by John Fowles
"You went to a . . ." I nodded. The incredulity became credulity.
"You had your revenge."
She came and put her arms round me. "Oh Nicko, Nicko."
I said over her head, "I'm not meant to have oral or closer contact for at least another month. I didn't know what to do. I ought never to have written. This was never really on."
She let go of me and went and sat on the bed. I saw I had got myself into a new corner; she now thought that this satisfactorily explained our awkwardness till then. She gave me a kind, gentle little smile.
"Tell me all about it."
I walked round and round the room, telling her about Patarescu and the clinic, about the poetry, even about the venture at suicide, about everything except Bourani. After a while she lay back on the bed, smoking, and I was unexpectedly filled with a pleasure in duplicity, with that pleasure, I imagined, Conchis felt when he was with me. In the end I sat on the end of bed. She lay staring up at the ceiling.
"Can I tell you about Pete now?"
"Of course."
I half listened, playing my part, and suddenly began to enjoy being with her again; not particularly with Alison, but being in this hotel bedroom, hearing the murmur of the evening crowds below, the sound of sirens, the smell of the tired Aegean. I felt no attraction and no tenderness for her; no real interest in the stormy break-up of her long relationship with the boor of an Australian pilot; simply the complex, ambiguous sadness of the darkening room. The light had drained out of the sky, it became rapid dusk. All the treacheries of modern love seemed beautiful, and I had my great secret, safe, locked away. It was Greece again, the Alexandrian Greece of Cavafy: there were only degrees of aesthetic pleasure; of beauty in decadence. Morality was a North European lie.
There was a long silence.
She said, "Where are we, Nicko?"
"How do you mean?"
She was leaning on her elbow, staring at me, but I wouldn't look round at her.
"Now I know — of course . . ." She shrugged. "But I didn't come to be your old chum."
I put my head in my hands.
"Alison, I'm sick of women, sick of love, sick of sex, sick of everything. I don't know what I want. I should never have asked you to come." She looked down, seemingly tacitly to agree. "The fact is . . . well, I suppose I have a sort of nostalgia for a sister at the moment. If you say fuck that — I understand. I have no right not to understand."
"All right." She looked up again. "Sister. But one day you'll be cured."
"I don't know. I just don't know." I looked suitably distraught. "Look — please go away, curse me, anything, but I'm a dead man at the moment." I went to the window. "It's all my fault. I can't ask you to spend three days with a dead man."
"A dead man I once loved."
A long silence crept between us. But then she briskly sat up and got off the bed; went and switched on the light and combed her hair. She produced the jet earrings I had left that last day in London and put them on; then lipstick. I thought of Lily, of lips without lipstick; coolness, mystery, elegance. It seemed almost marvelous, to be so without desire; at last in my life, to be able to be so faithful.
* * *
By an unhappy irony the way to the restaurant I took her to lay through the redlight area of the Piraeus. Bars, multilingual neon signs, photos of strippers and belly dancers, sailors in lounging groups, glimpses through bead curtains of Lautrec-like interiors, women in lines along the padded benches. The streets were thronged with pimps and tarts, barrowboys selling pistachios and sunflower pips, chestnut sellers, pasty sellers, lottery-ticket hawkers. Doormen invited us in, men slid up with wallets of watches, packets of Lucky Strikes and Camels, shoddy souvenirs. And every ten yards someone whistled at Alison.
We walked in silence. I had a vision of Lily walking through that street, and silencing everything, purifying everything; not provoking and adding to the vulgarity. Alison had a set face, and we started to walk quickly to get out of the place; but I thought I could see in her walk a touch of that old amoral sexuality, that quality she could not help offering and other men, noticing.
Yet I had chosen the Piraeus; and I even chose that road to the restaurant.
When we got to Spiro's, she said, too brightly. "Well, brother Nicholas, what are you going to do with me?"
'Do you want to call it off?"
She twirled her glass of ouzo.
"Do you?"
"I asked first."
"No. Now you."
