A Sicilian friend of mine has a theory that the people of the sea are more intelligent than the people of the mountains because sea-air confers some chemical advantage to the development of the brain. The Gozitans seem not to support his theory in that, though generally good-natured when you do get through to them, they are not conversationalists or mentally agile. Rationality isn’t their strong suit either. So to-night in the bar of my hotel it takes persistence to extract from the owner’s son that the hotel is over one hundred years old and has always had the same name. For some reason he feels this is compatible with its being named after the Duke of Edinburgh who is the husband of Queen Elizabeth II. Such elementary failure of logic is what can stun you hereabouts and, as so often, one wonders whether religion be the cause or effect of such a condition. In fact the hotel must be named after the previous holder of the Edinburgh title, Prince Alfred, ‘Affie’, Queen Victoria’s fourth child, who married the daughter of Tsar Alexander II. (Subsequent research discloses that Affie was also Commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, a keen violinist, and a collector of stamps which on his death in 1900 he left to the British Museum.)
The hotel is very conveniently situated. All the amenities of the town – bank, post office, newspaper shop, the Rundle Gardens, the two theatres, the Telemalta overseas telephone service – are only a few steps from its front door. I must tell you – I was phoning from the Telemalta office yesterday and asked for a London directory. They didn’t have one; they had very few directories. ‘We have this,’ said the pretty girl, eager to help, and she handed me the directory for Costa Rica.
Good Friday. The Crucifixion of Our Lord. Why do they call it ‘good’? It’s like Sunday with knobs on, a gloom of the spirits so palpable you could bottle it and sell it as paperweights. Every flag is at half-mast. The theatres have placed crosses over their entrances and from the balcony of the Aurora two loudspeakers broadcast tapes of their brass-band blowing sedate Victorian and Italian marches and slow dance tunes, all in minor keys, with very miser-able effect. The failure to hit notes adds an extra blighted touch and all is smeared into a whine by the poor quality of the sound system. A little boy and girl holding hands stare up perplexedly at the speakers as though trying to work out how the awful noise got up there.
Gozo’s relative treelessness means that the salt air carries right across the island and when it isn’t hot this makes the air clammy and chill. There is consequently a stickiness to the bedcover over which I am this afternoon extending my limbs, with a bunch of pillows at the head, reading Pope’s The Rape of the Lock while, between verses, I fitfully consider my solitary state…There is nothing to worry about. Which can sometimes induce a free-fall vertigo because worries are the banisters of life. But at present, no free fall. Thoughts and impressions pass through me in leisurely, comprehensible chains of reflection. Yet the very blankness of the worry sheet supplies a surface on which a fine seismic needle can now and again scratch a distant unease and it takes mere moments to realise that this unease derives from the frowning one. In a busier world I’d not notice it – or him – but here… well, I suppose without unease there can be no adventure. Unease is the awareness of exposure, of possibility, that something else might happen. Unease brings alertness – which means that Gozo is not bland. The couple next door appear to have left. I am now the hotel’s only guest. I wonder if I shall be the only person in the building when they close up at night. I do hope not. From the balcony the garden looks dull and damp. I come back in and give the book on the bed a shove with my knee. A shudder passes between my shoulderblades. I look round, and again I look round. My pulse quickens. Suddenly I am anxious.
