Corfu

by Robert Dessaix

  Inside to left and right, in a long unbroken row from farthest outer gate to the inmost chamber, thrones stood backed against the wall, each draped with a finely spun brocade, women’s handsome work.

  Here the Phaeacian lords would sit enthroned, dining, drinking – the feast flowed on forever.

  Yet what did I see? A few bronze nymphs with electric torches, illuminated bowls of glass fruit and dozens of bad paintings scattered about a suburban mansion with fake pillars tacked onto it. The casino on the second floor was a stroke of genius.

  Yet … what can I say? The woman who dreamt all this up, the woman who fled Vienna’s brilliant court and her extraordinary family of emperors, dukes, archduchesses and queens spread across the world from Mexico to Budapest, in order to be nobody, to come to rest and just be herself, this woman set off sparks inside me. Her moonstruck life was a stupendous failure, and failure on that scale is fascinating.

  How often, I wonder, did she think back to her childhood, before her fateful meeting with Franz Joseph, to the silly snowball fights in the streets of Munich, the sleigh-rides through the Bavarian forests with her brothers and sisters, the times she and her father, Duke Maximilian, would dress up as strolling players to strum the zither and sing bawdy songs at village weddings? Nobodies – fabulously wealthy royal nobodies, certainly, but for an hour or two, for an afternoon, of absolutely no significance.

  Marrying His Imperial Majesty, Emperor of Austria and King of Jerusalem, Margrave of Moravia and King of Bohemia, had been an appalling mistake.

  Just before she built her fairy palace in Gastouri, her son Rudolf killed himself together with his mistress in his hunting lodge at Mayerling. Or someone poisoned them both. Or one of them. No one knows. Sisi lost her faith in everything apart from her slimming cures after that, and her melancholy shrouds that house as if it were a mortuary temple. That’s why, I think as I write this, only one thing in the whole palace has any life in it: the sculpture of the dying Achilles, out in the garden amongst the palms and cypresses. Vitality in every stretched muscle, every contorted limb and vein and fold of marble flesh.

  Why Achilles? Because he was the dead son she’d have liked to be the mother of? A demigod with utter contempt for both gods and men? For his stone beauty?

  I made a mental note to browse through The Iliad again one day to look for other clues. It was sure to be somewhere on Kester’s shelves. Such a tedious book, unfortunately, the sort I can’t help dozing off over. Perhaps it needs to be read aloud by someone manly from the BBC. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is as engrossing, as exciting, as voluptuously pleasurable a book as any I’ve read. I wonder which of them Sisi loved most?

  After my encounter with Sisi I couldn’t go back to my letter. I couldn’t find the voice. I just sat at the desk by the window for a while and gazed back up the hill at the white palace. Eventually, to distract myself, I eased the desk drawer out an inch or two and peered inside. I wondered briefly, I remember, whether it was immoral to rifle through someone’s drawers uninvited, but decided it was neither moral nor immoral of itself and pulled it all the way out. It smelt delicious – papery, powdery, ancient glue and lavender. I was going to enjoy this drawer.

  Poking around amongst letters in English and German and old envelopes with exotic stamps, I unearthed yellowing notebooks, small diaries, several manuscripts, newspaper clippings (some fifty years old) and, scattered amongst them, photographs – uninteresting at first: a dark-haired young man on the doorstep of a weatherboard house somewhere far away and long ago, a different young man on a motor-bike (perhaps even before the war), another young man seated on a low wall with his arm around a young woman, a gentle-faced elderly woman at a piano … There were several more recent colour shots, too, of a smooth-faced, serenely smiling older man, white-haired, in the company of some frisky-looking foreign sailors (here in a crowded taverna, there shirtless in the Greek sun). And here he was again, leaning back against a whitewashed wall, here dining with friends al fresco … and here overcoated, rather more austere, caught standing awkwardly in an archway.

  And then, just when I was on the point of taking out one of the letters and perusing it (just for fun), I came upon another snap, hidden inside an envelope with an English stamp. It showed two men sitting naked on a rock in shallow water, with a panoramic view behind them stretching over the sea to snowcapped mountains (possibly Albania), yachts in the distance, brilliant sunshine. One was my older man (coyly posed), his nose and thin smile unmistakable. The other (less coy, but hardly brazen), relaxed but alert, without a shadow of doubt and to my great astonishment, was William.

