by Lynn Freed
And then, one day, Dania suggested that writing down the difficulties I’d had with Hester over the years might help put them into manageable shape. Particularly here, at such a remove. It would be like laying a ghost, she seemed to be saying, although God knows how she’d have mangled that metaphor if she’d got hold of it.
I unscrewed my pen and wrote “Hester #1” on the first page, underlining it, marring the book for good.
* * *
Hester #1
In the time since I’d brought Hester from London to America, she’d turned from a plump, pink, earnest English schoolgirl to a sarcastic hulking American, flinging blame at me for all the unearned misery of her adolescence. There she stood at the top of the stairs in her Lanz nightie, her mouth twisted in fury. “I knew you’d forget the book!” she screamed. “That’s so typical!”
The book I’d forgotten to pick up at the bookstore was for a report she had to write during our Mexican holiday. What was really enraging her, however, was not the book but the new man in my life—the lightness he’d brought me, the dinner we’d just had, and from which I’d returned very reluctantly because the next morning she and I were to catch an early plane to Puerto Vallarta.
I looked at my watch. “Jump into something,” I said. “They close in twelve minutes. We’ll race down there and you’ll dash in and pick it up.”
None of the girls in her class had invited her to go off with them for spring break. Why should they have? She had none of the lightness that American teenagers affected. She tried to bluster her way into their company with boasts about the father she’d never known, about London, even about me and my books.
“You’re the one who forgot!” she shouted. “You go and get it!”
And so began yet another of our fights. They seemed to be visiting us more and more often these days—quick, shrieking, towering fights, with insults hurled, deep, cutting, irretrievable insults.
I walked past her and into my room. “With that attitude, you can forget about Mexico,” I said. “I’ll just cancel the tickets.”
“I’ll go anyway!” she shouted back, just as furious. “It’s my money. My father left it for me, not you!”
Which is when, in the sort of access of power that has people running out of burning buildings with grand pianos on their backs, I stormed into her room, grabbed her passport, and tore it end to end.
Even now, considering that night, and the awful week at Club Med that followed, I wonder why I didn’t tear her in half, or at least that ghastly flannel nightie. I wonder, too, at the role she has chosen for me, now that she is middle-aged, and at the way I tend to speak its lines as if they were my own, so that when, like tonight, I sense myself failing in the role, it feels like failing at being myself.
* * *
DANIA WAS THE FIRST TO notice that Bess was up to something with Dionysos, the taxi driver. For some weeks, she’d been late returning from her run to the port, and now she was staying in town for a concert in the square. Not to worry, she said, he’d drop her home afterward.
“I’m telling you,” said Dania, “it’s that taxi driver, never mind he’s so short and fet.”
When he came for Bess, he’d leave his car at the entrance to the village, and then walk to the house, waiting in the hall, just out of the sun. After they’d left, we’d open the door to the veranda to air out his cologne. “Whew!” I’d say. “Dear God! What is it?”
Bess had never learned to drive. “What for?” she said. She’d only be a danger on the road. Anyway, driving in London was madness. And driving in Greece was worse.
Still, she insisted on contributing equally to the rental of our car. That was the agreement, she said, and it wasn’t our fault that she was handicapped for normal living, just as she didn’t expect us to drive her down to the port because she happened to be addicted to urban life.
So now she had Dionysos to drive her, and what if there was a wife somewhere? Dania said. A violent Greek wife? By the sound of it, Bess herself hadn’t been far off a violent Greek wife when she’d caught Rex, her last lover, with Wilfred’s au pair. And even if, as Bess said, it wasn’t so much the dalliance as the yacht he’d chartered with her money to sail the girl around the Mediterranean—and this after the fortune he’d lost her through his harebrained schemes, reducing her from a house in St. John’s Wood to a rented dump in Camden Town—well, thank God she still had the small inheritance our grandfather had left to her mother. Which, she was always quick to add, I should consider ours, since he’d left nothing to my mother, his legitimate daughter.
