by Jay Garnet
Only wealth could justify such suffering. And from 1950 onwards the returns declined.
Within a day of departure Mike was inducted into the ancient rituals of sponge diving. There was the captain, Niko, the tender – who was responsible for the divers on the bottom and for the equipment – a seaman, an engineer and four divers. It took a day to get to the sponge beds of Kalymons. The next day Mike sunbathed and observed. On the third day he was allowed to use one of the ancient hard hats and gather some sponges himself.
The Hecate’s equipment was ancient. The compressors were worked by hand. There was no phone link. For the first time in years he had to communicate by jerking his lifeline and air pipe. But in shallow water it could be safe enough. The water was wonderfully clear. Even though it needed sharp eyes to see the slight irregularity in the waving eel grass that indicated the presence of a sponge, Mike gathered half a dozen. Yes, the Hecate would do very nicely indeed.
After half an hour or so he felt three jerks on his lifeline, and was wound up to the surface. He stepped on to the ladder that had been placed over the side for him and tossed aboard his meagre bag of sponges. When his tender undid his face-plate, he got a round of applause.
That afternoon he began to speak to Niko of his long-term plans. He needed a boat, he said, though not necessarily during the sponging season. He needed a captain who knew both the islands and the seabed. If possible, he should speak English. And he needed diving gear, which he might well be in a position to replace later with more up-to-date equipment that would be safer and allow work at greater depths. He said he wished to spend a summer looking for wrecks on the seabed. Finally, if Niko was agreeable, perhaps he would agree to consider going into business with him next year.
‘These treasures,’ Niko said. ‘You can sell them?’
Mike remembered the Americans on Crete. And there were more foreigners in Greece every summer.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can sell them.’
Niko grinned and slapped Mike on the shoulder.
‘You come to Piraeus next year. I look out for you at this time, yes?’
They shook hands on it.
In April of the following year, 1950, Mike was back in Piraeus. He had fulfilled his five-year contract. He was twenty-four, in the peak of physical condition, an expert in his profession, with a good knowledge of many of the harbours of the Mediterranean, and driven by ambition. He wanted to be rich: first to enjoy life, secondly to exploit his professional skills to the utmost. All around him now were signs of wealth, mainly foreign wealth: holiday homes (either new or converted from once worthless peasant houses), yachts, restaurants, tourists. He wanted all that, of course, but only to achieve his ambition. He was between two worlds, Greece and Cockney London; the first he could never fully enter, while the second he had left behind. The only world that could be completely his was that of professional diving. That, after all, was the only way he would ever get back to the Edinburgh.
Back in the Navarinon, he was no longer the outsider. Arriving early enough in the season to rent his old room again, he settled down to look out for Niko, ready to wait anything up to a week.
The second evening, after he’d enjoyed a light seafood supper, with his customary wine, his life was changed yet again.
Into the noisy, smoke-filled room swept four girls, in full plumage, and as out of place as a hard hat in the Ritz.
All of them wore fashionable, three-quarter-length skirts. Three wore soft jerseys and neck scarves; the other wore a fawn-coloured coat. The place fell silent upon their entry, and their talk was easy to overhear. One was clearly Greek: she asked for a table. The other three, with little exclamations and laughs, revealed themselves as French, English and American. They were nervous, for Piraeus, being a dock area, is not a salubrious place for unescorted young ladies; but equally they seemed set on their course and felt collectively strong enough to put a bold face on their behaviour.
In order not to seem cowed, they began to talk, loudly, inconsequentially.
‘My! Is it OK to be here? It seems so, you know. . .’ said the American girl. She was the one with the coat. The others laughed.
‘Oh, it’s fine, fine,’ said the Greek girl, brushing back a tumble of dark curls with her hand. ‘I look after you. No worry.’
Sophocles, nodding slowly and smiling, indicated a table for four. He caught Mike’s eye and frowned as if in warning. Mike grinned and spread his hands, as if to say: ‘What do you think I am?’
The girls had class, no doubt about it. But they were no more than schoolgirls. Two –the French and English ones – couldn’t have been more than sixteen. The Greek girl, perhaps because she was in control and spoke the language, seemed a little older.
But it was the American who seized Mike’s interest. She had a glorious face: a classic jaw line, a few freckles, a mouth that turned up at the corners in a way that gave her a permanently amused expression. Her hair was blonde and pulled back into a bun. She wore no make-up, and needed none. In contrast to the colour of her hair, her eyes were a lustrous brown.
As they all sat down she began to take off her coat, with Sophocles in attendance, and Mike could now see that she had a startling figure. She was wearing a white blouse with a large collar buttoned up to the neck. As her hands went behind her back to slip off her coat sleeves, she raised her eyes and caught Mike’s gaze. In that instant he knew he couldn’t possibly let her leave without speaking to her.
Sophocles brought retsina to their table. The Greek girl looked at the menu. The American girl caught Mike’s eye again. He grinned and raised his glass to her. From the security of her group she smiled back at him quickly, glanced away, stared unseeing at the grubby menu, then looked at him again.
He took his glass across to her table.