The island still has a touch of what the Mediterranean had before tourism hit it, a self-sufficient character which is intimately connected to its drawbacks. Don’t moan so much about the food. Good food demands a more aggressive culture. And if British rule must take some responsibility for the dreadfulness of the food, it can also take some for the probity of the population, both features being untypical of the southern world. Gozo will do you no violence. Even the dogs are gentler than Sicilian dogs. And I haven’t seen a single beggar here, nor on Malta, not a single one. As I’m reminding myself of all this, a church bell begins to toll, not a carillon jangle but a bell single and sweet, and I feel the fear seep out of me. With every successive clang I am calmed. Surely the point of religion is to present existence in a positive light and to keep evil spirits in check. But religion doesn’t do that. It emphasises our failings, our sins, our worthlessness, the ghastly destiny which awaits those who do not obey. Heaven becomes absurdly remote, nirvana an impossibility except via tortuous paths. Nearly all theology is a form of nightmare. But a few sweet things do sometimes come through. The lighting of a candle for example. Or the beauty of a quiet old building when the inane squeal of theology is stoppered. Or the sound of this single bell. It is now 10.45 pm and stepping on to the balcony I see a cross of golden lightbulbs on top of a church, greeting me over the roofs of the town, including me, embosoming me, piercing the circumference of the self so that any lingering fretfulness leaks away and I flow in a larger, more benign rhythm. This I believe is what is meant by communion. I fire up the water-heater and run a scalding bath. On this night I sleep very well.
Thus far the rain has held off but the Easter weather is not good. On Saturday powerful gales drive across the island from the direction of Greece and the sky is skidding lead. At Ramla Bay, shielded by shrubbery, Gregory says ‘I’m sorry about the weather’ in his carefully modulated Harvard voice, as though the climate were his personal responsibility.
‘It’s OK. It makes it like Cornwall,’ I say. ‘Will you swim?’
‘This very second.’
He peels off his knitted salmon skin and totters down the sand into a heavy sea, a fragile but somehow protected figure. One does not fear for him. Periodically his head becomes visible; occasionally a flailing arm. Five minutes later he’s staggering back up the beach, murmuring ‘Oh God…oh God…’
‘Isn’t it dangerous?’
‘Yes. This sort of weather can generate a terrific current in the bay like a fast-flowing river. But I know where to go, along by those rocks.’
‘Those mucky rocks. I was reading The Rape of the Lock and –’
‘I love that bit at the end,’ he says, ‘about the birth of a comet. The heavens bespangling with dishevelled light…’
His quotation so charms me that I forget what I was myself going to say about the poem, and mention instead that ‘I thought I’d drive over to Marsalforn and check it out. Would you like to come?’
‘That’s kind of you. But I’m waiting for someone. In fact he may not turn up, but I’ll wait anyway, in case he does.’
Over at Marsalforn, Gozo’s main and shabby tourist resort, the sea is in magnificent uproar. Waves crash across the promenade and girls shriek with delight at the rocketing douches. Young bloods cruise slowly in dilapidated fuckmobiles and a large party of London school-children, wearing dayglo clothes and with sharp haircuts, gossip furiously in a café – their animation marking them out as not local.
At teatime the rain arrives, sluicing the island without pause. Back at the hotel a mothers’ meeting is going on in the Cotswold bar among a caterwaul of babies. Big Bertha waves to me from the dining-room. She is doing her best to be a waitress but ‘grace under pressure’ is not a characteristic of hers. On her way to the kitchen she asks ‘How is Princess Diana?’
‘Very well thank-you.’
‘But they say she is sad in the newspaper.’
‘Yes, I think she is.’
‘You know her?’
‘No, I don’t know her.’
‘But you have met her?’ she asks, with a forward, beseeching movement of her shoulders, as though to be with one who’s been with the Princess Diana would bestow a rosy light.
‘I’m afraid not. But she once sat behind us at a Tina Turner concert.’
‘We love Diana.’
Ah, yes, the Princess – it is remarkable how so many people whom Diana has never met, and does not know, have intimate and rewarding relations with her. I think even her enemies in England find themselves helplessly excited and gilded by the fact that the most glamorous woman on the planet is English and that in consequence our whole society there is lifted up a little more by the world’s attention. I’d been with my friend Von at that Tina Turner concert – one of Tina Turner’s numerous ‘farewell’ concerts – it was at Woburn Abbey – and Princess Diana is probably the only woman alive who could have upstaged Tina. But she did it in the most bashful way, arriving unaccompanied except for bodyguards, giving a self-deprecating little wave when she was picked out by a spotlight as she took her seat, to a huge cheer of appreciation from the audience. One of the detectives sat on Von’s left, and turning to him she said ‘Di’s the first royal to show her knees’ (the detective replied ‘Is that so, love?’).
