Corfu

by Robert Dessaix

  Now, with that sigh of William’s on the purple bedspread, time opened its great maws and yawned. It would have to be filled in. It was asking me what I wanted to do with it and I had no answer. That was the very quick of the matter.

  So I said to William (although I hadn’t smoked for months): ‘I’ll just duck out for some cigarettes – might pick up a map while I’m out – I’ll be back in a jiffy.’

  I grabbed my wallet, ran down the stairs and set off looking for a tobacconist’s. People, dogs and back-packers surged around me on the pavements, cars roared past in waves, I smelt coffee and perfume … but saw nothing, I was blind.

  Twenty minutes later I found myself back at the station. As I pocketed the cigarettes, it struck me: I had no idea where I had left William.

  Stopped dead in my tracks, I broke into a sweat. My mind was blank. The hotel’s name, the building, the street … nothing, a void. Think! Think! It was like trying to ring a bell that had no clapper.

  For an hour or so I tramped the pavements south of the station, peering into vestibules, squinting at names on plaques, trying to recall if I’d seen this café before, that display of bananas … Nothing, nothing spoke to me, I was lost. What would William be thinking? Or would he be dozing happily on the bed?

  And that’s when it hit me: I didn’t have to go back to that yellow and purple room. You should leave now – the words hung in the air in front of me in lurid, red letters. I had everything I needed in my wallet. I fingered it through my coat. But my clothes, my books … was I mad? Not really. A door has opened into another room. Just walk through it.

  And so I did. I went back to the station and caught a train to Brindisi. I didn’t even know where Brindisi was.

  I hovered in the corridor most of the way like a ghost, as if unable to convince myself I was really there. I flattened myself against the darkening windows as people squeezed past me.

  Yet, as soon as I stepped out into the light at Brindisi station, way down on the far side of Italy’s wobbly heel, I felt almost tumultuously alive. And in the squalid little hotel near the ferry-terminal where I spent the night, with sexual cries jabbing at me through the wall in little bursts, I dreamt I was soaring up to heaven on a grass-green ass with a golden bridle, singing songs of joy in Hebrew, songs like whirlwinds, gusting through the clouds of swooning angels – white-robed, tumbling angels. Too much Chagall in Nice the week before, I suppose. Still …

  A rap at the door downstairs. Arthur. Hovering behind him, even more pear-shaped this afternoon, was Agape.

  ‘Guten Tag,’ she said, smiling with a hint of mischief and trying to peer in. Then she said something in Greek to Arthur, nodded and set off down the steps.

  ‘What did she say?’ I asked as he came in the door.

  ‘I haven’t a clue.’ Arthur was looking distinctly less biscuity today, quite jaunty, in fact, in a forest-green hand-knitted sweater.

  ‘Why does she speak German?’

  ‘A relic from the days of the casino up the hill, I suppose, when Baron von whatshisname ran it. In the Achilleon. Have you noticed it? Ugly monster of a thing.’ His eyes flicked round the kitchen. ‘You’ve been busy cleaning, I see. It’s usually a pig-sty.’

  ‘A bit grimy, yes.’

  ‘A pig-sty. I’m sure Kester has the idea that squalor is awfully Zen. But look, I have a confession to make.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you on the way into town. Thought you might enjoy a coffee down by the water. And Prue said she’d join us, too, Prue … I’m just trying to think of her last name … Married to a local. Great friends with Kester.’

  Soon we were sailing in the sun up over the crest of the hill past the palace. I could imagine a German baron thinking it would make a fine casino.

  As we wound down through the olive-groves towards the sea, Arthur said: ‘The thing is this: I’m not much of a fan of Kester’s. That’s why I thought you might be interested in a second opinion.’

  ‘Why not? What do you think is wrong with him?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong with him,’ he said, grinning. ‘It’s just that I think he’s a bit of an old fraud. Not that I’ve got anything against old frauds – I’m Irish, after all, and Ireland’s full of them. No, it’s more …’ He concentrated for a moment on a particularly hair-raising manoeuvre on the road ahead of us. I looked out to sea. A milky mistiness was closing in from the east, shimmering in the late afternoon light and blotting out Albania.

