‘I never saw such a rich sponge that was so light,’ he gabbled. ‘Will you show me how you did it?’
She was diverted for a moment, then she laughed. ‘You must pay me,’ she said. ‘I don’t work without a fee.’
‘I don’t have any … my vows are obedience, poverty and … and …’
‘Pay me with a kiss.’
They brought Brother James back to the monastery by limousine, still holding his large box of ingredients and utensils. His apron, still crisply white, was folded on top of the box. Brother Gervase was waiting at the door to greet him.
‘Did you use the frozen bread?’ Brother James demanded without a word of greeting. ‘Did it defrost all right?’
‘Yes, Brother. I did just as you said. We all saw you on the television. It was a wonderful programme, Brother. And the cake! Brother Jerome said you could make it for us for Easter – that chocolate cake that the woman made.’
‘I might,’ Brother James said grudgingly.
The young man led the way into their shared kitchen. Brother James hesitated on the threshold. At his marble top, where he, and he alone, always made the monastery’s bread there was already a fine dusting of flour and the shrouded bowls of rising loaves. He turned on the younger brother with a face like thunder.
‘I thought you wouldn’t mind if I started some rolls for the brothers’ dinner,’ the young man stammered. ‘I so want to learn, Brother James. I so want you to teach me!’
Brother James placed the box heavily on the wooden worktop and strode to his breadmaking board. He shook out his apron with an outraged flourish and tied it on like a warrior girding himself for battle. Then he hesitated. The dough was well kneaded, the yeast was worked evenly through the cream-coloured mixture. It was rising in pleasing rounded shapes. It would be good bread.
His anger and sense of intrusion died away. The brother was young and had a right to learn his trade. Perhaps he had been too hard on the lad. A little charity should always have a place in a well-run kitchen. And no-one is perfect. He smelled the intoxicating smell of warm yeast, the smell of fertile female life itself filling the kitchen with its warmth. No-one can promise to be perfect, we all need forgiveness for one sin or another.
‘Brother James? Shall I fetch you a clean apron?’
Brother James glanced down at the immaculate white of his starched apron and then gasped. In the very centre, dark against the whiteness, was the unmistakable cupid’s bow outline of a chocolate kiss.
Brother James paused for a moment, remembering something which had been very sweet and very surprising. Like a rich chocolate cake but as light as air.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Fetch me a clean apron and we’ll make a start.’
Coo-eee
He saw her the moment the bus drew up at the quayside and the doors opened with a hiss into the bright Aegean sunlight and hot Aegean air. She had a scarlet baseball cap crammed on a head of tight permed curls. It said ‘Widget Dodgers’ above the wide peak, which shaded her pink sunburned face; a slogan so obscure that he found it lodged in his brain as he watched her labour up the gangplank and haul on the hand of the crew member who waited to welcome her on board.
‘I’m game for a laff, me,’ she remarked to no-one in particular when she was landed on deck, and then she looked at him as if he had caught her eye, as she had caught his.
‘You’ll be the teacher,’ she exclaimed. ‘Am I right?’
‘Guest lecturer,’ he murmured.
‘I doubt you’ll teach anything to me!’ she exclaimed, and turned to her husband who bobbed along in her wake. ‘I said, I doubt he’ll teach anything to me.’
‘Certainly not, if you are not interested,’ he said pleasantly. ‘It’s not school, it’s not compulsory. Some people find that a little information enhances their cruise. They like to know a little about the history and background of the scenery. But some people prefer to drift and wonder. Think of me as a bar snack. Nibble or not, as you wish.’
It was a practised speech, not a spontaneous one, and it had always worked before for first-time educational cruise goers who found the thought of a guest lecturer on board too daunting. She barely drew breath before she exploded in a loud honking laugh.
‘Nibble! Aye! I like a good nibble!’
To his horror she bared her red lips and showed her pink gums and snapped her white strong teeth at him as if she would gobble him up, then and there, on A deck.
‘George’ll tell you I like a good nibble when I’m in the mood,’ she proclaimed.