  6

  Good Friday morning in Gastouri (Great Friday as they call it) – the sky so blue you’d have thought someone had slapped the paint on with a thick, cobalt-laden brush – and I was just sitting in the downstairs kitchen, thinking how dingy it was and wondering for the umpteenth time who this Kester Berwick was whose house I’d landed up in – when there came a rapping on the door. Sharpish.

  ‘Anybody home?’ A throaty, woman’s voice.

  One always thinks of Jehovah’s Witnesses at such moments, but standing in the doorway was a smartly dressed woman in her late fifties, greying hair beautifully coiffed, with just a hint of gold jewellery – nothing to focus on. No witness to Jehovah, this one.

  ‘Why, hullo!’ she said, smiling. ‘Kester still in bed?’

  ‘No, Kester’s gone away, actually. I’m just renting the place for a couple of months.’

  ‘Really? How extraordinary! He didn’t say anything to me. Where’s he gone? And where’s Terpsi?’ She pushed passed me into the gloom of the kitchen. A whiff of something quite expensive.

  ‘Terpsi?’

  ‘The dog. I bring over the contraceptives for her every fortnight. How very odd. I do hope he hasn’t had her put down.’ She cast an eye around the dim, high-ceilinged room. ‘You’ve had quite a little cleanup in here I see. It’s usually a shambles.’

  I started to mumble something, but this woman with well-rounded vowels and stylish shoes was already off on another tack.

  ‘I’m Greta, by the way, and you are … ?’

  Marvellous eyes, they’d seen a lot. I explained a little about being on my way home, about being an actor (just for effect), and finding the advertisement in the local newspaper.

  ‘Well, you must come to lunch on Sunday,’ she said, moving back towards the door. ‘It’s an event, you know, here on Corfu, Easter Sunday lunch. Lamb on the spit and so forth. I’ll pick you up at twelve.’

  This was too sudden. I wanted to keep my wax tablet blank for a while. But before I could demur, she was half-way down the steps to the road.

  ‘Going down to see the procession today?’ she called up to me. ‘You really should. And the pot-throwing, of course, tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Well, I’m not really religious, you see.’

  ‘Religious?’ She looked nonplussed. ‘Religion has nothing to do with it, it’s Greek Easter, a completely heathen affair. Why don’t you pop in the car and I’ll drop you off.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Come on, it’s a hoot, don’t be so stuffy.’

  Was I stuffy? Would she know?

  But Greta was already in the car, heaving books and cardigans, and presumably contraceptive pills, onto the back seat. Two minutes later, without my even shaving, we were hurtling up past the palace, over the rise and down towards the sea – not at all wine-dark that morning, by the way, nor is it ever, in my experience, and I can’t imagine what Homer was thinking of.

  When we got to that tangle of streets on the out-skirts of Corfu Town, just in from the sweep of Garitsa Bay – not far from where Odysseus, as a matter of fact, was supposedly found in a wood by the virgin princess Nausicaa and her band of white-armed, braided maidens … somewhere there near the airport, where she first came upon him, a god come down from the blue, his curls ‘like thick hyacinth clusters’ wet from the surf and streaming in the wind, and called to him
to follow her in her painted wagon to the city ‘ringed by walls and strong high towers’, past the trim, black ships hauled up on slipways beside the road, through groves and orchards to the palace of her father, the Phaeacian king … or perhaps not, no one can be sure, it may have happened at Kassiopi further to the north, and, besides, that was all part of Sisi’s fantasy, rather than mine – at any rate, somewhere there, just near the end of the airport runway, I said to Greta as we roared past the hideous jumble of hypermarkets, petrol pumps and garish nightclubs: ‘Tell me, who exactly is this Kester Berwick?’

  ‘Berrick,’ she said, ‘he says Berrick. Nobody, really, just an Australian. Wrote a book once. Dear man.’ But her mind was elsewhere. Beside the road a swarthy man was hosing down racks of melons, oranges and paintbox-yellow bananas. We swerved into the spray, came to a jolting halt, and Greta was out of the car, scooping up an armful of them.

