by Alison Fell
She remembers the scent on the air: jasmine, mimosa, the smile spreading secretly across her face as the little worm of bliss unwound itself in her belly.
She remembers stumbling up the spiral staircase and collapsing into bed.
She eases herself up and pads across the white marble floor, smelling the sour odour of sweat. In the shower she turns the dial to cold and lathers herself quickly, standing on her cotton nightdress, virtuously trampling in the suds. The summer tourist invasion brings water-shortages, and although as far as she can see Greek plumbing hasn’t advanced a great deal since the Bronze Age, she likes to think she’s doing her bit for conservation.
Dressed and minimally combed, she goes out in search of milk and some good strong teabags.
Sophia the maid, in a faded pink vest and shorts, is sweeping dry leaves from the stairs. When she sees Ingrid she leans her broom against the rail and makes a strange undulatory movement with her arms and torso, as if miming a drunken sailor. Her sweet lustreless face is unusually animated.
‘Sismos!’ she exclaims. ‘You feel?’
‘Earthquake?’ Ingrid stares at her.
She remembers, now, waking suddenly in the night, some kind of dread clenching its fist in her stomach. The excitable echoes of the dance unfurling, peaking, tipping over into nausea. The bed had developed a tidal sway. When she sat up to steady herself the red light on the mosquito plug had shimmied sideways. She’d blamed the symptoms on the lethal cocktail; that there might be another explanation simply didn’t enter her head.
‘Nai,’ says Sophia, with a vehement jerk of the head. ‘Atichia!’ she promises, in a tone of avid fatalism.
Atichia, thinks Ingrid, fending off the afershocks of memory. Bad luck. A woman galumphing about in her combats, exhibiting herself on the dancefloor. So lost in her daft dream of beauty and pleasure that she forgot everything, even the possibility of scorn, the plain fact that she was past the age when those sort of antics might be indulged.
Tim is right, of course: he didn’t do all these years of psychotherapy for nothing. She is, has always been, a wild card, which is why she can’t afford to trust herself. Easy enough when you’re young to rebel against family, church and state, to project all your ills on to society. But later you have to come to an accommodation with life, build your nest, find your niche, or whatever. Consolidate, perhaps, is the word she’s looking for. At 43 her career profile is shapeless – a bit of teaching, a string of Research Fellowships, a few publications – and her relationships sporadic, ruled more by impulse than judgement.
If Tim’s dream-message was chastening, maybe it’s because she deserves to be chastened.
Seisismenon, she thinks. Shaken to the foundations. Seisichthon, Earthshaker: Pindar’s epithet for Poseidon. If last night is anything to go by, when Evans pictured his Minoans as a confident, cultured people, lords of their island and masters of their fate, he factored out the vulnerability they must have felt, the constant apprehension of being at the mercy of chthonic forces.
In the Minimarket Demosthenes, who has lost some tiles off his roof, is sanguine.
‘4.2,’ he says dismissively. ‘Not so big. The epikentro is not here, but in the Peleponesus. Athina is also having some damage.’
On the Flagstaff computer she finds an email from Texas, tagged Alice Kober fan club.
Attached is the memoir I mentioned – sorry about the delay. Eva Brann took AK’s Classics 1 course at Brooklyn C. in the spring of ‘48. As she admits, it says as much about her as about Alice Kober – nevertheless, you may find it useful. Cheers, Hank.
She opens the attachment and prints it off, hoping Lynda won’t object. Upstairs she makes her tea, takes it out to the table on the balcony, and flies through the text, flagging sentences.
Ms Brann turns out to be an astute observer, with a nice turn of phrase. Brooklyn College she sums up as ‘no alma mater, but a dura mater’; and while Alice ‘projected a dry, refraining rigour, it seemed possible that there was a daredevil in her, and a romantic.’
The memoir is long – some 30 pages – and valedictory. It’s also imbued with what she recognises as the scholar’s obsessive need to cover every angle, to leave not a single opening for criticism.
