The element -inth in Greek

by Alison Fell

  Kuh- Aah -Tuh. She appealed to the class, her eyebrows raised in expectation.

  And then, quite suddenly, like the sun, an animal entered the room, graceful, four-footed, and entire. A split second passed before she realised that it wasn’t an actual animal, that it didn’t purr or wind its tail round Miss MacMillan’s nyloned ankles. Instead, it was a phantom thing, an idea of itself that walked only in her mind.

  She remembers the moment as if it were yesterday. The bright pall of chalk-dust hanging in a sunbeam. The synthesis – its shocking, spacious delight.

  Philology: how sound falls in love with script. But if you didn’t know what sounds the script stood for, let alone what language it represented? The thought dizzies her – although clearly it hadn’t dizzied Alice Elizabeth Kober.

  It’s late already – late for Ingrid, that is, if not for the other, bona fide holidaymakers. In the kitchen – cramped, basic, like the rest of the one-bed apartment – she organises breakfast and carries it back out to the balcony. Greek yoghurt and grapes, topped with the strong dark honey you can buy downstairs in the Minimarket, with branches of thyme suspended in the jar.

  Tomorrow, Knossos. The pursuit of the prehistoric. The pilgrimage Alice Kober never made, the one Ingrid must make for her, lending the dead her living eyes. A daunting responsibility, all the more so because she knows her gaze can never measure up to Alice’s – in terms of clarity, of sheer pig-headed purpose.

  Hard to imagine Alice time-wasting, for instance, dawdling on a balcony, gaping at the sea and the sky. Not to mention licking honey off a spoon – honey she can’t help noticing is the exact colour of sun through eyelids – and wondering what could be done with it, in a culinary sense. How you could drizzle it over the kind of eye-wateringly powerful cassis sorbet she and Tim had eaten on that holiday in the Luberon. Or make a honey ice-cream, perhaps, flavour it with cardamom. Serve it with a coulis of blackcurrants – for there always has to be a third term, something bitter and dark to offset the sweetness. (One thing she’s never been able to comprehend is how Greek cooks manage not only to ruin the perfectly good produce available to them, but also to ignore that crucial chthonic third.)

  Focussing her intelligence on the tip of her tongue, she lets it rest there for a moment before traversing the lateral buds. Contrasts, colourations, comparisons. The exercise a kind of stratagem, perhaps – a sneaky way of marking herself off from Alice. Alice the bluestocking. Alice of the ‘frigid logic’, as Michael Ventris had scathingly put it.

  Poor Alice, dead at 43, while Ingrid, at the same age, is very much alive.

  History has neglected Alice, and Ingrid’s intention is to bring her, belatedly, into the public eye, to take up the cudgels for her and settle the scores. Ingrid knows where her loyalties lie, or at least where they ought to lie. And however brief her life had been, Kober’s achievements certainly merited a solid biography, let alone a monograph that even now – thanks to a predictable fit of jitters at the publishers – threatens to end up as a mere essay in an edited collection.

  Women in Archaeology, shrunk to fit. Plus ça change, thinks Ingrid.

  On her first student trip to Athens, she had fallen in love, not only with the brilliant white marble of the Parthenon, but also with the entire building-site of the city, where every park and yard was littered with fragments of pediments, metopes, fluted columns. Shards of alabaster, transparent as the rim of an ear. She had to stop herself bending down every few minutes to squirrel another specimen into her rucksack.

  For those magpie habits she supposes she had her father to thank. Her tall, stooped father, who was not nimble, who had, perhaps, never been young. The amateur geologist with his hammer and hand-lens and haversack. Supporting himself on his walking-stick, he’d follow doggedly behind as Ingrid scrambled up gullies and pounced on likely-looking outcrops. Sunday walks were field-trips on which they chipped, sized and sampled: Cairngorm granite, oolite, spangled schist. It was the white deposits Ingrid prized above all others – the calcites, rock crystal, pearly gypsum. Even in dark weather their lustre caught and held the light.

  Although nothing had ever been said, she sensed that her father was as relieved as she was to escape from the squat sandstone house where her mother drank gin sans tonic behind white net curtains. There was a brass nameplate on the gatepost: Dr. W.A. Laurie M.D. F.C.R.S., and a steep gravel drive up which patients dragged their feet to the twice-daily surgeries.