  ‘Just the thing for Sunday,’ she said, getting back into the car and we shot out into the traffic again. ‘By the way, you’re not a vegetarian, I hope? It’s all flesh and entrails on Easter Sunday, you know, bits of dead sheep everywhere. That’s the trouble with Kester – won’t touch meat, a dead loss on Easter Sunday, I’ve given up inviting him. It’s the Buddhism thing, I expect – or is he a Mormon? I get them all mixed up. Something bloodless, anyway. You’re not one, are you?’

  But by now we were snarled in an enormous, seething traffic-jam on the road beside the bay and Greta decided to toss me out to find my own way into town. I sauntered off with the crowds towards the city on the hill, my eyes on the fabulous Venetian citadel towering up out of the sea on a rocky outcrop to my right. And atop its walls, proclaiming the death and resurrection of Jesus to the infidels in Albania across the straits, stood the most brazenly monstrous cross in Christendom.

  There’s nothing Greek about Corfu Town. In fact, that’s probably why many foreigners find it so appealing. It’s a Venetian town, a maze of narrow, cobbled streets clustered between two massive Venetian fortresses. After all, the Venetians were here for over four hundred years. Along the clifftop, between the Old Fort, jutting out into the sea with the cross on top, and the colonnaded elegance of the old town itself, lies a stretch of parkland, ablaze with purplish judas-trees at Eastertime, where the Corfiotes like to stroll about in noisy groups and occasionally to play cricket.

  The festivities weren’t due to begin for several hours – at the hour of the crucifixion, to be precise, and indeed there were violently black storm-clouds already piling up above Albania across the water just to put us in the mood. So I did what people do in strange places with time on their hands: I sat at a table under the arches facing the park (more Paris than Venice, actually, this stretch of cafés, built by the French to remind them of the rue de Rivoli), ordered a coffee and began to write a postcard. This was where, in the Durrells’ day before the Second World War, everyone gathered (everyone well-dressed, that is, all those with money in their pockets) to scandalize each other with bits of juicy gossip. Perhaps they still do at quieter times, but that day the tables were jammed with overdressed Athenians, not to mention the hordes of Danes and towering Dutchmen.

  A brilliant invention, the postcard. Pithy, genuinely meant, but not sentimental. An offering – no one is obliged to send a postcard – which elicits nothing in return, except a brief remembrance. Good will in a dozen casual words. Perfect for my purposes, as it happened. I’d determined to spare both myself and William the strain of a sensitively worded explanation and send him a cool but friendly postcard instead.

  The image on the reverse side is always vital. No one at home gives a fig about where you are or what you’ve seen – that goes without saying. Nobody could care less what the beach at Paleokastritsa looks like or the Monkey Forest at Ubud. No, the image on the reverse side, barely glanced at by the friend at home, is a style statement, nothing more, although crucial to the exercise. That’s why for William on this occasion I chose an amusing shot of the Dying Achilles in Sisi’s garden: ‘Achille mourant, rear view’. Cascading mane of marble hair, painfully contorted shoulder-blades and amazingly life-like buttocks – solid, fleshy, workaday haunches, nothing gym-trim about them, right buttock tapering magnificently into heroic thigh and balletically extended leg. (He’s dying sitting upright, helmet on and spear in hand.)

  Greetings from Corfu, I began. Was that perhaps too cool? Of course, I was feeling cool after chancing on that photograph in Kester’s drawer, but had little right to be – if anyone had behaved badly, it was me, in Rome. But then, it’s very hard to forgive someone we’ve wronged, isn’t it?

  Our paths actually hardly crossed, William’s and mine, during the rest of the rehearsals of The Cherry Orchard. He came along a few times, watched from the sidelines, chatted with snub-nosed Alex and Leila a bit, and then went away and designed. When he did come – always in that blue floppy knitted top and black jeans – I felt naked and longed for him to vanish again so I could be reclothed. Strange, isn’t it? Because another part of me craved nakedness, craved almost to be flayed. Apart from anything else, that’s when I gave my best performance.

  In the event, if I say so myself, our Cherry Orchard was quite a triumph. There’s something about Chekhov’s plays the English-speaking public everywhere just loves, although I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. If I could, I think I’d be more at home in the world.