  ‘I met Kester as soon as I arrived, you see, at his booklaunch. Have you heard about the booklaunch?’

  ‘No, but Greta did mention a book.’

  ‘Yes. Sank without trace, of course. Dreadful title – what was it now? Head of Orpheus Singing – that’s it.’ And suddenly I remembered seeing its spine on one of the bookshelves back at the house. Blue and yellow. ‘It was an amazing evening. It was the day the Colonels seized power in Athens and declared martial law. In fact, Celia – have you met Celia?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You will. Her husband was rather famous, but nobody can remember what for. Anyway, Celia, who was having the launch party at her place, you see, wanted to call the whole thing off, she was rattled by the talk of a curfew, but Kester was adamant that nothing was going to interfere with it – this was his hour of glory, coup or no coup. So we spent the evening up at Celia’s stumbling around in the dark, with just a few candles, treading on the cats and talking to people we could hardly see. Then half of us got lost on the way home – the hills were alive with sozzled ex-pats trying to find their way back with no headlights. I ended up getting lost with Kester.’

  Over to our right, in the milky blue glare, I could just make out a little white church surrounded by water in the middle of the entrance to an inlet. Or perhaps it was a convent. It was almost spectral. ‘Beautiful!’ I murmured.

  ‘It was so typical of Kester,’ Arthur went on. ‘I thought he knew where we were going and he thought I knew where we were going, and we ended up half-way across the island in somebody’s vineyard. Not that Kester was fazed at all – in fact, I think he thought it was the perfect end to a perfect evening. We sat and ate some chocolate I found on the back seat until it got light.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Funny you should ask that. We talked about that Krishnamurti fellow.’

  ‘Are you interested in … that sort of thing?’

  ‘No, not at all. It just struck me as rather bizarre – an Australian and an Irishman sitting in a car in the middle of a Greek island at three o’clock in the morning discussing some mad Indian.’ He grinned again – quite disarmingly, as a matter of fact – but the swerving and cornering on the narrow road above the sea were mostly keeping my eyes glued to the road ahead.

  ‘So is that what you mean by “old fraud” – the Indian guru business?’

  ‘Partly, I suppose, although he claims to be a Buddhist these days, I think.’

  ‘You could claim to be worse things, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not the Buddhism in itself I object to … so much, although personally I find most of the stuff he comes out with as daft as …’ He hesitated to say as what precisely, not being quite sure what eccentricities I might myself be prey to. ‘No, it’s more the sanctimonious shit that gets up my nose – the clasped hands, the wise smile, the highmindedness – it’s relentless. The man can’t eat a carrot without a song and dance about the suffering he’s putting it through. I don’t believe in any of it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s phoney. But Prue thinks differently.’ A surprisingly gentle smile all of a sudden. ‘Of course, he’d only been here a few years himself back when I first met him – he must have got here about 1969. He’d been living on one of the other islands before that – somewhere over on the Turkish side, Lesbos, I think. In those days he had a house off a courtyard just near the old chapel – lovely old place, really, high wooden ceiling, whit
ewashed walls, with a bedroom upstairs looking out over the valley. That’s where he used to sit writing and strumming his guitar.

  ‘That’s the other thing that gets on my wick – not that I should talk, I suppose – what does my life amount to, after all? But there’s a sort of smallness to Kester, if you know what I mean, that really gets under my skin. To hear him talk, it’s all Art and Beauty and Truth and Goodness, but what does it all amount to? All he does is sit up there in his room day after day, typing away, tap-tap-tap, page after dreary page …

  ‘Have you seen his manuscripts? Piles of them everywhere, all covered in minute corrections, whole paragraphs stuck in with glue and sticky-tape, and every second word misspelt. And the lot of it just lukewarm rehashings of his screamingly dull life.’

  ‘How do you know, Arthur?’

  ‘I’ve flicked through some of it – I baby-sit the dog from time to time, when he wants to go to Athens.’

  He was silent for a moment, letting his irritation settle.

