‘He knew Krishnamurti – he met him in Australia years ago, apparently, before the war, and then again in London. There was some sort of bond between them – or at least Kester thought so. He was terribly upset when Krishnamurti died last year – that really shook him.’
‘Not as cheerful as he was about your daddy, then?’ Arthur’s lip was curling. ‘No nocturnal visits? Not, at any rate, from Krishnamurti …’
‘That’s enough, Arthur – I’m going to get cross with you.’
We lapsed into a charged silence, and then drifted into chit-chat about less contentious things – the almond cake, the flying-boat that used to land in the bay in front of us on its way to Australia (of all places) and what Prue was doing in Corfu.
‘Love, of course,’ Arthur said. ‘Isn’t that why we’re all here? She fell in love with a Greek sailor, didn’t you, Prue? And never left.’
Actually with the manager of one of the marinas, as she explained. She painted.
I thought of Nausicaa again, and her painted wagon, heading off for the palace with its lapis-blue frieze and solid gold doors, the shipwrecked Odysseus in tow. (Chagall has a marvellous green, pink and white painting of this scene – it was one of the ones I’d stared at in Nice not long before, until I was bewitched.)
In the bus back to Gastouri (I didn’t want to be too beholden to Arthur), I thought about the two pictures of Kester Berwick I’d just been presented with and wondered if they’d ever dovetail, then merge and come alive as a single image with real depth. Was he a prurient old trickster, a nobody masquerading as somebody, hoodwinking the gullible with spiritual flimflam, or was he some kind of sage, who’d drifted into saintliness in some mysterious way, high in the hills behind Corfu Town, in those whitewashed rooms of his with cold floors and wooden ceilings?
And just for an instant, as we chugged along the pot-holed road to Gastouri, horn blaring, sky turning to velvet, I had one of those translucent moments again, when all of a sudden I felt I’d become just a fizz of light and sound – of voices, memories, visions, streaking out of the past from all directions to cross at the point that was me … Nausicaa, Ranyevskaya, Achilles (dying), Krishnamurti, purple bedspreads, saints and miracles, London bedsits … A soft explosion and – there I was again, an ordinary man on a toiling bus in Greece, heading home, not a burst of light and sound at all.
Strange to relate, the detonation left a kind of afterglow, and in that afterglow, to my own bewilderment, I saw images of Adelaide, a blur of muddy yellows and blue.
In fact, I smelt them. I smelt that soft, warm, squelchy chook-dirt smell that hung in the salty air over our sprawling backyards in summer when I was a child. And the rain on hot asphalt when finally, after what seemed then half a lifetime of baking heat, it suddenly poured. And the hot stone and roses in the still, wide, tree-lined streets where some of the boys played cricket after school and cats got stuck up lemon-scented gums. And the dog-turds we dropped in Mrs Evans’ letter-box.
I didn’t admit to William that I also came from Adelaide until we’d known each other for nearly a year – not until the disastrous weekend we spent in a French hotel together, when it rained for three days and all sorts of things came out of the woodwork. And I don’t come from Adelaide, except technically.
It’s a completely unremarkable city, a city where, apart from the odd axe-murder, nothing ever happens, or nothing that matters. It’s just a flat strip of land between the gulf and the hills where retired clergymen and hairdressers, presided over by the Anglican gentry, eke out their days mulching their gardens and putting on Brigadoon in church halls. It’s true there was a period in the 1970s when we all thought a new Golden Age had arrived, because the Premier wore shorts in parliament and everyone started potting and weaving and living disordered lives in mudbrick houses in the Hills, but that was quickly snuffed out. The moment my divorce came through, I was off. I blanked it out.
Yet now all of a sudden there were reverberations. There was William, of course, and now Kester Berwick. Among the little piles of pamphlets and obscure magazines on his bookshelves were several articles he’d written about his involvement with some avant-garde theatre company in Adelaide before the war. None of it had rung any bells with me, I must say, although I’d moved in theatre circles there for years – for most of the seventies, in fact – before going to London. Well, I was an actor, after all.
