Corfu

by Robert Dessaix

  This is a terribly difficult letter to write, but write it I must. At the very least I owe you an explanation.

  When you suggested we meet up in Italy and then set out for home together, I agreed without a moment’s hesitation. And I meant it. I didn’t say ‘yes’ lightly.

  No, I didn’t. I’d first seen William some eighteen months before the Roman fiasco, on a nose-pinchingly cold November evening in an Indian take-away in North London. A few of us had popped up to the Shalimar on the Holloway Road to pick up some curries and chapatis – it was our first read-through of The Cherry Orchard, and all of a sudden between Acts II and III we’d felt tired and overexcited, needing the distraction of food. William, who was designing, hadn’t been there earlier. He must have arrived at Clive’s house just after we’d set off and been sent on to join us at the Shalimar. In he came, breezy but with a hint of shyness, in a floppy knitted top and black jeans, to join the gang. How flattering floppiness is to the slim. Late twenties, cropped black hair, a sculpted look – but by a rough hand. I didn’t realize I’d particularly noticed him – after all, everyone that first evening was new and intriguing (except Leila, whom I’d known for years – she was playing Ranyevskaya, a part she scarcely had to act) – until I saw Leila huddled with him by the door, warmly cocooned with him, ignoring the rest of us.

  Astonishingly, a tingle of jealousy started up at the back of my throat. I watched Leila’s slender fingers straying across this young man’s shoulder-blades, her fingernails flashing mauve in the neon light. Taken by surprise, I put the whole thing down at first to the overpowering smell of curry and Leila’s cigarillo.

  As we walked back to Clive’s terrace, William stayed glued to Leila, I remember, with Gareth, who was Welsh and eager to be noticed, nudging at them like a silly puppy despite his years. At this early stage, of course, we were all still sniffing each other out, so it wasn’t quite clear who Gareth hoped to be noticed by. Anyone, probably. He was playing Leila’s nincompoop of a brother, Gayev.

  That first night we couldn’t get the comedy of The Cherry Orchard to shine through at all. Cooped up in Clive’s living-room, with its distressing wallpaper and too few chairs, we found the play unsettling, tragic, heart-breaking, pathetic, trivial, even silly, but not comic. Yet Chekhov had called his play ‘funny, very funny’, and at the top of page one in black and white it said quite unambiguously:

  THE CHERRY ORCHARD

  A comedy in four acts

  This would eat away at us for days. To start with Leila tried camping it up, which was disastrous, while Gareth simply opted for playing the ninny, which was embarrassing. We couldn’t strike the right note. Clive, who’d had a smash hit with The Seagull the previous summer, just kept saying: ‘Look, it’s all there, the comedy is all there in the lines, there’s no need to work at it. This is a soufflé, not a suet pudding. Just find the truth of it.’ I hate it when directors mention truth.

  But I ask you: a blowsy, hare-brained aristocrat, Ranyevskaya, comes home to her estate in some God-forsaken corner of Russia from Paris, penniless, ruined, emotionally ragged; she cries a lot, remembers things, blubs some more, throws a party and loses her estate, along with her precious cherry orchard, to a hard-headed businessman who starts chopping the trees down before she even has time to catch the train back to Paris. Is this funny? While she mooches about sniffling into sodden handkerchiefs, her children and various other hangers-on walk in and out droning on about money, love, radiant futures, pickled cucumbers and all sorts of other Russian nonsense. Is this comic? Ludicrous, perhaps, or even pathetic, but hardly comic.

  Yet Clive did have a point. It’s maddening to have to admit it, but there was something in Chekhov’s straggly, often preposterous lines which was disarmingly ‘true’ – and not only about turn-of-the-century Russia, either, but of everyone in that North London flat. And when we hit on it, it made us want to laugh.

  For the rest of that evening William, as designer, just sat on the floor by the window in the shadows, half-lit by the tasselled standard lamp, listening. I knew he was there, I was aware of the rough-cut hair and watching eyes, but didn’t know if I was being watched, as it were, or if his eyes were on Chekhov.