"We could do something. Go somewhere you haven't seen." To my relief she'd already told me that she had spent a day in Athens earlier that summer; had done the sights.
"I don't want to do a tourist thing. Think of something no one else ever does. Somewhere we shall be fairly alone." She added quickly, "Because of my job. I hate people."
"How's your walking?"
"I'd love to. Where?"
"Well, there's Parnassus. Apparently it's a very easy climb. Just a long walk. We could hire a car. Go on to Delphi afterwards."
"Parnassus?" She frowned, unable to quite place it.
"Where the muses dash about. The mountain."
"Oh, Nicholas!" A flash of her old self; the headlong willingness to go.
Our barbounia came and we started eating. She suddenly became overvivacious, overexcited by the idea of climbing Parnassus, and she drank glass for glass of retsina with me; did everything that Lily would never have done; then called, in her characteristic way, her own bluff.
"I know I'm trying too hard. But you make me like that."
"If —"
"Nicko."
"Alison, if only you —"
"Nicko, listen. Last week I was in my old room in the flat. The first night. And I could hear footsteps. Upstairs. And I cried. Just as I cried in the taxi today. Just as I could cry now but I'm not going to." She smiled, a little twisted smile. "I could even cry because we keep using each other's names."
"Shouldn't we?"
"We never did. We were so close we didn't have to. But what I'm trying to say is . . . all right. But please be kind to me. Don't always sit so in judgment on everything I say, everything I do." She stared at me and forced me to look her in the eyes. "I can't help being what I am." I nodded, looked sorry and touched her hand to mollify her. The one thing I did not want was a row; emotion, the past, this eternal reattachment to the past.
After a moment she bit her mouth and the small grins we exchanged then were the first honest looks since we had met.
I said good night to her outside her room. She kissed me on the cheek, and I pressed her shoulders as if, really, it was a far, far better thing that I did then than woman could easily imagine.
39
By half-past eight we were on the road. We drove over the wide mountains to Thebes, where Alison bought herself some stronger shoes and a pair of jeans. The sun was shining, there was a wind, the road empty of traffic, and the old Pontiac I had hired the night before still had some guts in its engine. Everything interested Alison — the people, the country, the bits in my 1909 Baedeker about the places we passed. Her mixture of enthusiasm and ignorance, which I remembered so well from London, didn't really irritate me any more. It seemed part of her energy, her candor; her companionability. But I had, so to speak, to be irritated; so I seized on her buoyancy, her ability to bob up from the worst disappointments. I thought she ought to have been more subdued, and much sadder.
She asked me at one point whether I had discovered any more about the waiting room; but eyes on the road, I said, no, it was just a villa. What Mitford had meant was a mystery; and then I slid the conversation off onto something else.
We drove fast down the wide green valley between Thebes and Livadia, with its cornfields and melon patches. But near the latter place a large flock of sheep straggled across the road and I had to slow down to a stop. We got out to watch them. There was a boy of fourteen, in ragged clothes and grotesquely large army boots. He had his sister, a dark-eyed little girl of
six or seven, with him. Alison produced some airline barley sugar. But the little girl was shy and hid behind her brother's back. Alison squatted in her dark green sleeveless dress ten feet away, holding out the sweet, coaxing. The sheep bells tinkled all around us, the girl stared at her, and I grew restless. "How do I ask her to come and take it?"
I spoke to the little girl in Greek. She didn't understand, but her brother decided we were trustworthy and urged her forward.
"Why is she so frightened?"
"Just ignorance."
"She's so sweet."
Alison put a piece of barley sugar in her own mouth and then held out another to the child, who, pushed by her brother, went slowly forwards. As she reached timidly for the barley sugar Alison caught her hand and made her sit beside her; unwrapped the sweet. The brother came and knelt by them, trying to get the child to thank us. But she sat gravely sucking. Alison put her arm round her and stroked her cheeks.
"I shouldn't do that. She's probably got lice."
"I know she's probably got lice."
