‘That’s enough of that!’ George shouted at us from the top of the table, drowning out the bearded priest completely. ‘Show some respect. Sit and listen.’ He was still mumbling ‘Atheist – what next!’ to himself as he passed the dolmáthes, once the priest had finished, to the capaciously bosomed woman on his right.
According to Arthur, this was George’s Belgian mistress Gisella, who spent most of the meal chatting amiably with the tall, dark man next to her. I thought he might have been Arthur’s Chilean, but he turned out to be a car-dealer (amongst other things) from Athens. George’s wife was away shopping in London, where she kept a flat. Nobody seemed to have any idea where the sons were.
‘So,’ George boomed down the table to me eventually, once the meat-balls had started circulating, ‘do you sail?’ He was a handsome man, in a ravaged sort of way, with thick, grey hair and eyebrows like fat, furry animals jiggling on his forehead. ‘Ride? Shoot? What do you do?’
‘I’m an actor, actually.’ He looked as if I’d just belched in his face.
‘An actor? Is there money in that?’ But no reply was necessary because one of the dogs who’d wandered in with Martha had started peeing against the wall beneath the window. George leapt to his feet and kicked the animal out the door, swearing in Greek. Chewing lustily, the priest gave us all a beatific smile.
‘I’m Celia, by the way,’ said the woman opposite me, raising her voice above the fracas. She was dressed in that expensively dowdy fashion the English seem to have perfected. ‘My husband was a great friend of George Bernard Shaw, you know.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the playwright.’ She fingered an errant fake pearl. ‘I hear you’re a friend of Kester’s. I’ve been lumbered with his dog. I could kill him.’
‘Are you a particular friend of his, then?’
‘Of Kester’s? No, not really – to tell you the truth, I find him rather dreary, I never know what to talk to him about, he doesn’t seem to be interested in anything.’ Not for the first time in hearing about Kester, I wondered who exactly bored whom. ‘But my husband was fond of him – well, quite fond. No idea why. The theatre connection, I expect. My husband knew everyone in the theatre back in England. George Bernard Shaw, of course, Emlyn Williams, Larry and Viv – adorable pair.’
Next to me, Bernie was telling the consul’s wife about being almost struck by lightning while out bird-watching the day before in the marshes.
‘Sometimes I wish I were struck by lightning,’ the consul’s wife said, tearing at her spicy meat-balls.
‘I’m not an ex-patriate, you know,’ said Celia. ‘I’m an Englishwoman living in Corfu. There’s a huge difference.’
When the conversation drifted onto that most Corfiote of topics (how to get out of Corfu), Arthur gave me a nudge and offered to poke about the garden with me. All the familiar words were already trickling down the stairs after us – ‘Gatwick’, ‘Heathrow’, ‘charter’, ‘Harrods’ – as Arthur turned to me and said: ‘Scintillating company?’
‘Oh, everyone seems … nice enough.’
‘I suppose so – in their fashion. It’s just that we’re all desperately tired of being ourselves, but don’t quite know who else to be. Except the priest, I suppose, but he’s not really one of us.’
‘So why are we here, do you think?’
‘You’re wondering, are you?’ Arthur laughed. ‘It’s the grand seigneur thing, that’s all. George imagines he still counts for something – and he does in some ways, he’s got a finger in every pie in Corfu. But the days when you had to have his permission to sneeze are long gone. The little rituals persist, though – the bestowing of favours, the word in someone’s ear, and lunches like this one for the fag-ends of the empire. Well, Princess Margaret is hardly likely to pop over for drinkies, is she? She’s got the Rothschilds to hobnob with – it’s trade that’s glamorous nowadays, after all. So it’s us or nobody. Even Kester gets an invite at Christmas.’
Venetian it might have been, but the house reminded me of exactly the sort of ramshackled manor Ranyevskaya would have felt at home in, or any of those maundering, rudderless aristocrats, for that matter, in any of a dozen Russian novels I’d read. I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if a booted peasant in baggy pants, clutching his cap, had appeared in the sitting-room to announce a cholera epidemic in the village.
Eventually Arthur and I made our way out of the labyrinth of dank rooms into the unkempt garden below.
‘It’s all finished, really,’ Arthur said, waving an arm at the house, the chapel, the rows of quince and cumquat trees. ‘It’s all over. Finito. Kaput. In a few years from now some German shoe-salesman will be living here with his wife and three children. He’ll sell off the olive-groves in plots for more Germans to build their holiday houses on. George will spend his days griping about money and railing at his hopeless sons. Well, it’s happening already, really – the family used to own olive-groves right across the island once, but bit by bit they’ve sold them off, just scraps left now.
‘Nobody wants to work, you see, they’ve no talent for it at all. Oh, they do things – the usual things, passing round the tourist cake, hoping chunks of it will fall off into their hands – they wheel and deal endlessly, but they don’t actually work, not as such. No, it’s doomed. All those counts and countesses on the walls inside would die a second death if they could see what the family has become. Way back they were standard-bearers for the emperors in Byzantium, you know. That’s the sort of thing they do best. Well, the time for emperors has passed – thank God, I suppose.’
After pottering about in the orchard in the balmy air for a while, we made our way back to the sloping dining-room, where Martha was in disgrace for trying to clear the table before everyone had finished. She was singing softly to herself, coming in and out with plates of semolina cake and halva.