  Be that as it may, we had a full house every night for the whole pre-Christmas season. They laughed, they wept. Leila, understandably, was very smug indeed about her crits – unbearably tragic performance’ (the Metro), ‘a touchingly comic tour de force’ (Ham and High, the local rag), stunning stage presence’ (Time Out). I’m not sure I was ever specifically mentioned anywhere, but the supporting cast was certainly praised in general terms in the more prominent reviews. And the design got rave notices as well, at least in one or two of the newspapers – well, in Time Out, anyway. William went for realism in the end, but in a minimalist vein because of the tight budget. Clive felt it was symbolic of the stripping back of emotion.

  The party after the final performance on Christmas Eve was a bit of an ordeal. In the first place, I’m hopeless at parties, I have no small talk and they always make me wonder if I should get married again, possibly to someone in the room. And, in the second place, this was to be the last time I’d see William, and something – just a sentence or two, but something – had to be said in parting. One has one’s dignity.

  Most of the evening I spent slumped in the old beanbag beside the window, swapping inanities with whoever ended up squatting beside me. On a little map in my mind, though, regardless of who I was talking to at the time, I was tracking the movements of the spiky-haired Australian in the blue jumper. He was like a tiny blue blip on a screen inside my head. While Gareth was wittering on about fly-fishing in Wales, for instance, my mind was on the blue blip edging towards the Leila shape, swathed in the smoke from her cigarillo, in the top left-hand corner. When Clive’s wife Rosemary pinned me to the beanbag and started reading out to me her daughter’s poems, it was the little blue blip huddled with red-haired Alex I was really focused on, not the daughter’s dactyls.

  Suddenly, just before midnight, it jerked off the screen.

  ‘Rosemary, must just dash off to the loo,’ I said, heaving myself up past her generous bosom and heading for the door. The moment had come.

  William was in the hallway wrapping his scarf around his neck.

  ‘Oh, are you going, William?’ I said, trying to look as if I were actually on my way to the bathroom.

  ‘Yeah, I’m off,’ he said, adjusting the scarf over his Adam’s apple. A slender neck, quite long, at odds somehow with the strong line of his jaw. ‘Meeting a few friends for … Christmas drinks.’ He was lying, of course, but it didn’t matter.

  I’d worked out what I’d say while Clive’s wife was reading the poems. I knew my lines. In my head was a short dialogue, suave but sincere, friendly but detached, in which I�
�d make it clear that I valued our momentary intimacy, and liked him tremendously (as a person), but … I thought he’d perhaps misinterpreted my inclinations, as it were. I wouldn’t put it quite like that, naturally, but that’s what would be delicately implied. The whole thing would take less than a minute.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry we didn’t get to –’ I began.

  ‘William!’ It was bloody Gareth, lumbering into the hallway with bits of Black Forest cake all down his jumper. ‘Are you off, dear boy? Let me give you a lift. Got to get going myself – having the nieces and nephews over for drinkies in the morning.’

  A couple of handshakes, his hand on my shoulder – did it stay there just a nanosecond too long? – and they were out the door. I stood there staring after them for half a minute. Behind me in the stuffy living-room Clive was shouting boisterously over Nina Simone (‘That old warhorse! How in God’s name does he keep getting work?’) … someone else was trying to sing along … ‘My baby just cares for me …’ Leila laughed smokily, somebody dropped a glass … I stepped out into the drizzle, clicking the door shut behind me.

  It was time for the crucifixion. Just as the first sheets of rain swept over the crowded streets, and the violet-black sky turned to streaky grey, the procession set off. Jesus had been nailed to his cross in far-away Jerusalem and Corfu was plunged into festive mourning.

  It was the big, fat tubas I liked best. As the bands slowly goose-stepped past, all decked out in brilliant reds and blues, the deeply mournful lowing of the tubas filled the squares and stony laneways, drowning out the trumpets, horns and drums, the flutes and clarinets. Jesus was dying, but the crowd seemed delighted with the cacophony of clashing dirges. They smiled and waved at their smirking children and spouses as they marched by, peering around umbrellas to cross themselves as lurid, tasselled pictures of saints, or possibly Jesus, were paraded past. Priests appeared in small contingents from time to time as well, a smugly plaintive expression on their bearded faces, and as they swayed past in their sumptuous purple, rose and mulberry robes the throng would quieten.