The hotel owner’s son is also in the bar, babyfying, and I tell him how I’ve fallen in love with his hotel.
‘Oh good,’ he replies, ‘and it will be even better soon.’
‘What do you mean, better?’
‘We will develop.’
I go cold. ‘Develop?’
‘The bank won’t lend us money for improvement unless we become a four-star hotel and the Government won’t give us four stars unless we do the improvement – so to get the loan we must demolish the hotel.’
I feel slapped. He must have noticed this in my expression because he adds ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll keep the facade on the street. We’ll certainly keep the facade.’
‘But the place is as solid as a rock. It doesn’t need demolition. That’s a complete waste of money.’
‘You should write and tell our bank manager.’
‘So what about the high ceilings and fans and the flowery, tiled floors?’
‘Bulldozer.’
‘It’s mad.’
‘That’s what my father says.’
‘And Big Bertha?’
‘Who?’
‘Can I have a whisky?’
Certainly there is case for doing the place up. It’s not making the best use of itself. But really the nineteenth-century front half and the nineteen-twenties back half need only a clever, caring hand to turn this into a smart operation. That’s probably what’s missing. The cleverness.
‘So after the summer,’ he says, ‘the bulldozers arrive. September 1st.’
I clutch at a straw. ‘Why not demolish the nineteen-twenties bit at the back and keep the rest?’ ‘No. Demolish all.’
That’s right. All. And they won’t retain the street facade. Of course they won’t. Too much trouble. They’ll get rid of the lot and stick up a box. I reach my room in despair, wade through a packet of dates, and pop a vitamin pill, while the rain pours down the window. This is the only hotel on Gozo with any history or personality. Therefore it has to be demolished. Haven’t they heard, in this wretched ditch of blinkered bank managers, that these days you restore? Sense of place is in, mate! The fading royal photographs, the imperial plaudits from the Palace at Valletta, the spacious period charm, everything will be swept away. Already I am mourning the hotel’s death, seeing clearly that the room wherein I lie will be two rooms, maybe four, a new floor slicing horizontally through my ribcage, an air-conditioned blast stinging the nostrils, polyester sheets bringing on prickly heat.
I pour a big glass of Bacchus, not a good idea on top of whisky. Suddenly the ghosts of the place are very strong, aroused by imminent obliteration – scraps of chat about garden parties and illicit sex, threaded by echoes of foxtrot music – yes, the English this way came, bearing cocktails and epaulettes – you can hear them laughing and sighing, drinking, ruling, playing gramophone records and tennis, being languidly noble and controlling continents with a sardonic remark or a casual gesture born of romance and rectitude and boredom and fun, their blue eyes looking across a blue sea to beyond the horizon – nostalgia hisses into the room like a gas, as asphyxiating as a faceful of Pre-Raphaelite arum lilies. Nostalgia, loss, melancholy, are these not forms of love?
Actually I feel awful. More Bacchus wine please. Yes, such a charming label. I must take a few bottles away with me. Because I shall leave Gozo now. Can’t live here for ever, after all. The clock which stopped is moving once more. Time starts eating again, with a crunchy noise like that of the deathwatch beetle.
Easter Sunday. I drive to Ramla to say good-bye to Gregory – he is, as always, there. And so, to my great surprise and fascination, is – the frowning one. In a small place such as Gozo I must have seen a number of strangers several times over, but because they have not attracted my attention these recurrences pass unnoticed, fail to be granted the accolade of ‘synchronicity’. Not the frowning one however. Him I notice every time. And to-day he is not frowning but playing on the sand with two toddlers, obviously his own, while a young woman, obviously his wife, looks placidly on. The weather is better than yesterday’s and quite warm and the sun is out. Even so, he’s the only man on the beach who’s taken his top off. Once in a while he stands hands on hips, looking round, displaying the T-shape of hair on his muscled chest. The four of them potter for a further fifteen minutes or so, the man readopts his shirt, and they clamber into an old jalopy and drive off.