She didn't look up at me or stop caressing the child. But a second later the little girl winced. Alison bent back and looked down her neck. "Look at this, oh, look at this." It was a small boil, scratched and inflamed, on the child's shoulder. "Bring my bag." I went and got it and watched her poke back the dress and rub cream on the sore place, and then without warning dab some on the child's nose. The little girl rubbed the spot of white cream with a dirty finger; and suddenly, like a crocus bursting out of winter earth, she looked up at Alison and smiled.
"Can't we give them some money?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"They're not beggars. They'd refuse it anyway."
She fished in her bag and produced a small note, and held it out to the boy and pointed to him and the girl. They were to share it. The boy hesitated, then took it.
"Please take a photo."
I went impatiently to the car, got her camera, and took a photo. The boy insisted that we take his address; he wanted a copy, to remember us.
We started back for the car with the little girl beside us. Now she seemed unable to stop smiling — that beaming smile all Greek peasant children have hidden behind their solemn shyness. Alison bent and kissed her, and as we drove off, turned and waved. And waved again. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her bright face turn to me, then take in my expression. She settled back.
"Sorry. I didn't realize we were in such a hurry."
I shrugged; and didn't argue.
I knew exactly what she had been trying to tell me; perhaps not all of it had been put on for me; but some of it had. We drove for a mile or two in silence. She said nothing until we got to Livadia. We had to talk then, because there was food to buy.
* * *
It should have cast a shadow over the day. But it didn't, perhaps because it was a beautiful day and the landscape we came into one of the greatest in the world; what we were doing began to loom, like the precipitous blue shadow of Parnassus itself, over what we were. We wound up the high hills and glens and had a picnic lunch in a meadow dense with clover and broom and wild bees. Afterwards we passed the crossroads where Oedipus is reputed to have killed his father. We stopped and stood among the sere thistles by a dry stone wall; an anonymous upland place, exorcized by solitude. All the way in the car up to Arachova, prompted by Alison, I talked about my own father, and perhaps for the first time in my life without bitterness or blame; rather in the way that Conchis talked about his life. And then as I glanced sideways at Alison, who was against the door, half-turned towards me, it came to me that she was the only person in the world that I could have been talking like that to; that without noticing it I had slipped back into something of our old relationship . . . too close to need each other's names. I looked back to the road, but her eyes were still on me, and I had to speak.
"A penny for them."
"How well you look."
"You haven't been listening."
"Yes I have."
"Staring at me. It makes me nervous."
"Can't sisters look at their brothers?"
"Not incestuously."
She sat back obediently against the seat, and craned up at the colossal gray cliffs we were winding under.
"Just a walk."
"I know. I'm having second thoughts."
"For me or for you?"
"Mainly for you."
"We'll see who drops first."
Arachova was a picturesque shoulder of pink and terracotta houses, a mountain village perched high over the Delphi valley. I made an inquiry and was sent to a cottage near the church. An old woman came to the door; beyond her in the shadows stood a carpet-loom, a dark red carpet half-finished on it. A few minutes' talk with her confirmed what the mountain had made obvious.
Alison looked at me. "What's she say?"
"She says it's about six hours' walk. Hard walk."
"But that's fine. It's what Baedeker says. One must be there at sundown." I looked up at the huge gray mountainside. The old woman unhooked a key from behind the door. "What's she saying?"
"There's some kind of hut up there."
"Then what are we worrying about?"
"She says it will be damn cold." But it was difficult to believe, in the blazing midday heat. Alison put her hands on her hips.
"You promised me an adventure, I want an adventure."
I looked at the old woman and then back at Alison. She whisked her dark glasses off and gave me a hard, sideways, tough-woman's stare; and although it was half-joking I could see the hint of suspicion in her eyes. If she once began to guess that I was anxious not to spend the night in the same room with her, she would also begin to guess that my halo was made of plaster.
At that moment a man led a mule past and the old woman called to him. He was going to fetch wood down from near the refuge. Alison could ride on the packsaddle.
It was destined.