  When we started to break up, something quite unexpected happened. Only two of us were left to walk up the road to the Underground – William and me. The others had all quickly melted into the fog or jumped into their cars and driven off. Even Leila, who just called out ‘Bye, darlings!’ as she jumped into her car and chugged off. Offering a lift on the first night could lead to awkwardnesses later on. I admit I felt a little prickle of pleasure.

  ‘Feel like a coffee?’ he said suddenly, as we ambled up the hill.

  ‘Why not?’ I said, although I didn’t want a coffee at all. The tingle at the back of my throat again. It was disconcerting, completely unforeseen. Well, almost completely. Certainly, from time to time since my divorce I’d caught myself looking – I may have been invisible, but I could still see. On trains, say, or on escalators or in cafés, I admit I’d sometimes found my eyes flicking across calves and t-shirted chests, or resting briefly on the backs of necks and strong, bluish jawlines – but my throat had never once gone dry. And I’d hardly been aware of any impulse to reach out and touch.

  ‘It’s so scungy around here this time of night – let’s go back to my place.’ Scungy. No Englishman would say that. Unexpectedly, I thought of Adelaide.

  ‘OK. Let’s grab a taxi.’

  Nothing happened in William’s flat that night, needless to say: we just drank coffee and skipped across the surface of things – Chekhov, William’s guitar lessons, and Adelaide, as a matter of fact, which was where his parents turned out to be living and where he’d first started dabbling in the theatre (‘ages ago’ – four years before). He hated Adelaide, he said, although I sensed he missed it. We weren’t really talking about Chekhov, guitars or Adelaide, obviously, or only in order to mark out a space for something else to happen in. But nothing did. Except the toppling.

  By midnight the slow toppling had begun and it was already too late to regain my balance. The mauve fingernails on the shoulder-blades, the whiff of coriander, the expectant glances, the glow of the tasselled lamp, scungy – trifles, pinpricks – had already clustered into an instant after which it was already too late. It’s only in retrospect, of course, that I can say that.

  ‘When you were reading,’ he said, after a longish pause well past midnight, ‘you were kind of transparent. It was great!’

  I was shocked. What had he seen through to, exactly? Gathering up my script and coat, I leapt to my feet and made to go. He didn’t move. So, not knowing what to do next, I bent over him and kissed his forehead. It may have been a mistake, but, after all, I am an actor.

  ‘See you Tuesday,’ he said. ‘It’s been fun.’ And sat cross-legged on the couch while I let myself out.

  Not a taxi in sight. I set off home on foot.

  Transparent. It wasn’t a word I’d thought much about, to be honest. Sometimes when you meet somebody – over dinner, in a foyer, even at a bus-stop – you have the immediate feeling that you are seeing straight through something to a life being lived right at that very instant – the real one. Straight through what, I’m not sure – speech, gestures, clothes, looks … although those words don’t quite cover it. And at such moments you’re apt suddenly to feel translucent yourself – uncovered, not quite there, while at the same time more solidly alive and yourself than you usually are.

  What I can’t work out is whether this feeling of transparency strikes you because of all the things in the way – the timbre of the voice, the cocking of the head, the lamplight on the hair, the angle of the knees – or despite them. Or is it the same thing?

  When I eventually got back to the Holloway Road and was passing the Shalimar, now closed, the blue neon sign hit me with an almost blinding brilliance, and I realized, as the lingering smell of curried lamb pinched my nostrils, that I was experiencing a blue transparen
t moment right then and there in the empty street. It passed, of course.

  See you Tuesday. Sitting at Kester’s desk in Gastouri this afternoon a year and a half later I could still hear those four syllables as clearly as if William had just spoken them, standing behind my chair. So banal and said with such nonchalance, almost jauntily, yet brimming over with every meaning ever dreamt of. Or else no meaning at all.

  On the Tuesday we read through Act III. Such a painful act – the stupid party Ranyevskaya throws while her estate is being auctioned off, while she’s losing everything she loves and ruining everybody. It’s painful for everyone, it’s an orgy of humiliation and despair. And terribly funny, according to Clive, an expert in all things Russian.

  ‘Remember, it’s vaudeville with feeling,’ he said to us as we were about to begin. Then, quite pleased with his little bon mot, he said it again.