The steward diverted her by coming up then with the clipboard to tell them their cabin number. The lecturer was sorry to hear that they were two doors down from his own cabin but he was relieved as they moved away, following the steward. Still he heard her saying: ‘Don’t I, George? Like a good nibble?’, and George’s quieter assent, ‘Yes Bunny. Yes, dear.’
It was as if each had sighted their own shadow, their own negative, that day at the gangplank: the elegant refined lecturer and the bawdy noisy woman. She was fascinated by him, and he felt both fascinated and repelled by her. She could not leave him alone, she attended his every lecture: Minoan Relics, Etruscan Civilisation, Hellenic Culture. Whatever the title, she was there in the back row: mildly subversive, slightly disorderly. Never exactly heckling – which he would have managed well; he had taught undergraduates all his professional life – but always running a commentary which was so irrelevant or steeped in such ignorance that it defied him to educate her to a better understanding.
She had picked up from somewhere the notion that Oedipus Rex had an unnatural fixation on his mother, and somehow muddled it into the belief that he was, therefore, homosexual. When the lecture concerned the Greek tragedies and referred to Oedipus and the tragic forging of his destiny from the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, she grew rowdy in the back row. ‘I reckon they’re a nation of Oedipusses,’ she declared of the Greeks. ‘Oedipussies, we oughter call them. Nancies, the lot of them. Look at how they carried on in the old days and they’re no better now.’
He could feel his temper rising but he kept his voice icy. ‘Excuse me, I think you have misunderstood.’
She shook her enormously enlarged head, ignoring him completely. It was a morning lecture and she had come to it wearing her hair rollers with a scarf tied over the top. It was an outfit so bizarre, so ghastly for a prestigious cruise ship that no-one had the courage to challenge her.
‘You know what you ought to do?’ she counter-attacked. ‘You ought to have a bit of a laff. You’re too serious. That’s why we’re all falling asleep. You ought to have a bit of a laff. We’re on holiday, us. Not in school. Why, when we went to Egypt last year to see the pyramids and all we had a teacher on board like you but he had a bit of a laff. You learn more that way too. He had funny names for everybody. I can remember them now. So you see it works. He called one of the queens “Hot Chicken Soup”, I remember that. And the mummy with all the gold – Tutankhamen, that’s him. He called him “Toot-toot”. And when he mentioned him we all had to shout out “Toot-toot!” You ought to do that. We’d all remember much more and we’d have a bit of a laff.’
He found he was looking around the lecture room in something like desperation, waiting for someone else to tell her that this was a Hellenic cruise with a guest lecturer, not some kind of music hall turn. In his confusion he saw only stern faces and could not judge whether they disapproved of her or of him. She beamed at him in the silence. ‘But go on,’ she said. ‘It’s very interesting. All about this Oedipus Rex. Oedipus Sex, you oughter call him!’ She laughed loudly. ‘Oedipus Sex!’
He stepped down from the lectern. ‘Excuse me,’ he said faintly. ‘I feel unwell.’ He went swiftly from the lecture room, across the bright sunlit deck and down the shady corridor to his cabin. He shut the door behind him and lay on his bunk, his hand over his eyes. For no reason at all that he could think of, he felt seasick for the first time in his life.
After that she was everywhere, as if scenting victory over him. When he talked quietly after dinner to a pleasant table of people about the writing of Homer, with a tiny black Greek coffee before him and a glass of Metaxa at his elbow, she appeared from nowhere bearing a huge frothing glass adorned with little paper umbrellas and streamers.
‘Try this,’ she ordered, plonking it down before him. ‘I got the barman to make it up for you special. I call it the Sexy Rexy. He says you’ll have ten per cent of every one he sells. I cut you in on the deal. Don’t thank me! Just tell me if you like it?’
He would have demurred but she could overcome any protestation. She could overcome any refusal. He began to fear that nothing could stop her. He drank the drink she ordered for him, she brought him another. He surrendered the after-dinner conversation he was enjoying, she dominated the table.