Like Professor Henry ‘Hank’ Yoakam, Eva Brann has no truck with the obvious analogy with Rosalind Franklin, the so-called ‘Dark Lady’ of DNA:
‘I want to enter my misgivings about skewing the direction of my teacher’s life, by twisting it into a victim’s life, co-opting it into current preoccupations with gender domination. This woman was masterful.’
Yes but, thinks Ingrid, nettled by what looks like a typical sideswipe at feminism. The intellectuals of Brann’s generation have a tendency to deprecate theories they had no hand in formulating. It seems to be a point of pride with them – or else, maybe, of pure competitiveness. She weeds on through, trying to restrain her impatience. On page 15 she finds the crucial visual sighting.
‘… she was, to coin a phrase, aggressively nondescript, or so it seems to me now. She wore drapy, dowdily feminine dresses; something mauve comes before my eyes. Her figure was dumpy with sloping shoulders, her chin heavily determined, her hair styled for minimum maintenance, her eyes behind bottle-bottom glasses snapped impatiently and twinkled not unkindly.’
Brains or beauty: the choice was far more cut and dried in Alice’s time, of course – although even when she herself was young she’d felt it looming like a great divide.
If she thinks back to friends who didn’t go on to the Grammar – Sandra Robson, Isobel Kennedy, Marie MacFarlane – what she remembers is the esoteric accessories that began to travel everywhere with them. Hairspray and blusher, eyelash curlers, eye-shadow palettes the size of tea-trays. Even before they left school it was as if they were already rehearsing for some witless kind of womanhood. Ingrid might have been top of the class, but in the meantime other areas of competence were being delineated. And although she can’t remember exactly how the dividing lines were drawn, or how much her own scorn – defensive, no doubt – had contributed, she could remember to this day how inept their coded expertise had made her feel, and how excluded.
‘Dowdily feminine’, though, is both depressing and intriguing. It suggested that Alice hadn’t taken the mannish dress option, which would certainly have been open to her – what could be more glamorous, after all, than Dietrich in a tuxedo, or Hepburn in sassy slacks? – but had chosen instead to be frumpish and schoolmarmy. In 1948, when Brann had met her, Alice would have been 41. An old maidish age, Ingrid supposes, for the times – but even if she’d decided by then to give up on the whole business, somewhere in herself she must have known that a woman would always be judged first and foremost on the image she presented.
There was no doubt that, 20 years earlier, she’d had options.
In the Hunter College photograph the young Alice had a soft bob, with a hint of a marcel wave flowing over one eyebrow. Without the bifocals, you could see eyes that were deep-set and intense, wide Slavic cheekbones, a fine straight nose. Hank had produced it with a flourish, slapped it down on the desk in front of her.
Alice Kober, Phi Beta Kappa. Treasurer of the Classical Club 1928. Costume Committee and Publicity Committee for Hippolytus. In cast of German Christmas Play.
‘But how pretty she is!’ Ingrid enthused, ‘Without those awful glasses.’
She wore a dress or blouse of some muslinish fabric, with a faint geometric print and a frilled neckline low enough to reveal the curve of her collarbone, her pretty necklace.
‘You can tell she hasn’t given up yet. She’s still making the effort.’
Admittedly Alice wasn’t a glamour puss, like some of the other sophomores – the luminous Mildred Knag, for instance, or the pert doe-eyed Rose Kelder, with whom, Hank Yoakam joked, he was primarily in love, although Alice Kober came a close second – touching Ingrid’s arm just in case she hadn’t got the message that at 53 and thrice married he was still a man of impulsive a
ffections, a man who got crushes on clever women. But if it was true that at 21 Alice looked a little sadder, perhaps, than she should have done, her half-smile a little too strained, no one would ever have called her unfeminine.
Ingrid had been wary, at first, of Professor Henry (Hank) Yoakam, for, engaging as he was – trim-hipped, fleet of foot, un-professorial in cowboy boots – he was, nevertheless, the Boss. His was the Archive, and his, crucially, the expertise, next to which her own grasp of the field was sketchy at best. (An M.A. Edin. in Classical Archaeology and Ancient Civilisations was hardly a match for a Chair in Classics, not to mention a D. Phil dissertation analysing different scribal hands on the Linear B tablets at Knossos.)