“You think she goes to bed with him?” Dania said. We were sitting out on the veranda in a cloud of mosquito repellent now, a boom box throbbing down the hill. “Oy! Oy, Ruthi! Can you imagine it? With that taxi driver?”
For all her years on a kibbutz, Dania was a snob. Never mind class or money, it was education that counted for her, professional success, standing in the world.
“Male attention can be a powerful aphrodisiac,” I said, realizing as I did that, at least for my part, there also needed to be male laughter. And how much, suddenly, I missed it.
“Yes, yes, but with that taxi driver!”
“Bess is a sensualist.”
“You said it! The chocolates, the baklava—”
And on we went, cozying back into our old friendship. Perhaps, I thought, Dania had been feeling left out over the past couple of months in the face of the common ground I shared with Bess. Often we had to explain things to her about South Africa and the world we’d left behind—a phrase, a food—and Dania didn’t take easily to needing an explanation for anything. But most of all she was unsettled by Bess’s lack of ambition, the waste of her sharp-eyed intelligence on magazines and jokes.
“Now there is ringing again her phone,” she said. “Again she must have forgot to take it with her.”
“Let it ring. It’ll just go through to voice mail.”
Dania stood up. “It’s like having with us a child!”
I gazed down at the lights along the shore. Whatever Dania thought, I was pleased with the idea of Bess and Dionysos, the mad pull of a man on one’s common sense. How long had it been since I’d suffered that mad pull myself? Ages, I thought, and although it was a relief, in a way, to have it gone, still there was pleasure in remembering its power.
Dania burst onto the veranda, holding Bess’s mobile at arm’s length. “Gledness!” she said. “I do not understand one word she is saying. Is it English?”
* * *
BY THE TIME BESS RETURNED, Dania and I had forgotten completely about Dionysos.
“Gladness is in Athens!” I announced. “What the hell is going on, Bess?”
She flopped down on the window seat. “I know, I know,” she said, “but you’d never have agreed if I told you.”
“Bess! For God’s sake!” I was almost shouting. “Not even you can be that disingenuous.”
“Shhh!”
“I will not shhh!” Truly, Dania was right. It was like arguing with a child. More than this, her blithe disregard for the ethics of a situation was perfectly in keeping with what I now knew about her mother and grandmother. “Disingenuous!” I repeated. “Insincere! Dishonest! Deceitful!”
She shook out her hair, a sure sign that she was delighted with herself. “I know, I know, I’m a lousy cunt.”
Dania lifted a hand like a traffic policeman. “That is a word I do not like,” she said. “Please do not use that word, Bess.”
“Rex used it as a term of endearment.”
“He’s also the man who lost for you all your money.”
“I know, I know,” she said again, trying without success to look miserable.
“And where,” I asked, “do you propose to stash Gladness?”
But Bess had it all worked out already, of course. There was the small downstairs room behind mine, where our suitcases were kept. Or, if this didn’t suit me, the house just down the hill, the one we were going to rent in June, when the
children came. As it turned out, it belonged to Dionysos’s aunt, who was willing, he said, to rent out the small downstairs apartment. She could have it cleaned out by Wednesday.
Did the aunt know Gladness was a Zulu?
Yes, yes, of course.
And in June? When the children come?
Well, Gladdy would be there to help, of course. Never mind Wilfred’s son, never mind anything, now that Bess was getting her own way.
“I am going to bed,” said Dania. “You two must work it out.”
Bess waited to hear her door close. “Sorry, Ruth,” she whispered.
“No, you’re not.”
She laughed, entirely happy with herself. “What did she say about Dinny?”
“What have you got to say?”
She arched herself back, staring up at the ceiling. “Did you know he’s a poet?”
“I can just imagine.”
“No, really. He wrote a book. They sell it in that tobacco shop down there, where they sell the foreign newspapers. He gave me a copy.”
“In Greek?”
“Of course in Greek.”
“So, what’s the use?”
“He’ll translate them for me, he says. He translated one already. It made absolutely no sense.”
“There’s a wife somewhere, I presume?”