‘Excuse me, ladies,’ he said. ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever ’eard English ’ere. I thought I might interpret what’s on offer for you.’
There was a slight, uncertain pause before the Greek girl took the initiative.
‘You know this place?’ she said. ‘What is good?’
‘First of all, ignore the menu. Sophocles can’t spell, ’e can hardly write, but ’e can cook. Sophocles!’
Mike indicated a chair to Sophocles, who made wide eyes at him across the bar and brought one.
Mike then introduced himself. They told him their names: Joanna, Marie, Helen and Sandra – Alexandra Krassnik. He knew Joanna’s type, all right: toffee-nosed. He at once set himself outside her upper-crust English world by saying, as Sophocles brought bread and taramasalata: ‘So what am I doin’ ’ere, so far from ’ome? Well, I don’t normally tell no one, but I’m looking for sunken treasure.’ He grinned at their disbelief. ‘No, honest. Listen.’
And then he began to tell his story, only breaking off to order, varying the tone with anecdotes: the warmth and poverty of home life, the epic drama of the Edinburgh, the wonder of diving, the horror of Sid’s death, the infinite possibilities in his own adventurous present and future.
He talked for half an hour, often directly to the American girl, whose stare was the most riveting he’d experienced since Louise; and in all that time, none of the girls uttered a word. It was a masterly performance and it worked. At the end they knew him, and had confidence.
Along the way he asked about them. He’d been right. They were all classy bits, all privately educated, all pals together at a finishing school in Switzerland. They had come down to stay at Helen’s home for the Easter holidays. They had said they were going out for a meal locally and then, for a jaunt, decided to slum it down at the docks.
Sandra began to talk. It turned out that her father was in business on his own account and was obviously successful. He had connections in the Middle East, though Sandra didn’t know what. He’d be arriving to pick her up in the next few days. Bad news, that, Mike thought. He had no time to waste.
He needn’t have worried. Had he been able to analyse why Sandra talked, he would have
seen that it was the only way she could cope with the confusion aroused in her by his bronzed good looks and his unwavering attention.
Towards the end of the meal, over coffee, Mike found an excuse for further contact.
‘Let me write down where you live,’ he said.
Then there was the business of finding a pencil and paper from Sophocles, and the polite ritual of writing down all their names. Then he tore the paper in half, wrote down his own name and address and handed the scrap of paper to Sandra. He looked her full in the eye.
‘You never know,’ he said. ‘You might be down this way again.’
As the girls rose to pay, each contributing her share, Sandra went across to get her coat from the stand beside the door.
Mike saw his opportunity. ‘I’ll ’elp you,’ he said, and then, as he held the coat for her, he added from behind: ‘’Ow about showing you the town tomorrow?’ She was breathing fast.
‘That would be really nice.’
‘Come to my room any time in the morning. OK?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘I’ll wait, however long it takes you.’
Mike hadn’t asked, or thought, how she was supposed to travel. As it happened, she had enough money on her, and – with the help of her friends – enough freedom, to take a cab from Helen’s parents’ villa, eight miles away. He heard the cab pull up, and glanced out, as he’d done at the sound of many previous cars that morning. He saw her fumble briefly in the handbag slung over her shoulder. She paid the driver and looked around anxiously for some clue that she was in the right place. Mike leant out of the window. ‘Oi!’ he called, grinning.
She was wearing the same coat she had had on the previous evening, over a polo-neck jersey. Her skirt, tight-waisted and full, was saffron. A spring flower. A daffodil.
She looked up. Her hair was scraped back off her face, as before, but this time it was hanging in a pony-tail. There was no hint of puppy fat to disguise the perfection of her chin line. She was not yet fully aware of it, but she had arrived early in life at a startling peak of beauty.
‘Oh, swell!’ she said. ‘I didn’t know if I’d find you!’
‘You want to know something?’ he said, grinning down at her as she reached his side of the street. ‘You are the most gorgeous girl in the ’ole bloody world.’
She smiled radiantly and curtsied.
‘Why, thank you, sir. But you’ve no need to swear, you know.’
He put on an overdone Oxford accent.
‘Oh, gosh,’ he said. ‘I’m frightfully sorry.’
‘That’s quite all right. Now: am I to stand here all day?’ She put her hands on her hips and frowned up at him.
He came down the rickety stairs to greet her.
It was as obvious as anything could be that they would become lovers sooner or later. It was only a matter of timing. Mike stretched out his hand to lead her along the little corridor to his room. She put her hand in his.
At the bottom of the stairs Mike paused and breathed in, about to say something. She bumped up against him and one breast lightly touched his forearm. She bent her head minutely towards him as if in preparation for whatever it was he was about to say. The impressions that poured into him were wonderful – warmth, acceptance, desire, the perfume she had put on that morning, the shampoo with which she had washed her hair, the softness of her jersey and her skin, the touch of her breast. All of this Mike sensed so rapidly that he was not consciously aware of most of it. He noticed her hand, her breast, her perfume. The rest of it slapped him in the unconscious, with instantaneous effect. All over his body nerves and cells saluted. Such responses are seldom one-sided. The effect on Sandra was similar, and as deep and as inexpressible.