40
The long path zigzagged up a cliff face, and leaving the lower world behind, we came over the top into the upper Parnassus. A vernally cool wind blew across two or three miles of meadowland. Beyond, somber black firwoods and gray buttresses of rock climbed, arched and finally disappeared into fleecy white clouds. Alison got off and we walked over the turf beside the muleteer. He was about forty, with a fierce moustache under a broken nose and a fine air of independence about him. He told us about the shepherd life: a life of sun-hours, counting, milking, brittle stars and chilling winds, endless silences broken only by bells, alarms against wolves and eagles; a life virtually unchanged in the last six thousand years. I translated for Alison.
She warmed to him at once, establishing a half-sexual, half-philanthropic rapport across the language barrier.
He said he had worked in Athens for a time, but then hyparchi esychia, there was no silent peace there. Alison liked the word: esychia, esychia, she kept on repeating. He laughed and corrected her pronunciation; stopping and conducting her, as if she were an orchestra. Her eyes flicked defiantly at me, to see if she was behaving properly in my eyes. I kept a neutral face; but I liked the man, one of those fine rural Greeks who constitute the least servile and most likeable peasantry in Europe, and I couldn't help liking Alison for liking him back.
On the far side of the grassland we came to two kalyvia, rough stone huts, by a spring. Our muleteer was taking another path from then on. Alison fished impulsively in her red Greek shoulder-bag, and pressed on him two packets of airline cigarettes. "Esychia," the muleteer said. He and Alison stood interminably shaking hands, while I took their photo.
"Esychia, esychia. Tell him I know what he means."
"He knows you know. That's why he likes you."
At last we set off through the firs.
"You think I'm just sentimental."
"No I don't. But one packet would have been enough."
"No it wouldn't. I felt two packets fond of him."
Later she said, "That beautiful word."
"It's doomed."
We climbed a little way. "Listen."
We stopped on the stony track and listened and there was nothing but silence, esychia, the breeze in the fir branches. She took my hand and we walked on.
The path mounted interminably through the trees, through clearings alive with butterflies, over rocky stretches where we several times lost the path. As we came higher, it grew cooler, and the mountain ahead, a damp polar gray, disappeared completely into the cloud. We spoke very little because we seldom had breath to speak. But the solitude, the effort, the need I had continually to take her hand to help her when the path became, as it frequently did, a rough staircase rather than a path — all broke some of the physical reserve between us; instituted a sort of sexless camaraderie that we both accepted as the form.
It was about six when we came to the refuge. It was tucked away above the tree line in a goyal, a minute windowless building with a barrel-vaulted roof and a chimney. The door was of rusty iron, perforated with jagged bullet holes from some battle with the Communist andarte during the Civil War: we saw four bunks, a pile of old red blankets, a stove, a lamp, a saw and an axe, even a pair of skis. But it looked as if no one had stayed there for years. I said, "I'm game to call it a day here." But she didn't even answer; simply pulled on a jumper.
The clouds canopied us, it began to drizzle, and as we turned up over a crest, the wind cut like January in England. Then suddenly the clouds were all around us, a swirling mist that cut visibility down to thirty yards or less. I turned to look at Alison. Her nose had gone red and she looked very cold. But she pointed up the next rock-strewn slope.
At the top of it we came to a col and miraculously, as if the mist and the cold had been a small test, the sky began to clear. The clouds thinned, were perfused by oblique sunlight, then burst open into great pools of serene blue. Soon we were walking in sunshine again. Before us lay a wide basin of green turf, ringed with peaks and festooned by streaks of snow still clinging to the screes and hollows of the steeper slopes. Everywhere there were flowers — harebells, gentians, deep magenta-red alpine geraniums, intense yellow asters, saxifrage. They burst out of every cranny in the rocks, they enameled every stretch of turf. It was like stepping back a season. Alison ran on ahead, wildly, and turned, grinning, her arms held out, like a bird about to take wing; then ran on again, dark blue and jeans blue, in absurd childish swoops.