  Act III was particularly crushing for me. I was playing Peter Trofimov, the risible, moth-eaten, bespectacled, eternal student and former tutor of Ranyevskaya’s drowned son. It hardly mattered that I was rather older than Trofimov, who seems to have been just under thirty – after all, everyone keeps telling me how old and ugly I’ve become since Ranyevskaya went away to Paris. ‘Why have you lost all your looks, Peter? Why have you got so old? You were just a boy when I went away …’ Leila loved saying that to me, I’m convinced, although she had a stab at fond pity.

  It’s in Act III that I mock Ranyevskaya’s dreary foster-daughter Varya, the would-be nun. ‘If only we had some money,’ she bleats, ‘even just a little, I’d give everything up and go away. I’d go into a monastery.’ Piffle! She’s avid for money and all it can buy – and for sex, needless to say, although ‘love’ or ‘marriage to a good man’ would be how she’d put it. And so I mock her. Just one or two barbed words. Like all righteous people, I am merciless. Her mother – almost spongy from all her illicit loves – tries to protect her from me.

  RANYEVSKAYA: Don’t tease her, Peter, you can see how distressed she is already.

  TROFIMOV: She’s got a one-track mind, she’s too pushy by half, always poking her nose in where it’s not wanted. We’ve had no peace from her all summer, Anya and I. She’s afraid we might start an affair. What business is it of hers? Anyway, I haven’t given her the slightest cause to think such a thing. That kind of vulgarity is foreign to me. Anya and I are above love.

  RANYEVSKAYA: Yes, well, I must be below it.

  Absolutely. She’s drowning in love, raddled with it, mostly for men who mistreat her. And for her daughters and servants and old furniture and the cherry orchard and Russia, of course … all the things she’s throwing away as the orchestra plays on.

  RANYEVSKAYA: The reason you can resolve all life’s important questions, Peter, dear, is that you haven’t yet had to suffer through a single one of them … I was born here, after all, my mother and father lived here, and my grandfather … I love this house, I can’t even imagine life without my cherry orchard, and if it has to be sold, then I might as well be sold along with it. (She embraces Trofimov and kisses him on the forehead) And my son drowned here … (Cries.) Have some pity on me, Peter, my good, kind Peter.

  TROFIMOV: You have my wholehearted sympathy, Lyubov Andreyevna, you know that.

  However, when I call her Parisian lover a no-good nothing of a man, no better than a petty thief (she’s squandered everything on him), something inside her hardens and she hits me right between the eyes:

  RANYEVSKAYA: It’s time you became a man, Peter, at your age it’s time you understood people who love people. And it’s time you loved someone yourself … time you fell in love. (Angrily.) Yes, it is! You’re not pure, you’re just a prude, just a ridiculous crank, you’re unnatural … ‘I’m above love’! You’re not above love, you’re just a nitwit. Fancy not having a lover at your age!

  TROFIMOV: (In horror.) This is horrible! What is she saying? (Leaves the room, clutching his head.) This is horrible! I can’t take this, I’m leaving … (Leaves, but immediately comes back in.) It’s all over between us! (Goes out.)

  RANYEVSKAYA: (Calling after him.) Peter, wait! What a funny man you are, Peter, I was joking! Peter!

  Someone can be heard rapidly going down a staircase and then noisily falling down the stairs. Anya and Varya scream, but then straight away start laughing.

  I was sweating profusely by the time we finished that little scene, I might say. Over by the window on his beanbag in the corner, those knees tucked up under his bluish, unshaven chin, William was laughing along with the two hysterical sisters. Then one or two of the others seemed to catch the mood and joined in. Alex, the snub-nosed young woman with the red hair playing Anya, had a coughing fit and had to be given a drink of water.

  ’Very good!’ said Clive, in his usual businesslike way. ‘Very good! Almost believable.’

  But it was unfair, that laughter. If Trofimov was a high-minded prig, clothing his shyness and lack of experience in grand phrases about being above sordid, everyday feelings, then Ranyevskaya and her daughters were just as uncomprehending, just as pitiless towards my failure to be a man.

  Soon afterwards we called it a night. This time, when William turned to me, whipping his scarf across one shoulder, to see if I was ready to set off for the station, I said I thought I’d walk home. ‘I need to clear my head,’ I said.

  ‘See you Thursday, then,’ he said with a friendly grin, unfazed. But on the Thursday the beanbag by the window stayed empty.