‘I live upstairs,’ he said.
‘Gee!’ she said brightly, in mock amazement. ‘I’d never have guessed.’
There were, of course, all sorts of games to be played before contact. It wouldn’t be easy: after all, she was only seventeen. Mike, as usual, was light, easy, charming and funny. Sandra, who might have been decorous and restrained in other circumstances, relaxed and talked about her last few days, which were also her first, in Athens. Wasn’t the bomb damage awful, but weren’t the Greeks such lovely people; wasn’t the civil war just awful, and wasn’t he glad that the Reds had been defeated; and wasn’t it just fabulous that Helen’s house had survived unscathed?
Mike offered coffee. Sandra accepted. He made her laugh by shouting an order out of the window to the café below. He went to get the coffee. By the time they had drunk it, it was lunchtime.
They ate downstairs and Mike, the expert, lectured her about Greek menus, for it was only her second meal in a Greek restaurant. Like the Navarinon, it was a small place, purely local in atmosphere. The air smelt of the firm yellow cheese, kefelotiri, that the Greeks use on spaghetti. They ate tsatsiki, a cold blend of yoghurt, chopped cucumber and minced garlic. Mike warned her about the garlic, then added: ‘But it’s OK if we both ’ave it.’
She glanced up and their eyes met. She’d instantly read significance into the remark.
Then there was kebab, and some red wine, while she talked more about her home life. There was a small apartment in Washington that was just for Daddy, the family apartment on Park Avenue in Manhattan, the house near Greenwich, Connecticut, with the tennis court and the horses, the private school not far from there and, inevitably, the finishing school in Switzerland.
In all of this she had been protected from the real world. She knew no single man who had fought in the war, even as an officer. Some of her father’s friends had been in the government, but that was about as close as she had got. Her father made money at business, and art and politics, but he had never told her the details. He was often in Washington, and he’d made a lot of money, which was really swell – that was a word she liked – because he had come over from Yugoslavia with Oma and Opa absolutely without a penny in the world in 1920. She didn’t even know his history very well, but she knew that by the time he was twenty-one he had made enough money to take care of Mommie. And Mommie’s family, wow! you should see their place in Boston!
Mike had never been to the States, and the names meant nothing to him, but he loved to hear Sandra talk. She felt the same way about him. An American would have seen in her the immature product of driving ambition married to social status, with a good deal of wealth on both sides. A social-climbing Englishman would have seen in Mike an uneducated but clever adventurer, somebody who would have to achieve by guile and force of personality what would never have been his by birth and upbringing. As it was, each saw the other with no burden of prejudice.
As they went back to his room that afternoon after lunch, Mike again offered his hand to guide her along the little passageway. Recognizing the pattern of events, she again accepted it. At the bottom of the stairs he paused, and she, smiling and expecting another unnecessary comment, bent forward as she had done that morning.
This time, however, instead of dropping his hand down by her side, he put it around her waist and guided her whole body gently up against his. They melted together. Uncertain of what to do next, she remained for a second with her hand against his shoulder, taking short little breaths. He lowered his head and kissed her lightly beneath the ear. As she breathed out, she clasped the back of his neck.
‘I wanted to do that this morning,’ he said.
‘I wanted you to.’
He took her upstairs and guided her to the bed. There were still inhibitions to be overcome, for it was still, after all, only 1950. She was young and a virgin. She hadn’t had her body very long, so it would have been surprising if she had been willing to give it all away at once.
Still, she gave a good deal of it away. No clothes were taken off, but there was a lot of kissing and fondling. Her breasts were firmly encased in an uplift bra, and remained that way. But her skirt was full, so that it easily slid up under the insistent pressure of Mike’s thigh. He spent most of the afternoon moving on top
of her, going through all the motions of lovemaking, ensuring the pressure applied through the security of the clothing was put to the best possible effect. Conversation halted. Her responses became so urgent that Mike, despite his experience, was twice brought to orgasm, and the second time she too vanished into a world of her own, giving hard gasps of pleasure. After that they both became calmer.
‘You must be very experienced,’ she said.
‘No. It’s a lonely life, really.’
‘But some.’
‘A few.’
He told her about the American woman, Louise. She told him she was a virgin (‘Daddy’s very protective’). She asked, at first tentatively and then more probingly, about sex. He was the first man she’d ever talked to about it. He began to treat her much as Louise had treated him on Crete. He even explained his own responses.
‘Golly,’ she said. ‘Is that what happened? Boys have tried that sort of thing on me before, but I never realized what they got out of it.’
Then he explained about her reactions, and it was the first piece of sexual instruction about her own body she had ever had.
‘Golly!’ she said eventually. ‘That’s why it’s so beautiful!’
He kissed her again, then put his hand on her stomach and between her legs.
‘So when do we go to bed?’ he said.
She looked at her watch. ‘Oh, my! Is that really the time? I have to go. I really have to go. I’m terribly late. They’ll start sending out search parties and things. And look at my dress! they’ll all know . . . Oh, golly!’
‘Tomorrow. You’ve got to come tomorrow,’ said Mike, as he saw her into a taxi.