  ‘The point is that nobody is ever going to publish any of it. It’s simply dead boring. Kester can’t write. He was in the theatre once, too, you know – acting, teaching, writing plays … all gone, like a puff of smoke. Who’s ever heard of Kester Berwick? Oh, to listen to him, you’d think he was quite the celebrity – the names he drops! He knew everyone who was anyone in the theatre in England – in his day, of course. But where has it got him? He may’ve known Dame Sybil Thorndike – good luck to him – but the fact is he’s a lonely old man stuck in a God-forsaken village on an island most people have never heard of … tootling the days away on a bamboo flute he made himself and teaching English to Greek fishermen’s sons. He’s not even qualified.’

  There was nothing I could say, really. I didn’t know the man, did I.

  ‘If you find him so unlikeable,’ I said, choosing my words with care, ‘why do you baby-sit his dog?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing, you see, that’s the idiotic thing. We all get roped in. We take him fresh fish, we invite him to dinner, we read his damned manuscripts, we look after his dog, we even go round and spring-clean his house for him. Why? I don’t know why.’ He was thinking hard as we moved out onto the road along Garitsa Bay, heading towards the Old Fort on its rocky crag. ‘Do we feel sorry for him? We certainly don’t find him interesting. I just don’t know. Ask Prue. Anyway,’ he said, as we threaded our way through the park between the town and the citadel, ‘why are you interested in him? If I’m not mistaken, you’ve not even met him. All you’re doing is renting his house.’

  Now I was stumped. I could hardly bring up William. And in any case, was it just William?

  ‘Yesterday at Greta’s,’ I said, ‘a man in an upstairs window told me to fuck off. Who might that be?’

  Arthur laughed and swung the car into a parking space outside the Palace of St Michael and St George, a massive limestone building with a Doric colonnade brooding over the parklands beneath the citadel. Oddly light, given its bulk.

  ‘Well, you never know with Greta, it could’ve been anyone. Probably her husband, though. Rude bugger. They don’t speak. Haven’t spoken for ten years. Not a syllable, apparently.’

  I wanted to know why, but I once read somewhere that unbridled curiosity is really just a form of indifference – I’m sure that can’t be right, they can’t be the same thing at all – but anyway, by the time I’d mustered the determination to lead Arthur on, we’d reached the little garden behind the palace and he was waving at a young woman seated at a table near the seawall.

  ‘Prue’s here already,’ he said, smiling. ‘That’s good, punctuality is not her strong point.’

  Arthur and Prue greeted each other with a special kind of ease – a hint of playfulness, breezy questions – that can only grow out of affection untinged by any hunger. A pleasure to watch.

  ‘So you’re living in Kester’s house,’ Prue said, smiling up at me. ‘Have you got everything you need? His cupboards are rather bare.’ She was a strikingly good-looking woman in her thirties, even beautiful, with long, silky hair dyed a tasteful auburn. Big, frank eyes.

  ‘She means he’s an old skin-flint – hardly a pot or pan to his name,’ Arthur said.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘It’s only for a couple of months.’

  ‘It’ll be his teeth,’ Prue said, as Arthur tried to catch a waiter’s eye. ‘Every now and again he pops off to have his teeth looked at. Athens, probably, or London.’

  ‘Yes, he seems to have enough money to go to London alright to have his teeth done, but can’t afford to feed himself properly or buy warm clothes for winter.’

  ‘Arthur, that’s unfair. He’s an old man, he just doesn’t …’

  ‘What?’

  Prue was looking genuinely wounded, but gracefully so. She’d clearly heard all this before. While Arthur dallied with the waiter, she turned to me and said quietly: ‘Arthur doesn’t understand. He’s actually very kind to Kester, but he doesn’t understand him at all. He looks at all the small things about him – the shabby things, I suppose… and they’re there, of course: the darned clothes, the dirty cups, the biscuits and cheese he seems to live on – a few olives, if anyone drops in … and the dog always has a rash …’

  ‘Where is the wretched dog, I wonder?’ Arthur said as the waiter sauntered off. ‘Perhaps he’s had her put down.’