  While other girls at school collected Barbie dolls or Banarama records, her own bedroom shelves were crammed with labelled finds. Black basalt, garnets, the rare green-veined marble of Glentilt. She remembers these as happy times – tomboy days, when she still glittered like quartz in her father’s eye. Until puberty came along, as puberty will, and shattered the cosy sense of conspiracy.

  Whenever she tries to trace the events of adolescence in any ordered way, she draws a blank. What she does remember is the onset of strategic thinking. How hard she tried to conceal every cut or bruise or bellyache, in order to avoid her father’s surgery with its chilly stethoscope, its atmosphere of pained distaste.

  Wherever Thor’s hammer strikes the ground, no plants grow.

  Witness the bare earth under the holly-tree, or was it the hawthorn? She can’t remember now – the Norse legends belong to a substratum of childhood, long since overlaid by the myths of Classical Greece.

  Down below, Panomeli is waking. First Demosthenes emerges from his garden gate and flip-flops across the road to open up the Minimarket. Then Androula the keeper of sunbeds limps shorewards in shoes that have outgrown her, stopping now and again to wait for the little boy who toddles in her wake. The sunbeds overnight under a bamboo shelter on the narrow strip of beach. Every morning old Androula sets them out in pairs, one umbrella to each pair, with difficulty.

  The Minimarket bears the Union Jack marque of the tour company. A small storeroom annexe doubles as the Flagstaff office, where you can meet the Rep. between the hours of 12 and 2, should you wish to sign up for an over-priced excursion, borrow a book from the shelf of dog-eared Stephen Kings and Danielle Steels, or even, for a small fee, access your email.

  Snobbishness aside, the package holiday has obvious advantages for the anxious traveller. Flights, transfers, accommodation are all taken care of. That much shepherding she can handle, if it staves off the capricious travel gods of Greece.

  To the west, hidden from view by an olive-clad headland, the holiday apartments of Katomeli – which boasts a 2 kilometre stretch of imported sand, disco-bars, and a new strip of coast road down which shuttle-buses sizzle from the airport – wear the logos of Dutch, German and Italian operators. Here in the old village of Panomeli, however, England claims the monopoly, and middle-aged England at that. Cheerful, irreproachable couples from Manchester and Middlesborough, with the sole exception of the honeymooners in the apartment above hers.

  The Wilson-Wilsons are an oddly symbiotic pair in their mid-twenties, with skin as white as candle-wax. She assumes they’re newlyweds only because a small scree of confetti, missed by the maid’s broom, lurks on the bottom tread of the shared outside staircase.

  On the beach they squeeze oh so strictly under the shade of their sun-umbrella, yet somehow manage not to touch one another. A prohibition which – judging by the marked absence, overhead, of voluptuary noises – extends to the hours of the night.

  Yesterday the Wilson-Wilson boy had staged a rebellion. Humping his lilo out of the shade of the connubial umbrella, he placed it decisively a few metres away, in the full glare of the sun. And there he lay, face down, scowling out across the bay. The erotic voltage humming from him. Sunglasses or not, you could tell that the whole beach was staring. Even middle-aged England knew what it means when a young man lies face down on a lilo, sulking at the sea.

  She remembers a summer day in Dunelg, the air full of dandelion clocks and the white seed-fluff of rose-bay willow-herb.She’d come up from the Firth in her new red bathing suit, 13 or 14 maybe
– a perfect scallop shell clutched in her fist, and so full of herself there was no rule on earth that could hem her in. Slithering through the gap in the hawthorn hedge, she crossed the hot tarmac of the road and crunched up the gravel drive.

  The waiting room was at the front of the house, in what had originally been the dining room, and adjoined the new Surgery extension at the side. There were hard upright chairs, a trolley which held out of date copies of the Scottish Field, and a vase of flowers on the mantelpiece when her mother remembered. In the corner near the Surgery door, a grandfather clock ticked away the meek, echoey minutes.

  There was a dragging feeling at the bottom of her stomach which made her badly want the lavatory. It was forbidden to use the front door in Surgery hours, but if she just scooted straight through the hall and up the stairs surely no one was going to notice.