“She’s off on another island, visiting a sister or cousin or something. Greeks always seem to be darting around from island to island.”
“You’d better watch out, my dear. Are there children?”
“A son. In Athens.”
“So he says.”
* * *
DANIA HAD RETAINED A FEW of her patients long-distance. “They count on me,” she said, “and, look it, I can make in a few hours on the phone the rent.” With one exception, they phoned once a week at a given hour, talked for fifty minutes, and that was that till the next time. The exception was Wendy, and she was a grand nuisance for all of us. She phoned whenever she felt like it, day or night, and every time she did, Dania would snatch up her phone and stare into it as if it were a snake about to strike.
“Daniushka,” I said, “why don’t you just get rid of her? Tell her to take a running jump?”
“I don’t want Bess to know about this,” she said, glancing around.
“Why? What’s the matter?”
She shook her head. “I was stupid. I took from her some presents.”
“Presents?” The thought of Dania being won over by Gucci or Chanel was entirely delightful.
“So now I’m caught,” she said in a whisper. “Like I have a knife on my throat.”
I stared at her. “What presents?”
“It is not professional.”
Clearly, but still it seemed impossible. Dania made money easily, spent it modestly, gave it freely to her children and to Amos, the hapless lover she’d married as soon as her divorce went through. “Was Amos behind this?” I asked.
She shrugged. “He wanted badly things, all the time things. Crazy things. Even for her to help us build for the house another floor. And then, at his funeral, she was standing in the front like a wife! Like me!”
“So, just give them back! And the money for that floor!”
“I tried. When I sold the house, I even sent to her a check. But she wouldn’t cesh it. And now, if I don’t answer her call, she says she has proof—”
“That’s blackmail, Daniushka.”
“Yes, yes. And she’s very clever, too. She hecked my e-mail. Also she took one day a photo of Yael in the boots she gave me—fancy boots from England for riding a horse, can you imagine me? Ruthi, I suffer for this great guilt.”
* * *
LYING IN THE PLUNGE POOL some weeks later, I mused about Dania and the abiding mystery of her devotion to Amos. He’d hardly been a man at all when she’d first taken up with him. He’d been boyish and sarcastic, and she’d caught him out again and again with other women. So, what was it about him that had had her forgiving him each time? And then boasting about him regardless? What was it about any of us when it came to men? Why, for instance, had I married Clive? Married him without loving him? What had I known then of love anyway? Love, I’d assumed, would bend to my decisions. And, when I found it didn’t, there was Hugh to show me the way.
Just as I was winding back to Dania and the situation with Wendy—just as I was thinking that even if we understood the architecture of attraction, still we would never be able to broach the mystery at the heart of it—up onto the veranda stormed a stout, red-faced, middle-aged woman, with Gladness huffing close behind her.
Gladness had been with us for a week, folded neatly into the little downstairs room. It had its own little bathroom, which we’d had Eleftheria scrub clean, and opened onto a narrow side veranda, from which a naked flight of steps led up to the street.
“The lady she knock my door,” said Gladness, panting. “She want Bessie.”
The woman came to stand at the rim of the pool, chest heaving. She had a thatch of thick, bleached hair, scarlet talons, and small, bearlike eyes squinting into the sun.
Wendy? I thought, climbing out of the pool.
“Missus Beess?” she shrieked at me.
Not Wendy. “Mrs. Dionysos?” I said, hoping Bess wouldn’t wake earlier than usual.
She gave a hard laugh. “Missus Beess!” she spat out.
“No,” I said, sitting down to dry my feet. “Gladdy, would you show this woman out, please?”
But the woman just wheeled on Gladdy. “Get away, bleck devil!” she screamed.
“Time to go!” said Gladdy, quite unruffled. “You go now, madam!”
And just as I thought the woman would take a swing at Gladdy regardless, Dania appeared in the doorway. “Wot is going on out here?” she said. She cocked her head at the stranger. “Who is this?”
The woman stormed up to Dania now. “Missus Beess?” she said.
