her unkindness? And despite her general gloss of well-being and almost mindless apparent enjoyment, was that what Nick glimpsed in her eyes just now - grief, guilt, loss?
Expressos are coming, Greek brandy, a grape liqueur, and one tall slim glass of Retsina for Shelley.
Kirri whisper-twitters to Joss. He answers her passionlessly. “Take him to look at the view.”
And she gets to her feet and twirls her hands at the five others, “See you later, folks. Be good, girls,” she says to the French women, “watch out for serpents,” to the brooding genius, who grunts into his brandy; she pats Clyde on the shoulder: “Better keep your handsome lad on leash this afternoon,” she adds to Shelley. Everyone but the genius, and Joss, (and Nick) is laughing good-humouredly, Kitty-Kirri with them.
She has, here, no trace of a London accent. She speaks like an actor, though not in fact like Claudia.
“Come on then, Nicolas,” she says. “Let me show you the amazing view we have. You may want to paint it,” she says. And then he believes he sees what is truly in and behind her eyes. It is a bitter hardness. It is a hollow unripened petrification of some feeling that has died. What it may have been is now, for him, doubtless unknowable.
He too rises to his feet. He follows her from the table and the room and across the courtyard and under an archway. Beyond, a path runs on up the hill, up behind the house.
“Where are we going precisely?” he says.
“Precisely? Where I said. Don’t worry, you’re quite safe with me.” Her tone is bantering, and unconcerned.
He finds he says, “I wouldn’t think I’d be anything else, after your letter to me.” And is appalled to have mentioned it, such trivia, as if he had smarted at her censure.
“That,” she says. “Don’t take it to heart. You were very good. You just didn’t fit the bill. You weren’t meant to.”
He wants to have it out, the real matter, with her, now, now, on the hillside, but she goes on walking, climbing just ahead of him on the easy path, which is littered with tiny pebbles. Trees, pines of a rounded sort, grow by the sides, and cast down waves and splatters of shade. The sea manifests again to his left, as they go up and up.
“Stop here,” he says. He sounds impatient, a put-out pickup who is being fobbed off.
“It’s not far,” she says.
“I don’t care how far it is. I want your answers to my questions.”
“Are there many, Nicolas?” she asks in a silly tweeting way. Then she lifts her shoulders. She says, over one of them, her back still to him, “It’s more private at the top. No chance of wandering art students.”
Nick gives up, and they climb on, he noting vaguely as he does so that his watch now tells him it is eleven at night, or in the morning. He sees, between the pines, a pasture with sheep in it, un-English savage sheep, pulling at grass already sun-parched. If only they knew about the fresh, watered grass in his father’s house.
Then there is a sun-shot hilltop. Some broken stones indicate the ruin of an ancient building, but it may only be a folly, a construct. A spring spangles out and flings itself off downhill like a silver ribbon. That too could be a put-up job.
No wind is blowing. One cloud unfurls along the sky. The mountains are very visible from here, floating above and on a haze, the cigarette smoke of the gods. A single cedar towers out of the ground. She goes over to it and stands there in the bluish shadow, and points the other way, out to sea. “You can spot ten islands from here.”
Nick stays in the baldness of the light. It is surprisingly hot for spring.
“You’re her daughter,” he says. “Claudia’s daughter. That’s it, isn’t it? Reenie’s sister, Laurence’s sister. Mine. My sister. Claudia’s last-born.”
Some more time passes, during which neither of them say or do anything further. Nick eventually stares away at the sea. He finds he attempts to count the visible islands. He makes out only four or five, and is anyway unsure if one of these is not some kind of illusion.
When he looks back the woman has disappeared.
He moves forward, almost involuntarily, and there she is after all, just beyond the cedar, and seated on another block of fallen ruinous stone, which is too clean and well-placed, he guesses, to be genuine. Anemones grow in a cleft of it, no doubt planted.
Kirri-Kitty glances up and laughs at him silently.
“Why did you do it?” he asks. “I mean, come after us one by one…”
“Oh,” she breaks in, “not necessarily one by one. Sometimes all of you concurrently.” She stresses concurrently, an ‘educated’ word perhaps.
“My question is the same. The first question as well. Are you Claudia’s - the last child? And why, if you meant to find us all, didn’t you tell us who you were? I’ll suppose committing incest was all part of the plan - or just an inspired extra?”
“Oh,” she says again, smiling again, “I meant to screw you all. To screw you all up.”
Nick thinks that she has certainly managed that with Serena, and decidedly with Laurence - Kirri has killed Laurence. But he, Nick, Kirri has done nothing much to him.
He is about to challenge her with that fact, when something shifts very oddly inside his brain. It is not like those moments in the blue-tiled room, when Greek Stephanos had said that Kirri’s mother had called her after the bee goddess, because “Her mother, you see, was fanciful,” and Nick had intuitively known at once the mother referred to must be Claudia. Then he had felt faint. Now he feels something indescribable, a sort of terror and a sort of elation.
A vast portal opens in his memory. He sees himself from some way above, inside his flat in London and unlocking the door. Then he drops, is slammed, without any impact, straight home inside his own body.
There are two men outside the door, the locksmiths Pond had recommended.
Nick can see them clearly. The first locksmith, smoky-skinned with blue-black hair, the white guy behind with dreads.
Nick tries to explain the door will not need attention now, as he is about to sell up. The locksmith insists. “No, you need it. And you’ll receive it. Imp…” he says, “perative.”
And the man comes into the flat and the one outside shuts the
door, and Nick and the first locksmith are alone together.
“You are Nick? Yes. How she exactly describes you. Jasmina. He has said to tell you, she is with him. His. So now you are to take receipt.”
And then the locksmith, (who obviously is not a locksmith at all, but some henchman of Jazz’s other unknown, ever-unmentioned possessive boyfriend) jerks forward and stabs Nick in the left side, well below the heart. It seems the henchman understands efficiently how to do this, in order to cause a lot of trouble, even a significant risk of death - without actually intending (maybe?) to murder Nick.
Nick stands on the hill in Greece and remembers dying.
And why.
Then he sits down on the grass. Like the grass, unlike the grass wall in the house, Nick is abruptly aware none of these events have any pattern at all. None of it really makes sense. These things - the partial assassin has nothing to do, for example, with the Drawer-man and Friendly’s gang, nor with this red-head blonde who is his mother’s other daughter. None of it really concerns Nick. He had unknowingly ‘stolen’ a woman, he had unknowingly ‘stolen’ a criminal code - he has been smacked and knifed. He is the child of a woman who had four children, one outside her marriage. He is peripheral, barely included, brushed painfully off the notepads of their lives like a fly. As he had suspected here and there before, though incidentally damaged he may be, his has only been a walk-on part. Something though grinds into his thigh. He thinks it is a stone. Then recalls the Roman pin he had brought with him today. And nearly lazily, he draws the pin from a pocket and unwraps it. Cleaned off by the constant wrappings, the friction of a pillow, a travelling bag, he can see now it is not made of verdigrised copper, or bronze. It is made of ivory, or some substance that resembles ivory. He raises his head and notes she is now looking at him, or in fact looking at the ivory pin. He has lost interest. It seems, most of this, irrelevant suddenly. Perhaps that is only the aftershock of his returned memory. Or not. But she is all eyes. All attention.
Omega
Qirri, (which is how, left to herself, she spells this version of her metamorphic name) has a last memory of her father. He had been called Yorgos Andrezou. He had kissed her as he shoved her in a taxi. The cab was paid for. She had nothing to worry about. Go straight back to Granny.