Not that my wife called me an actor when things got scratchy. ‘Look at you!’ she used to snap in that terribly tight way of hers when I’d failed yet again to make something of myself. ‘Always crapping on about the theatre, but you’re not an actor, you’re just a night porter with delusions. I’m living in Largs bloody Bay married to a motel receptionist.’ Sometimes she wept. She’d been to a very good school.
She was being rather unfair. I was also a magician at children’s parties, mostly on weekends, and spent a lot of time at the Studio in rehearsal during the week, preparing audition pieces, doing a bit of backstage work when parts were scarce – that kind of thing, all perfectly professional. I don’t suppose it was a frantically exciting life, but you have to begin somewhere.
The catalyst for change was an American called Harold. He was doing research at the Museum in the city, something to do with indigenous cultures, and I’d like to be able to say I thought he was a pretentious bore, but, to tell the truth, he was fascinating, and there was something about his nose and chin I really took to as well. There was something about Harold that said he was going places. And indeed, one hot Sunday afternoon while I was pulling coloured scarves out of my fist, he went to Texas with my wife.
It was a shock when it happened and I won’t pretend it wasn’t. I’d introduced them, after all. I’d stood next to him at a poetry reading in a bookshop. We’d got talking and I told him to look us up. Which he did. I’d noticed, of course, the little day-trips they started taking together to the hills or the Barossa Valley on days when I was tied up with a children’s party, and the concerts Harold would suddenly ring with one extra ticket for on nights when I was on duty at the motel, not to mention the queer girlishness that came over Lisa whenever he dropped by, the little hints at inner commotion. But, if I thought about it at all, I suppose I just thought the arrangement was rather sophisticated, with a touch of the charmingly dissolute about it – after all, we were civilized people and I wasn’t above the odd divertissement myself, so long as it didn’t mean anything. I found the idea of a close friendship with a man who didn’t just talk business and offer gardening tips rather appealing. I didn’t have many friends as such.
To be honest, I always took it for granted that Harold was gay. I mean, the brightly coloured shirts, the choir he’d joined, the tasteful shoes, the … well, the deftness with words, the rightness of every syllable. The charm, I suppose, the disarming interest in what Lisa or I thought about things. No men I knew in Adelaide looked or behaved like that. Once or twice when he dropped around while Lisa was at the library and began talking to me about things in that intense, eloquent way he had, it even crossed my mind he might be after something more intimate with me. It was the way he offered me his vulnerabilities for pricking. I even said as much once to Lisa while she was doing her eyes to go out with him.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said, studying herself carefully in the mirror.
‘Why is there never any mention of a wife or girlfriend, then, do you suppose?’
Lisa said she understood he’d had a ‘great sadness’ in his life. I left it at that.
I’ve never seen her since she left. We’ve only spoken once in all these years – it was on the telephone after Harold had his accident. He was beheaded in the Yukon when a sheet of roofing metal came off the back of the truck in front of him, sheared through his windscreen and took his head clean off. They found it right at the back of his van in a plastic bucket. It was very quick, apparend.
13
Did I mention that the staircase at Kester’s house was outside? It was an ir
on affair, beginning by the front door, crossing the front of the house and ending in a little landing upstairs around the corner outside the bedroom. Very off-putting in winter, I’d have thought.
One morning a week or so later I was clanging down these stairs to make some tea when I noticed Greta standing at the door.
‘Well,’ she said with a smile, ‘you’ve become quite the recluse – as bad as Kester.’ Did I have any choice? I had no telephone, no car and knew where nobody lived, except Greta. ‘I’ve come to invite you up to the Big House next Sunday. It’s quite a coup – by no means everyone is welcome.’
The Big House – well, fancy that. I’d heard mention of the Michaelís family residence. Corfu is a small island, after all, barely out of the feudal age, so the names of the great land-owning oligarchs crop up in conversation regularly – especially ex-patriate conversation, because no one aches for the trappings of significance, for notability, more than nobodies from distant seats of power.