  In the front porch stood a brass stand for her father’s walking-sticks, where patients could leave their umbrellas on rainy days. Her hair, still soaking wet, shed drips across the tiled floor.

  The door of the waiting room was usually kept closed. Too late she saw that someone, presumably because of the heat, had propped it open

  Her father was standing at the door of the Surgery, holding it open to see out old Mrs. Michie and her walking-frame. It was the look he gave Ingrid over his glasses that made the waiting patients draw in their breaths.

  ‘Mr. Duff, please,’ he said, after an icy pause.

  She clutched the rolled-up towel to her chest, understanding how the sight of her hurt his eyes, also that she’d known all along, but had somehow managed to forget, just how much it would provoke him. She’d fled up the stairs then, locked herself in the toilet, and when she wiped between her legs there was blood, like a blight on her.

  He father had grounded her for a week. Not that he’d actually locked her in her room; it was Ingrid herself who’d done that.

  At one point she heard quarrelling downstairs, she heard the word hormones. Her mother came wheedling at the door, but Ingrid didn’t reply. Twice daily, trays were deposited on the landing, and removed hours later, untouched. For several days she refused to eat a thing – a feat which strikes her now as fairly impressive. It was enough to sit cross-legged on the bed, cutting off hanks of hair with her penknife. The handle was mother-of-pearl, translucent and smooth to the touch. Crazy Ingrid, holding the blade of the knife to the pale inside of her forearm, stroking it against her skin.

  As the room subsided into stillness, resistance solidified in her mind. True power lay in negation: from their shelves the stones in their dead weight agreed with her.

  On the balcony railing her bathing suit has dried overnight. As she steps into the one-piece she remembers the tautness of the trunks across the Wilson-Wilson boy’s buttocks, and how his girl-bride simply turned her back on him, blotting out his anger, his desire. After a silence which, in her memory at least, lasted a good hour, the girl laid her Harry Potter aside, donned a sarong, and sauntered off along the beach towards the Totem Bar. When she returned ten minutes later, eating a pink ice-cream shaped like a torpedo, the face he turned on her was thunderous, the hurt too plain now to be even faintly amusing.

  ‘What about me, then?’ he demanded, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, but his young wife merely shrugged, throwing him a vindictive little smile.

  Ingrid had the impression that the whole beach was quietly, collectively, seething. Not that anyone said a word, of course. Like good Brits, they just went on minding their own business.

  She parks her breakfast bowl in the sink, stashes her laptop in the bottom of the wardrobe, and stuffs her beach-towel, Alice Kober file, and Hutchinson’s Prehistoric Crete into her tote bag.

  But still, she thinks: a single solitary ice-cream. And she didn’t even offer him a lick.

  3

  Where the cobbled street peters into sand-strewn concrete and meets the beach-track, an old rabbit-hutch has been wedged in the cornerstones of the wall. Every morning Androula brings produce to display behind the wire-netting door: a few aubergines, potatoes, fresh eggs in a white tin bowl. The prices – approximate, for there are no weighing scales – are scrawled in felt-tip on a piece of cardboard. For money there is a cracked cup, used infrequently, since the English visitors prefer the unambiguous labels of the Minimarket, or the glossy greengroceries of Katomeli. And those who do stop to look, and occasionally to buy – the woman in the red bathing suit being a case in point – are so afraid of appearing dishonest that they pay double or triple the price. This evokes in Androula a certain amount of scorn, as well as a suspicion that this prodigality masks a guilty urge to grab her goods and pay her nothing.

  From the hayfield above the beach Androula keeps an eye on the new arrivals while she gathers horta for Asterios’ lunch. Today she’ll make hortopitta with green beans, mash potatoes and garlic together for a skordalia. And there is slicing sausage in the refrigerator, some fresh peaches.

  On the lower sector of the slope the hay has been cut, and at the top the gradient rises steeply to meet the terrace wall of the Shoestring Bar, but at the mid-level the grass is long and full of sweet peppermint, poppies, and the succulent wild leaves of the horta. From the Bar come smells of baking lamb and the intermittent throb of music, not Greek but English, American. Spiraki, who has been helping her to harvest the greens, is hot and bored now, wanting ice-cream, swiping at butterflies.