Dania gave me her knowing look. “No,” she said calmly, “I am Dr. Weiss. You need help?”
The woman swung her murderous glance from Dania to me and back again. And then suddenly, with all of us standing there in silence, she turned and stamped off into the house, Gladdy right behind her. We heard the front door slam, and then out onto the veranda came Gladdy, looking triumphant.
* * *
à gg, Greece
Dionysos arrived at the front door one day out of the blue, saying the house agent had sent him to help us with the Internet. She was his cousin, he said, and for any trouble we had we should ask for his help. So, when Gladdy arrived, we asked him please to put up a railing on the outside steps as twice she had almost pitched off the edge.
Safety, in ancient places, is never to be taken for granted, particularly not by women of our age, used to the predictable arrangements of modern cities. Not only do most of the stairs here have no railings, but the steps themselves can vary from an inch to a foot or more high. Cobblestones can be lethal, and thresholds death traps. I have learned to lift my feet like a soldier when I walk through the village, conscious of the dangers about which I’ve been warned, but never, until now, took to heart.
Dionysos has offered to take us around the island, show us good places to swim, and where to buy the best island ceramics. But when I ask what this will cost, he just smiles and holds up his hands, saying, Endaxi, endaxi. Bess finds out that he is a retired ship’s engineer, and owns a restaurant on the other side of the island, now closing for the winter; that taxes are iniquitous, and that he’ll accept a monthly fee to drive her wherever she wants to go. She also finds out that “ne” means “yes,” “yasas” means “hello,” and “endaxi” has nothing to do with taxis. It simply means “everything’s all right.”
Which is what it is on these lovely October days.
* * *
THE COLUMN DONE, I CLIMBED up to the main floor for lunch. My middle-of-the-night wakefulness had been returning lately, and not even the boring memoir I’d picked up at the English bookshop about life in the paradis
e of New Zealand could send me back to sleep. Then there was Gladdy, clattering upstairs every morning just before six to make early morning tea for Bess, leaving her door to blow shut behind her. Up in the kitchen, the clattering of cups and spoons woke Dania, too, who would bellow like a bull. When we complained about all this to Bess, she just said that she’d speak to Gladdy but, really, when you came to think of it, early morning tea was normal for Gladdy, normal for her as well, and couldn’t we just get some earplugs?
“Gott!” said Dania. “Arrives this slave with tea before even the sun is up, and this is normal? It’s medness.”
“Oh, come off it, Dania!” Bess snapped. “You know perfectly well the difference between a servant and a slave!” She seldom lost her temper, but when she did, her fury ran deep. “Do you play these sorts of games with your ‘patients’?” she demanded. “Or do you just boast to them the way you boast to us? Your perfect life! Your perfect books! Your perfect everything! Except one of them keeps phoning you, and that’s not exactly perfect, is it?” She huffed back on the window seat and pretended to go to sleep.
Dania raised her eyebrows at me. “The nerves of her!” she said. “Ruthi, I’m going to town. Where are the car keys?”
“I’ll come, too,” I said. “I’ll drive.”
As far as we knew, Dionysos’s wife was still on the island. Enraged wives, Dania said authoritatively, seldom just disappear. Perhaps this one hadn’t returned because Dionysos had installed a gate and a lock at the top of the outdoor steps. He’d done this for Gladdy’s sake, it seemed, as, clearly, he didn’t take his wife herself too seriously. “Maybe I give her a good—” He made spanking motions in the air, roaring into laughter.
“Gott!” said Dania.
What Dionysos did seem to take seriously, for some reason, were the phone calls from Wendy. When Dania swapped the SIM card on her phone, it took the woman only a day and a half to have the new number. Somehow, she also had my number, and Bess’s, too. Anticipating one of her sarcastic messages, or even the click of a hang-up, began to make us all jumpy. It was as if she had binoculars trained on us from somewhere across the harbor, a microphone as well. “You all having a good time?” she would say in her girlish whine. “You think I’m even interested?” Or just “Four six five eight (click)”—the last four numbers of Dania’s new bank account number.