A minute later I was walking fast down the path towards the gate. But even then, as I came to the trees, I looked back and hoped, with one thousandth of a hope, that someone might be beckoning me back.
But no one was; so I set out for my faute de mieux.
38
Athens was dust and drought, ochre and drab. Even the palm trees looked exhausted; all the humanity in human beings had retreated behind dark skins and even darker glasses. At two in the afternoon city and citizens gave up; the streets were empty, abandoned to indolence and heat. I lay slumped behind shutters on a bed in the Piraeus hotel, and dozed fitfully. The city was doubly too much for me. After Bourani, the descent back into the age, the machinery, the stress, was completely disorientating.
The afternoon dragged out its listless hours. The closer I came to meeting Alison, the more muddle-motived I grew. I knew that if I was in Athens at all, it was mainly out of spite. Six days before it had not been too difficult to think of her as something that could be used if nothing better turned up; but two hours before changed my meanness into guilt. In any case, I no longer wanted sex with her. It was unthinkable—not because of her, but because of Lily. I wanted neither to deceive Alison nor to get involved with her; and it seemed to me that there was only one pretext that would do what I required: make her sorry for me and make her keep at arm’s length.
At five I got up, had a shower, and caught a taxi out to the airport. I sat on a bench opposite the long reception counter, then moved away; finding, to my irritation, that I was increasingly nervous. Several other air hostesses passed quickly—hard, trim, professionally pretty, mechanically sexy; more in love with looking attractive than being it. Six came, six fifteen. I goaded myself to walk up to the counter. There was a girl there in the tight uniform, with flashing white teeth and dark-brown eyes whose innuendoes seemed put on with the rest of her lavish makeup.
“I’m supposed to be meeting one of your girls. Alison Kelly.”
“Allie? Her flight’s in. She’ll be changing.” She picked up a telephone, dialed a number, gleamed her teeth at me. Her accent was impeccable; and American. “Allie? Your date’s here. If you don’t come right away he’s taking me instead.” She held out the receiver. “She wants to speak to you.”
“Tell her I’ll wait. Not to hurry.”
“He’s shy.” Alison must have said something, because the girl smiled. She put the phone down.
“She’ll be right across.”
“What did she say then?”
“She said you’re not shy, it’s just your technique.”
“Oh.”
She gave me what was meant to be a coolly audacious look between her long black eyelashes, then turned to deal with two women who had mercifully appeared at the other end of her section of the counter. I escaped and went and stood near the entrance. When I had first lived on the island, Athens, the city life, had seemed like a normalizing influence, as desirable as it was still familiar. Now I realized that it began to frighten me, that I loathed it; the slick exchange at the desk, its blatant implications of sex, contracepted excitement, the next stereotyped thrill. I came from another planet.
A minute or two later Alison appeared through the door. Her hair was short, too short, she was wearing a white dress, and immediately we were on the wrong foot, because I knew she had worn it to remind me of our first meeting. Her skin was paler than I remembered. She took off her dark glasses when she saw me and I could see she was tired, her most bruised. Pretty enough body, pretty enough clothes, a good walk, the same old wounded face and truth-seeking eyes. Alison might launch ten ships in me; but Lily launched a thousand. She came and stood and we gave each other a little smile.
“Hi.”
“Hello, Alison.”
“Sorry. Late as usual.”
She spoke as if we had last met the week before. But it didn’t work. The nine months stood like a sieve between us, through which words came, but none of the emotions.
“Shall we go?”
I took the airline bag she was carrying and led her out to a taxi. Inside we sat in opposite corners and looked at each other again. She smiled.
“I thought you wouldn’t come.”
“I didn’t know where to send my refusal.”
“I was cunning.”
She looked out of the window, waved to a man in uniform. She looked older to me, overexperienced by travel; needing to be known all over again, and I hadn’t the energy.
“I’ve got you a room overlooking the port.”
“Fine.”
“They’re so bloody stuffy in Greek hotels. You know.”
“Toujours the done thing.” She gave me a brief ironic look from her gray eyes, then covered up. “It’s fun. Vive the done thing.” I nearly made my prepared speech, but it annoyed me that she assumed I hadn’t changed, was still slave to English convention; it even annoyed me that she felt she had to cover up.
“Your hair.”
“You don’t like it.”
“Not used to it.”
She held out her hand and I took it and we pressed fingers. Then she reached out and took off my dark glasses.
“You look devastatingly handsome now. Do you know that? You’re so brown. Dried in the sun, sort of beginning to be ravaged. Jesus, when you’re forty.”
I remembered Lily’s prophecy, I remembered—that evening I never forgot—Lily. I smiled, but I looked down and let go of her hand to get a cigarette. I knew what her flattery meant; the invitation extended.
“Alison, I’m in a sort of weird situation.”
It knocked all the false lightness out of her. She looked straight ahead.
“Another girl?”
“No.” She flashed a look at me. “I’ve changed, I don’t know how one begins to explain things.”
“But you wish to God I’d kept away.”
“No, I’m… glad you’ve come.” She glanced at me suspiciously again. “Really.”
She was silent for a few moments. We moved out onto the coast road.
“I’m through with Pete.”
“You said.”
“I forgot.” But I knew she hadn’t.
“Was he fed up?”
“And I’ve been through with everyone else since I’ve been through with him.” She kept staring out of the window. “Sorry. I ought to have started with the small talk.”
“No. I mean… you know.”
She slid another look at me; hurt and trying not to be hurt. She made an effort. “I’m living with Ann again. Only since last week. Back in the old flat. Maggie’s gone home.”
“I liked Ann.”
“Yes, she’s nice.”
There was a long silence as we drove down past Phaleron. She stared out of the window and after a minute reached into her white handbag and took out her dark glasses. I knew why, I could see the lines of wet light round her eyes. I didn’t touch her, take her hand, but I talked about the difference between the Piraeus and Athens, how the former was more picturesque, more Greek, and I thought she’d like it better. I had really chosen the Piraeus because of the small, but horrifying, possibility of running into Conchis and Lily. The thought of her cool, amused and probably contemptuous eyes if such a thing happened sent shivers down my spine. There was something about Alison’s manner and appearance; if a man was with her, he went to bed with her. And as I talked, I wondered how we were going to survive the next three days.
* * *
I tipped the boy and he left the room. She went to the window and looked down across the broad white quay, the slow crowds of evening strollers, the busy port. I stood behind her. After a moment’s swift calculation I put my arm around her and at once she leant against me.
“I hate cities. I hate airplanes. I want to live in a cottage in Ireland.”
“Why Ireland?”
“Somewhere I’ve never been.”
I could feel the warmth, the willingness to surrender, of her body. At any moment she would turn her face and I
would have to kiss her.
“Alison, I… don’t quite know how to break the news.” I took my arm away, and stood closer to the window, so that she could not see my face. “I caught a disease two or three months ago. Well… syphilis.” I turned and she gave me a look—concern and shock and incredulity. “I’m all right now, but… you know. I can’t possibly…”
“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 red-light 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.”
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