The Durrells, who found the feudal set-up so much fun, were habitués at the Big House, I seemed to remember. Kaiser Wilhelm II had certainly dropped over from the Achilleon more than once in the years before the First World War, according to what I’d heard, not to mention assorted kings and queens of England, Greece and Denmark. Someone even thought Edward Lear had lunched there once in the mid-1800s, over from Albania, and left behind a sketch with a witty inscription as a parting gift.
How on earth had rumour of my lowly existence reached the Michaelíses’ ears? I hurtled into town and bought a snappy tie and jacket.
The following Sunday, heading off with Greta (who was dressed in a cream linen suit, also from one of the smarter boutiques in town) for the middle of the island, I felt pleasantly on edge. But by the time we’d left the main road and, skirting a deserted nunnery, were winding up a hillside through brooding olive-groves towards the manor gates, I was beginning to feel a little unnerved.
Then all at once the trees thinned out and I found myself looking back over the tops of flowering quince and orange trees into the humming haze in the valley below. And slumbering amongst this sunny lushness, tucked up in the shadows of a crag, all mouldering Tuscan pinks with deep green shutters, lay the fabled Big House.
According to Greta – whose familiarity with Corfiote history struck me as broad rather than deep, so I can’t vouch for the truth of the tale – the Michaelís family first came to Corfu in a galley from Malta in the late Venetian period to help the Christians fight off the Turks. Putting two and two together, I worked out that the Turkish siege these Maltese knights had come to lift, along with the Spaniards, the Tuscans and the Genoese, was the very same siege St Spiridon and his heavenly hosts were credited with smashing in 1716. As their reward, in those deeply feudal times, the Maltese knights were given huge estates on the island, well-stocked with peasants, olive-groves and giant oaks, olive-oil and wood for ship-building being two great sources of wealth in Corfu under the Venetians. As his reward, St Spiridon got another procession, every August.
‘There are still Maltese Catholics all over the place up here in the hills,’ Greta had said to me as we headed inland from Gastouri. ‘It’s a real zoo, this island.’
In Greta’s story, a Venetian countess or two was soon woven into the Michaelís family fabric and this added a certain éclat, a thread of brilliance no mere Maltese could aspire to.
Indeed, the first thing we saw when we came through the door of the Big House, high up on a flaking wall in the gloomy main salon, was a portrait of the first countess to join the clan. Serene, mournful, she eyed us with an insouciance I found quite appealing.
‘Maria someone, I think,’ Greta said, as the servant ushered us in meandering fashion round the vast oak furniture cluttering the room. ‘I have an idea it was she who had this place built.’ Maltha, the servant, who was ancient and had denture problems, had not stopped mumbling ever since she’d opened the door to us. ‘Don’t pay any attention to Martha,’ Greta said. ‘She had a vision of the Virgin Mary about ten years ago, round in the old stables behind the boiler, and hasn’t been the same since. Appalling cook, but quite harmless. Thank you, Martha, dear – efharistó.’
We’d been shown through onto the narrow balcony running along the far side of the house, overlooking the valley. Across the courtyard below us, half in shadow, was the old family chapel, unpainted now, with faded, brownish tiles sprouting weeds. Beside it, right in front of us, rose the elegant belfry, ropes from its three bells trailing down its splotched façade into the shrubbery below. Nothing stirred. The valley beyond, apart from the occasional flash of sun on glass, was swathed in a blue-green mistiness. Far, far away a child shouted something and then shrieked with laughter.
We stood there together, Greta pointing things out to me. Around to one side of the house, for instance, past the stables where the sons of the family kept their expensive German cars, were the crumbling servants’ quarters, a two-tiered wing of empty cells with gaping doorways, half-choked with vines.
‘You can see how very grand it must all have once been,’ said Greta. ‘I’d have loved to see it in its heyday. Imagine the goings-on.’
‘When would that have been, do you think?’
‘A couple of hundred years ago, I suppose. Then the French arrived and freed the serfs – not that that was of much use to anybody because the serfs still owned no land. As a matter of fact, the peasants were largely uneducated here until well into the 1950s. I dare say Martha’s illiterate. Anyway, as far as the Michaelís family’s concerned, I imagine it’s all been pretty much downhill ever since Napoleon.’