‘I’m leaving to-morrow.’
‘Ah…Come back again one day,’ says Gregory.
‘Yes, I shall. Perhaps I shall.’
For an Easter holiday the beach is surprisingly deserted. A couple walking dogs, three schoolboys sitting on scooters near the snack-van. We talk about the food situation, our experiences taking LSD, odds and ends. It’s very restful.
‘They are going to pull down the Duke of Edinburgh Hotel,’ I say.
‘Are they?’ Gregory responds vaguely. ‘That’s a shame. I haven’t been there for years. Here, let me give you this.’
He pulls a bag from under a bush and forages in it and produces a small painting done on a square of hardboard. It is vaguely Islamic in manner, with some kind of gold lettering appearing out of a cosmic whoosh, but subtle.
‘Oh, Gregory, that’s so kind. What do the letters say?’
‘Don’t worry about that. It’s my own language. Look – the sun’s come out.’
‘Your own language?’
‘Yes. I invented a language. And an alphabet to go with it.’
‘Gregory, excuse me for a moment.’
I break away, churlishly in the circumstances. But it’s because I’ve spotted – guess who. He’s in the distance but I recognise the frowning one immediately. He must have dropped the family at home and come out again, for he’s by himself, walking with determined stride round the rocky headland where I spied him once before. As I jog across the beach he turns a corner out of my sight but I keep following, climbing energetically beyond the tar line. I’m excited. The Spanish poet Cernuda refers somewhere to being ‘sweetly confused, like a man anticipating some pleasure,’ and Eric Rohmer in one of his films mentions the torments of anticipation. It’s something like that, but more – I am in pursuit.
The route grows more awkward, the rocks more extravagantly shaped. I’m slowed right down and find myself scrambling through what resembles a lunar landscape of mini-ravines and crags. I’ve never been this far round. Tumbled boulders form small enclosed spaces. Here and there, the stone has been worn flat by the diluvial lick – hidden sunbathing nooks in the season but now as silent as the grave.
Pausing to catch my breath, I scan for indications. Perhaps he knew a shortcut to wherever he’s going, a secret passage through the maze of rocks. The terrain slopes sharply up from the shore and it looks as though in a couple of places there has been recent landslip…Then I register – not a noise exactly – perhaps a signal slightly beyond the range of the conscious senses – anyway a piece of information which causes me to climb carefully and peer between rocks.
Not far away, in a sheltered scoop, I
see him. His clothes have been removed and lie in a jumbled heap. He is naked, his shaggy haunches moving slowly against someone, who is also naked. The golden expanse of his back prevents disclosure of who the other is and anyway they are kissing softly, face to face. He stops, twists his torso, turns his head and sees me.
Blood rushes up through my whole body, tingling hotly into head and face. He turns further. There is a flash of white teeth – he’s grinning! His erect penis bobs in the sunshine. He makes a gesture to me with his left arm and turns back to his partner, a young male. The gesture was entirely ambiguous. It could have meant either go away, you intruder, or come, join us in pleasure. When I was a little boy, if some uncertainty was frightening – if I thought I saw a ghost or someone’s behaviour confounded me – my whole instinct was to run towards the uncertainty in order to resolve it and dispel it. In growing up I’ve acquired skills and knowledge and experience, but at heart how much more am I than that little boy? Perhaps I am less in resilience and courage. But of course little boys aren’t consciously sexual. Sexual awakening brings doubt, and with doubt the hiatus of hesitation and the possibility of misunderstanding. Little boys are active; they don’t understand. For several moments, my heart thumping painfully, I am spellbound by the secret lovers. But it is too much, I must escape this quandary, and instead of going towards them, I scurry quickly away over the rocks like a frightened crab. By the time the sand is reached, my body and mind have become amazingly focused and my whole being overtaken by the profoundest dissatisfaction. And Gregory has packed up and gone home.
How to Disappear Page 3