  5

  On the subject of Greek driftwood, by the way, and getting entangled in it, Sisi was a classic case. Having a terrible weakness for palaces, by which I really mean palazzi, not castles, châteaux or anything English, I strolled up the hill the next morning to cast an eye over the strange white building, so out of place in this higgledy-piggledy village, which, from my window, I could see on the crest above the sea. I was hoping for a tonic.

  It was built, as it turns out, by that stupendously miserable creature Elisabeth, Empress of Austria – Sisi, as everyone called her with a mixture of affection, pity and disdain. Hopelessly adrift on dreams of Homer, Sisi called her palace the Achilleon.

  Sisi was in love with loveliness – her own mostly, to be frank, which was the talk of Europe, but also Corfu’s orange-scented beauty, aglow with drifts of golden broom when she first saw it as a young woman. But she had little eye for beauty of more cultivated kinds. In 1887, at the age of fifty, she took a perfectly nice old Venetian villa, perched idyllically on the edge of an escarpment with views across the town and the glittering straits to Albania, and turned it into this lumpish little Schloss with classical pretensions. ‘At last I’ve come home,’ she said, and in a sense she had.

  It was the perfect place for an unhappy empress to wait for death, gracefully, amidst olives and myrtles, and that’s why she had it built – God knows, she didn’t want to die in Vienna surrounded by all those lunatics her family swarmed with, her nagging mother-in-law and her sour Hungarian ladies-in-waiting. In the event, however, even dying proved boring and she moved disconsolately on. Out strolling on the quay in Geneva one afternoon some years later, she was knifed to death by an Italian anarchist. Just a tiny puncture with a stiletto – she hardly bled a drop.

  As you wander through the Achilleon’s coldly vulgar rooms, you can picture the amber-eyed empress mooching about absently, vaporously, a volume of Heine in one hand (Heine’s ghost came to her in the night), a fine lace shawl across her shoulders, one of her emerald-studded belts around her tiny waist, wondering if she’d really come to rest at last after a lifetime of wandering, looking for … what, exactly? Tranquillity? Solitude? Certainly not love – Sisi craved adoration, not love. I’m tempted to suggest insignificance.

  In this white palace it was, a hundred years ago, as age crept up on her, that she bathed in warm seawater poured from gilded taps, here she lay in wet sheets impregnated with seaweed to slim her waist, here she spent hours of a morning dressing her famous auburn hair, here she lay on her
leopard-skin couch to be oiled and pummelled by her masseuse … all in vain. ‘As fresh and unspoilt as a green, half-opened almond’, she had been when she’d first met Franz Joseph in the Austrian mountains. Or so her smitten husband-to-be wrote of her. Well, in Vienna’s desiccating air she’d dried and cracked in no time at all, and by the time she took up residence here in the Achilleon it was too late for unguents and deep massages. She’d become that worst, that most unqueenly of things – spry for her age. And her only companion was an over-scented local hunchback, her tutor in Greek, Christomanos. Together this unregal pair would tramp at a furious pace up and down the hills through the olive-groves, discussing Homer and the futility of everything. The peasants round about called her ‘the locomotive’.

  But I must say, after staring at her palace from my window for several weeks, that I’ve grown rather fond of Sisi. This was her fairy palace, this was how she madly imagined that Alcinous, King of the Phaeacians, had lived here on this island three thousand years before. I like the craziness of those dreams. Yet what does Homer actually say about Alcinous’ ‘resplendent halls’, his ‘famous house’ which once (if ever it existed) soared, high-roofed, amongst orchards of pears and pomegranates, teeming vineyards, rippling springs and groves of figs and olives, somewhere down near the present Hilton? As Odysseus crossed the palace’s bronze threshold. Homer says, he saw:

  Walls plated in bronze, crowned with a circling frieze glazed as blue as lapis, ran to left and right from outer gates to the deepest court recess and solid golden doors enclosed the palace. Up from the bronze threshold silver doorposts rose with silver lintel above, and golden handle hooks.

  And dogs of gold and silver were stationed either side, forged by the god of fire with all his cunning craft to keep watch on generous King Alcinous’ palace, his immortal guard-dogs, ageless, all their days.