  ‘You’re being beastly, Arthur. She’ll be with Celia or somebody – Kester would never do that.’

  ‘He might just as well. He doesn’t look after her. All this Buddhism business, respect for every living creature and so on – all that palaver about how it hurts him to slice up a tomato – yet he can’t even look after his dog properly.’

  Prue looked stung. Behind her, curling down the sheer seawall to the rocks below, was the most exquisite spiral staircase, so elegantly elongated it took your breath away.

  ‘How old is Kester?’ I asked.

  ‘He must be over eighty. But he’s not frail. And he doesn’t talk like an old man.’

  ‘Oh, Prue, what’s this now?’ Arthur was goading her again. ‘The man doesn’t live in the real world at all. He doesn’t even know it’s there. He’s like a ghost from the 1930s.’

  ‘Why does he interest you?’ Prue said, ignoring Arthur. ‘Do you have friends in common?’

  ‘It’s just one of those funny things,’ I said, treading warily. ‘I came into his house and it was like hearing echoes.’ But of what? ‘Of conversations I’d once taken part in, or overheard, I’m not sure. I feel I’d just like to know where these echoes are coming from.’ I hadn’t known I was going to say that, it just came out.

  ‘Arthur won’t like me saying this,’ Prue began, although Arthur wasn’t even listening – the waiter, as sleek and playful as a seal-pup, was at his elbow, sliding cups and plates onto the table, trying to feign indifference, even disdain. ‘But Kester Berwick is the most spiritual person I’ve ever met.’ And she blushed slightly and blinked.

  I never know what people mean when they say things like that. What on earth does ‘spiritual’ mean?

  ‘You see, when Arthur talks about the holes in his pullovers and having no food in the house, what he sees is an old man living a rather empty life in an empty house, whiling away his time doing rather pointless things – playing his guitar, writing plays no one will ever put on, listening to the radio … little things, aimless things. But what I see is someone who has gone through the attic of his life, as it were, and thrown almost everything out – all the rubbish, all the bric-à-brac, all the clutter …’

  Not quite all of it, I thought to myself, remembering the smell of lavender as I pulled open the drawer of his desk.

  ‘What I think is that he’s found the secret of something.’

  ‘And what would that be of, I wonder? The art of sponging off the rest of us?’ Arthur guffawed.

  ‘Oh, do shut up, Arthur,’ Prue said, not without affection. ‘No, the art of …’

  ‘Happiness?’ I a
sked.

  ‘No, no, Kester doesn’t seek happiness.’ This was obviously something they’d talked about. ‘No, it’s something more like peace.’

  I was getting edgy. Peace, spiritual wholeness – what would be next? Love? A couple of the photos I’d found in the drawer came to mind.

  ‘Kester’s in touch with something – he just is. No, he’s not happy – perhaps he’s content, I’m not sure – but he’s found a way to live and think about his life I find inspiring. When my father died – he was a potter here in Corfu –’

  ‘Oh, please, Prue, not the dream!’

  ‘When my father died, I sent Kester a letter to tell him – he was very fond of my father, but didn’t have the phone. Well, a week went by and I’d heard nothing from him – he wasn’t at the funeral – so one morning I went up to Gastouri to see what had happened. He actually had my letter in his hand when he answered the door – he’d only just got it, it had taken a week to reach him – I mean, it’s only five miles, but the postal service here is hopeless.’

  ‘Like everything else,’ Arthur murmured.

  ‘And he looked so happy, he was smiling – almost cheerful. And he said: “I knew he’d gone, Prue, I knew days ago, because he came to me in the night and told me I’d hear bad news, but not to be sad because everything was alright. All is well, he said to me.” And I knew he was telling me the truth.’

  ‘God in heaven, Prue – I don’t know how you can fall for that kind of gobshite. The man’s batty. Actually, I think he’s worse than that: I think he’s heartless, he was peddling you heartless claptrap to cover his own bewilderment. It’s inexcusable.’ Arthur was quite seriously annoyed.

  ‘I noticed a picture of Krishnamurti on the bookcase. And there are the books, too – Madam Blavatsky and so on. What’s all that about?’