We wandered back into the salon, which smelt of unwashed dogs and rising damp.
‘I wonder where on earth they all are. All those cars out in the forecourt – we’re obviously not the first to arrive. Perhaps they’ve gone for a walk in the orchard. I might go and rustle up a gin and tonic in the kitchen. Care for something?’
All I wanted to do was go back out onto the balcony and drink in all that soft decrepitude. Face to face with something very old – a Roman aquaduct, a Dutch master, even your grandmother’s wedding-ring – you kaleidoscope, it seems to me, into a different cluster of memories and illusions from the one that empties the tea-pot or watches the news at seven. In the blink of an eye you’re engulfed by waves of Goths and Franks, earth-shattering love-affairs and trifling amours, war after war, archbishops, miracles, princes, cousins and second-cousins swarming everywhere like ants whose nest you’ve accidentally trodden on – and, looking at these stones, this painting, this ring, you shrink to nothing, lose all your significance. And then you shake yourself – and piece by piece recover it. And if you’re in Rome or some art museum in Amsterdam, you rush off as fast as you can to the nearest café to gobble down cake and coffee and talk rather too loudly to your companion, afraid, no doubt, at some level, of being obliterated again without warning, however thrillingly. So, standing on that old stone balcony, taking in the view, I knew once again I didn’t matter – yet mattered utterly and was slotted in. I felt lightheaded with despair and a rush of excitement.
The hush was abruptly broken down below. The door of the chapel was flung open and out trooped a gaily attired file of men and women, all blinking in the sudden sunlight and smiling with a sort of relief. Jolted back to the present, I waved and called out hullo. The old man in a suit at the head of the file stopped dead in his tracks and peered up at me. Then the others all fell silent and did the same. A dozen blank faces were angled up at the stranger on the balcony. Two of them in fact belonged to Arthur and his sister Bernie, and a couple of the others seemed vaguely familiar as well, but they all stared at me as if I were a ghost.
‘And who the hell are you?’ the old man in front bellowed up at me. Arthur stepped forward and said something in his ear. The old man grunted and set off again, with the others in tow. A young priest brought up the rear, locking the door behind him. In a moment or two the whole line had disappeared into the thicket of br
oom-bushes at the side of the house. As he vanished, Arthur waved.
It had been a service for all the dead Michaelíses, Arthur explained when he reached me on the balcony. Mind-numbingly boring, he said, rolling his eyes, except for when the consul, who’d converted to Islam while he was in Abu Dhabi, had refused to eat the chunk of bread the priest had offered each member of the congregation. George Michaelís, the patriarch in the suit, had roared at him to ‘just swallow the bloody thing and stop being such a prick’ – and he had, but was now refusing to stay for lunch. His wife, who was drinking something reviving in the kitchen with Greta, was in tears, apparently. We could hear the consul trying to start his car in the driveway out the front.
In dribs and drabs the crowd straggled out onto the balcony. ‘Hullo,’ I said to this one and that, ‘pleased to meet you … No, not long … Yes, Gastouri … How do you do?’ Then they straggled inside again and up various staircases to lunch. I didn’t want to make rash judgments, but they didn’t look to me like a particularly select crowd, despite what Greta had said.
The house was such a maze of dark rooms, passageways and stairs that Arthur and I got lost and ended up in somebody’s bedroom way up in the roof. By the time we reached the dining-room, which seemed to be on a tilt, the priest was already intoning some sort of blessing. It went on for so long that I gathered it had turned into a homily.
I glanced around the long, polished table at the fidgeting assembly, nodded at a couple of familiar faces and lapsed into that embarrassed silence religion tends to hatch nowadays in educated circles. The beeswax was clashing strangely with the smell of dogs and fried meat-balls.
‘What’s he saying?’ I whispered to Arthur’s sister, Bernie the bird-fancier and owner of the only second-hand bookshop in town.
‘Something about virtue, I think,’ she whispered back, rather loudly. ‘About feeding the inner man. Personally, I’m an atheist.’
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