‘Now we’re having fun,’ she declared and arranged the party into a circle so that they could play charades. He slipped away before he had to hear more than: ‘Now then! Sounds like snog’, and leaned over the stern rail and watched the small sliver of moon on the edge of the sky and the white wake vanishing into the blackness of the wine-dark sea.
He went to his cabin early, he did not dare to accept an invitation to join a table and talk with them for fear that she would see him and come waddling in, shouting encouragement, and telling people about her trip to Egypt when the lecturer had been such a laff. He took a large glass of brandy with him and sat on his narrow bed and drank it, looking mournfully out of the dark porthole where the islands he loved so much, slept in the darkness of night and forgotten history.
He was starting to get undressed when he heard her unmistakable shriek of laughter at the head of the corridor, and he sank back on his bunk, gritting his teeth at the very presence of her on the far side of his door, weaving her way, probably drunk, to her own cabin just two doors down.
‘Bet you I dare!’ she cried to her companions.
Shrill giggles alerted him that she was not with the helpless George who normally escorted her everywhere, but with her new friends, two women travelling alone, who had mistaken loudness for confidence, and were eager to hear of her adventures in Egypt and her equally profound knowledge of Indian art.
‘Bet you think I don’t dare!’ she cried again to shrill squeals of delighted alarm, only this time even louder, right outside his cabin.
Ignoring the disturbance, he pulled down his trousers and started to step into his cotton pyjamas. His horror when he saw the door knob turn was total. The door opened and she entered in one smooth movement and slammed it shut behind her with a noise as loud as one of Zeus’s thunderbolts. She was inside his cabin and he was a man surprised, with one leg in a pyjama trouser and one leg still out, his nakedness open to her frank scrutiny.
‘They dared me!’ she said, out of breath. ‘So I did.’
She seemed to think that was explanation enough. ‘But now I’m here …’ She swayed towards him, staggering slightly from the rocking of the ship, her clumsiness exaggerated by the three Sexy Rexys she had drunk. ‘Now I’m here – how about a bit of a giggle? Or a bit of a nibble, as you offered? You naughty man! You naughty naughty man!’
She came towards him, as unstoppable as an oil tanker. He shrank back, the narrow cabin bed offering no refuge. Still she came on. He thought wildly of the several hours that it took for a ship to stop at sea, as she surged forwards and fastened her bright wide mouth on his and thrust a cold hand down into the tangle of his clenched pyjamas.
She pulled him out like a bookmark. ‘Whassamatter?’ she asked. ‘You want a little warming up?’
She kissed him again, more insistently, her gin-sweet tongue pressing against his closed lips. ‘Come on,’ she urged him. ‘Let’s have a little fun. Let’s have a laff.’ She reared back and gazed at him unblinkingly. ‘If you’re worried about George, he’s out for the count. Nobody knows I’m here.’ She had quite forgotten her bosom pals of the corridor; but he could imagine them, only too vividly, listening to all of this at the door of his cabin, daring each other to bend and peep through the keyhole.
He tried to rise to his feet but his pyjama trousers, one leg on, one leg off, entangled him and he fell back on his single bunk. ‘I must ask you to leave,’ he said and knew himself to be pompous and powerless.
‘Oh, give us a kiss.’ Once again she insistently fumbled down the front of his trousers. ‘Come on. Warm you up! Cheer you up. Show a girl a good time! Come on!’
He found the strength in his irritation to push her away, and at last got his second foot down the second trouser leg. He pulled the trousers up, tied the cord, and confronted her with more authority. ‘You must go,’ he said. ‘You should never have come in. I did not invite you. Your presence here is a mistake.’
‘Whassamatter? You some kind of pansy?’ she asked, lurching back from him and bumping against the door. He could not now throw the door open, she was clinging to the door knob for support. ‘You some kind of faggot? You some kind of queer? You some kind of Oedipussy? Is that why you’re so keen on him?’
‘Get out,’ he said coldly. ‘Get out and I don’t want to see you again.’