Fearing her own eagerness, and the vulnerability that made her interpret any coolness as criticism, it seemed safer to hide behind a barrier of reserve, to remain aloof, even standoffish. Over the week she’d spent at the University, however, he had grown on her, and finally she had to admit to herself that he was a kindly sort, generous and garrulous, with an artless show-offy vanity – a good egg, in fact, if a rather scatty one.
The trouble was that liking the man didn’t make her feel any more at ease with him, but instead made her want to be liked in return, to be appreciated for her own qualities, not to mention the quality of the research documents she’d lugged down from New York – some of which he’d whisked off to xerox, but subsequently hadn’t mentioned.
To her surprise, the grandly-named Aegean Script Archive turned out to be little more than a corridor linking his office with two smaller offices shared by other members of the Classics Faculty. Hank had cleared a desk in an alcove penned in by filing cabinets, and had piled it, not with the material she’d specifically asked for, but with material she had not. Instead of Kober’s correspondence with John Franklin Daniel, which she’d repeatedly requested – to the point, she thought, of pestering – he had provided her with his own scarily erudite dissertation, sundry correspondence between Michael Ventris and Emmett Bennett from the early 1950s, after Kober was dead and gone, and also a lengthy unpublished monograph by Alice on the suffix -Inth or -Inthos in the Greek language.
Every afternoon around 4 o’clock she carried a briefcase full of photocopies back to her motel. The University campus – its walkways shaded by plutocratic trees under which students ambled, golden and privileged – was bordered on the east by a roaring Interstate.
‘That’ll be the Pan-American Highway,’ the taxi-driver had said when he dropped her at reception. ‘Yes Ma’am – all the way from Chicago to Mexico City!’
The Longhorn Motel – named, apparently, after the University football team – was a two storey building which squatted in the shadow of a flyover. From her first-floor window she counted ten lanes, with a conservative estimate of four more on the overpass, which was just too high for her to see. After the verticals of New York, she found herself with a view sectioned into horizontals: the lower lanes separated by steel barriers, then a strip of greensward planted with pink poppies; above that was a blurred line of distant trees, and a blue Texan sky neatly bisected by the parapet of the flyover.
Inside the room the noise was muffled by double-glazing, but outside it was unmitigated, deafening. In the mornings, pantechnicons sliced the low sun into strobic flashes so unnerving that she kept the heavy curtains shut tight, mindful of everything she’d ever heard about epileptic seizures.
The Longhorn’s swimming pool was separated from the Freeway by a three foot wall surmounted by a signboard in the shape of a pair of steer’s horns, some ten feet high and six feet wide. A lifebelt hung on the wall, its red and white paint flaking away; above it a faded notice prohibited eating, smoking, and the consumption of alcohol.
The interior of the pool had been painted standard turquoise, and although here and there swathes of dust gave the bottom the rugged look of a scree-slope, the water seemed clean enough.
When she lowered herself into the water and swam lustrally above the submarine scree, her peaceful passage disturbed not a teaspoonful of dust. Afterwards she climbed out and padded barefoot across the hot concrete surround. Spreading a hotel towel on a decrepit lounger, she settled down behind the minimal sound-barrier afforded by the wall and opened the file that contained Alice Kober’s -Inth monograph.
When she finished the last page late afternoon had become balmy evening; above the parapet of the flyover a pale crescent moon lounged lazily on its southerly bottom. Like a diver returning from the silence of the deep, she emerged into a different element. She was aware, once more, of car-horns, and the shriek and hiss of brakes. Tranced, she’d slipped beneath the surface of the world in which drivers forged single-mindedly towards their goal – sunglassed, looking neither to left nor right – and for an hour or more had managed to blot out the thunderstorms of sound.
Hank had told her he intended to publish the -Inth monograph, budget permitting. These days, he complained, funding passed on by without a second glance, alighting graciously on Petrochemical Sciences or Information Technology; next to those profit-generating giants, which were housed in glistening ziggurats embossed with donors’ names, Mycenology didn’t stand a chance.