  Leaning on her stick, Androula bends to pull another handful. The sun beats down on her back, heavy as the curses she once measured her beauty by. Kathara mou from the women passing her in the street, their eyes on her legs, her breasts, her rope of shining hair. Kathara mou, My curse on you for all eternity. And her heart would swell with pride while her hips, oiled by the women’s envy, would swing the more provocatively.

  When she straightens up the heat drums in her right ear, signalling the pressure in her blood. The woman in the red bathing suit is swimming out beyond the other bathers. Her overarm stroke is easy and lazy; on every fourth stroke her wet head surfaces and her invisible mouth drinks in the air. Under the surface her feet kick a milky wake across the turquoise sea. The Sheely Valentai. This is what they call them now, these women without family, belonging to no one. Women with dyed hair who wear the bright revealing clothes of the young. Women who come to Greece to look for men.

  This morning the Sheely Valentai was late. For once she did not have her money ready when Androula did her rounds of the sunbeds. Instead she lay flat out, sunbathing bare-breasted as they all did, and when Androula’s shadow fell across her she covered herself quickly with a towel and sat up to rummage in her beach bag for her purse. Unable to distinguish the denominations of the notes, she removed her sunglasses, and for the first time Androula saw her eyes: pale grey like moonstone, made brilliant by a thin black rim around the iris. Ftou ftou ftou, she said to herself, to ward off the dangerous gaze.In her mind she made the sign of the cross before the ikon in the parlour alcove, the one she mists thrice daily with holy water. Panayitsa mou, deliver us from evil. Conjuring up the comforting grape-dark of the Panayia’s eyes.

  ‘Oriste’ said the Sheely Valentai at last, plucking out a 5 euro note and handing it over. From the shelter of Androula’s skirts Spiraki peered out, wide-eyed.

  ‘Bos te lene?’ the woman asked him in her foreign accent, with her foreign smile.

  The mikraki cringed back, glancing up fearfully at Androula. ‘Yia yia?’ he whimpered.

  ‘Po po po!’ she’d scolded, even though he was trembling, tears welling up in his eyes, because a child must learn to be respectful towards his elders.

  Distracted by the memory, Androula throws the last handful of leaves into the basket and wipes her forehead with her scarf. She thinks of the little lexico that lay beside the woman’s sunbed, worming its way ever deeper into the fine white sand. The Greek words at the top of the cover and the English ones lower down, already half-submerged. Had the Sheely Valentai understood yia yia? She had gi
ven no sign of it, lounging there splay-legged with her boyish muscles and her salt-snarled hair. And if she did understand, thinks Androula in a moment of defiance, she had only herself to blame. Up close anyone could see she was no spring chicken, so what did she expect a little one to think?

  From the terrace above comes the clink of glasses, a fusillade of foreign laughter. Spiraki is picking poppies without his sunhat, which lolls on the ground near Androula’s feet. When she calls to him he toddles towards her through the long grass, holding the flowers above his head.

  Androula is enchanted. ‘For me?’ She claps the sunhat on his head and straightens the brim. ‘Panapounes? For your Thitsa Droula?’ She flirts her hand out to receive the bouquet.

  ‘Ochi!’ Spiraki grasps the stems tightly, withholding the flowers. His bottom lip juts. His eyes flicker towards the beach, where the woman is emerging from the sea, wading thigh-deep through the shallows. The poppies are that most brilliant of reds, like wet silk, redder even than the bathing suit.

  ‘Yia yia!’ he accuses, hurling the flowers away from him. They scatter across the heads of the high grass and hang there limply by their stems. He gives Androula a wicked, testing look.

  ‘Ela, mikraki mou!’ she tuts, shaking her head at him, for who can divine the mind of a child. ‘Come, Thitsa Droula will get you an ice-cream.’

  ‘Yia yia!’ he roars, triumphant now, thrashing at the poppies with his little fists, beating them down.

  4

  A youth, brown hair, 1 metre 80. At first Yiannis had assumed he was North African, because of the skin tone, until the pathologist established that the discolouration was a result of the manner of death.