Roughly he pushed her aside so that he could pull open the door. As soon as it opened her two companions tumbled in as if they were enacting some ghastly farce. He stood, glacial and irritated, as they picked themselves up and got themselves out of his cabin. Only when they were all gone, like reprimanded fourth formers, did he sink to his little bunk bed and put his head in his hands and shake from the horror of it, and from the shame of her questing hand, and from the cruelty of her accusations.
They were at Paxi the next day, an unspoiled Greek island, some few miles from the mainland. There could be nothing here to attract her: a tiny harbour, a boat trip to the Blue Caves, a few quayside bars. Nothing more. He could assume she would stay with the cruise ship, drinking cocktails and looking at the enchanting view of pale rocks and rustling olive groves and complaining of boredom.
‘Paxi is principally interesting for the legend that this is where the River Styx flows,’ he said as dryly as he could. She was in the back row with George in attendance. She was silent for once. He imagined that a blinding hangover from three Sexy Rexys was suppressing her usual morning vitality.
‘The River Styx flows from this mortal world into the underworld, as you know. The only way to the underworld is to be ferried across it by the boatman Charon. It is, as you can imagine, a one-way journey.’ He waited for the usual gentle murmur of laughter.
None came. He had lost his audience for this cruise. They were so accustomed to her interpolations of crude jokes that they had lost the taste for mild academic wit. And he had lost his sense of timing. He was no longer confident before them. He was continually waiting for some noisy demand from her table for a joke or for something to cheer them all up. He could hardly hold the floor when he was certain that in a moment, she would be bellowing: ‘After all, what I say is: you’re a long time dead!’
‘Our ship is too big to enter the narrow harbour of Paxi,’ he said when he had left a moment for them to laugh, and they had not laughed. ‘So we will take one of the ship’s launches to pay a brief trip. We will go down the winding and narrow channel to the harbour, and then we will take a short trip to the Blue Caves, returning in time for lunch on board. You may bring cameras and video apparatus, of course. And if I may ask, when we enter the narrow gorge, let us do it in silence. It does have a certain air of mystery, there is a rather special sense of place. Let us be as quiet as we can to enjoy that.’
He had his eye on her. She looked pale under the yellow colour of the fake tan which she applied religiously every morning. ‘For those of you who find the morning sun a little bright there is no need to come,’ he continued. ‘There are better and more interesting sights to be seen later on this trip. This is really nothing more than a little diversion, of interest only to those of you who know the legend of the River Styx and are curious t
o look at the jaws of death itself – from the comfort of an Aegean Experience launch rather than Charon’s boat!’
Again there was no laugh, but she lifted her heavy head and looked at him, across the room. ‘It’s always dead things with you, isn’t it?’ she demanded, and he felt the attention of the room shift to her. ‘Old things, and dead things. What I say is: it’s all a long time ago!’
He forced himself to smile at her. ‘It’s been my interest, no, my passion, for all my life,’ he said. ‘And I know of nothing more rewarding than the study of the classics.’
‘Oh yeah,’ she said as if that confirmed her worst opinion. She winked at her friends. ‘I bet you don’t.’
‘We can go at once,’ he said, speaking to his class over the murmur of their comments on this exchange. ‘Anyone interested in seeing Paxi and the legendary mouth of River Styx on Deck B at once please.’
He had been certain that she would not come, but she was there in a bright pink top which showed the swell of her midriff and seam-stretchingly-tight white Capri pants. She wore her heated rollers in her hair as was her habit before noon, but today she had tied a bright pink turban on top by way of camouflage. He watched the sailor help her into the neat little launch and saw the way she held the man’s gaze and flashed a smile at him as if the man were serving her from desire and not because he was paid to do it.
He said nothing to her, nothing to any of them, as he dropped into the boat himself. He felt as if he was far away from his class, far away from the subject that he loved. He felt as if he would never speak inspiringly of it again.
But he had a job to do. Not a very academically respectable job, not a very well-paying job, but a job which allowed him to come to Greece twice a year, which was more than enough for him who so deeply loved the islands. And sometimes he was able to explain what the place meant to him, how the light that they saw even now on the pale limestone of Paxi was the same that Homer had seen and loved too.
Bread and Chocolate Page 2