‘Sometimes I think a return to the monastery system’s the only answer,’ he said bitterly. ‘We used to employ a full-time archivist, but now Maryam does it pro bono. Jesus, we can’t even pay for her flights down from Boston!’
Maryam was petite, gym-toned in blue jeans and a primrose polo shirt. Despite the early morning flight her skin was fresh, her eyes bright. She unfurled a roll of flex from her bag, crawled under the desk, and plugged it in.
‘Excuse me, got to charge my cell.’ Her movements were quick and economical, as if to emphasise that time was the enemy, the future a carrier of dust and dissolution. She pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves and opened the drawer of a filing-cabinet.‘The cigarette-carton files’ she explained, flicking a sable brush at something inside. ‘Whenever I come down I just know I’m gong to find more silverfish skeletons!’
Paper-clips had left rust-shadows on the fragile yellowed slips of paper, cut from old Church announcements and Brooklyn college flyers, and packed tightly into the famous Fleetwood cartons. The Linear B signs had been drawn with a fountain pen, in brownish ink that had faded and furred over time.
Maryam pounced on a stray paper-clip and removed it. ‘They react with the acid in the paper. One day, well.’ Her smile was doleful. ‘We did start to digitalise, but now, you know how it is, there simply isn’t the money.’
Ingrid showed her the article of Hank’s which mentioned the Kober-Daniel correspondence; she had even circled the footnote in red, in the hope that sheer embarrassment would finally jog his memory.
‘Letters from Daniel to Alice?’ Maryam shook her head, frowning. ‘I don’t remember those at all. Let me check with the Finding Aid.’
She went into one of the adjoining offices and, reappearing with an open ring-binder, marched into Hank’s office. Through the open door Ingrid could hear her scolding.
‘Well if they aren’t listed, Hank, where the hell are they?’
‘Ah yeah.’ he replied, helplessly.
Maryam emerged rolling her eyes. She took the Fleetwood cartons out of the drawer and carried them into the smaller office. ‘Got to do my health-check.’
Some time later a rodeo whoop issued from Hank’s room.
‘Even a blind squirrel!’ He appeared in the doorway barndishing a cardboard file. Lips pursed, he regarded it with mock astonishment. ‘Haven’t laid eyes on this since 1991!’
When Maryam emerged he spun on his boot-heel like a cowhand in a line dance, and gave her a bashful hangdog grin.
‘You mean to say you found them?’
‘Hey, who’d have known it?’
‘Jesus, Hank!’ Snatching the file from his hand, she rumpled her face at him. ‘I’m going to xerox these damn things right away!’
Ingrid throws her uneaten toast into the waste-bin, retrieves her lapt
op from the wardrobe, and plugs it in. If work is what keeps her feet on the ground, perhaps it will also keep the ground under her feet. The power is on, the sun is shining normally; down on the beach the sunbeds stand, paired and ready, in their rows. Apart from the arid restless wind, nothing, fundamentally, seems to have changed.
16
On the drive back from the Medusa Yiannis hadn’t been able to bring himself to come clean with Dora. Instead he’d played possum – yawned, feigned fatigue after the exertions of the dance, anything to avoid the plain truth that he didn’t want to spend the night with her. Later, pretending to sleep, he’d lain in bed fuming, because despite all his good intentions, once again he’d let inertia be his guide.
This morning he’d stripped the bed as usual and dropped the sheets into the laundry basket. On his way back from the airing cupboard with clean ones he encountered Dora, half-dressed, in the kitchen. The laundry basket sat empty on the draining-board and Dora was crouching by the washing machine, setting the dials.
‘You don’t have to do that,’ he said.
Dora smiled up at him complacently. ‘Yianni, it’s nothing.’
But Yiannis knew it wasn’t nothing. If he’d mastered the un-macho skills of cleaning, cooking, and ironing, it was because of the draconian standards of equality Karen had enforced. She’d been a hard taskmistress – How can you be a grown-up if you can’t look after yourself? she’d challenged – but she had taught him what no Greek mother ever taught a son: the basic humdrum skills required for independence.