‘Kester sings, of course,’ Celia said, helping herself to a very large slice of cold custard soufflé.
‘Really?’
‘Very badly, but yes, to his guitar. Composes his own songs. Sort of haiku things about love being washed away by autumn rains. I find it most embarrassing. Always try to dissuade him in company. I wonder where he’s gone? His teeth, I suppose. Ghastly business, teeth, at our age. And, needless to say, here on Corfu …’
While the cumquat liqueurs were still being served, there was a sharp blast on a horn outside, and Arthur rose rather abruptly and made his apologies. Probably the Chilean. Bernie, his sister, fell glassily silent in mid-sentence – she’d been talking (to nobody in particular) about snipe and woodcock – and then said: ‘Perhaps I’d better come along with you, Arthur.’
‘Don’t worry, Bernie, you stay here – we’re not going straight home.’ Celia then offered to drop her off and, as happens at such moments at the end of meals, suddenly the whole thing unravelled like tangled wool, with everyone pushing back their chairs and hitching onto someone else, unhitching and then hitching up again.
By the time I got down to the front door, even George and Gisella had vanished, which I thought was distinctly odd, roaring off down the white gravel drive between the banks of golden broom in their sparkling Mercedes. In the end, only Greta and I were left, saying goodbye to Martha in a funny mixture of English and Greek. As we drove away, I watched her grow very small in the blackness of the doorway, the empty house mushrooming lopsidedly around her, all scabby pinks and greys, doomed, baleful, melancholy.
‘If we’d stayed until evening fell, we’d have seen the fireflies,’ Greta said. But all I could think about as we swooped down through the darkening olive-groves past the abandoned nunnery was Sisi. There she’d sat, a hundred years before, wife of the Emperor of Austria, just a few hilltops away, reading Homer and talking in Greek with her hunchbacked nobody about nothingness and lovelessness and loss and poetry, desperately striving to shake off significance of every kind – or at least of the kind her world fought for – while here, at the same time and so clo
se by, amongst these hunched olive-trees the scions of Byzantine courtiers had struggled to do the very opposite: hang on to significance where there was none, ending up, now, with one crazed, toothless housemaid serving meat-balls to failed actors and local shopkeepers and their wives. Was there no middle path? Was Chekhov’s ‘work, work, work’ the answer? If so, what exactly ought we to be working at? Anyway, working hard never rescues anyone’s life from futility in Chekov’s plays – it’s vision that does that, a certain kind of homespun wisdom.
‘It all looks so civilized and normal, doesn’t it?’ Greta remarked as we took off down the main road along the valley floor towards the coast, supermarkets and suburban villas flashing by. ‘But you know, up there in the mountains to the north – not twenty miles away, probably, as the crow flies – it’s still 1000 BC. Up there, believe me, Homer is alive and well. And I don’t just mean cures for the Evil Eye, which they say can knock a donkey into a ravine at fifty paces. In some of those stone villages up on Mt Pantokrator, for instance – can’t see it today, too cloudy – the old gods and goddesses are still running riot, large as life. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were still sacrificing goats and rams at the winter solstice.’
‘How amazing.’ I gazed back at where the mountain should have been – the ‘hilt of the scimitar’ that was Corfu, in Gerald Durrell’s phrase. (A sickle, in the myth, rather than a scimitar – Saturn used it to lop off Uranus’s testicles, so we’re told, providing the Venetians with the two rocky outcrops in Corfu Town to build their fortresses on.)
‘Yes, and just a stone’s throw from Princess Margaret’s helipad, too. They still bring in the New Year with old Dionysos sitting up in a painted wagon, I hear, and the men still gad about in women’s clothing on Shrove Monday (I think it is), goodness knows why. And those huge what-do-you-call-them … phalluses, they still strap those on in early spring, apparently, and stride about singing obscene songs by torchlight.’
‘Are you sure?’ I asked. It all sounded terribly unlikely to me.
‘No,’ she said, ‘but I believe it’s true. Don’t be deceived by all the flash hotels and Paris boutiques. Corfu is still a primitive place, it has a wonderfully pagan heart.’
How paper-thin everything seemed back at Kester’s house that evening after listening to Greta, how almost banal the tracts on astral travel and table-rapping, how positively hum-drum, how light as air Clive James’ memoirs of his childhood in suburban Sydney. And as for Kester Berwick’s pale existence – his notes in old envelopes, his yellowing playscripts and chipped cups and plates – it was little more than a faint smudge in the corner of the last page of history. I blew on his ghost and out it went like a light.
14
Through the letter-slit next morning dropped a card for Kester. Michaelangelo’s David. Not a perfect body – in fact, with a real peasanty thickness here and there – but perfectly rendered. Breathtakingly naked in a way no man would ever appear, yet unerotic because his nakedness we see (miraculously) as our own. Should I read the card? Postmarked Florence, ten days earlier. I hadn’t the slightest compunction.
Dear Kester,
Greetings from Florence. Isn’t he divine? I’m on my way home at last and thought I’d drop in on you – hope you’ll be there. In about a fortnight. I’ll get the ferry from Brindisi. It’ll be great to see you again.
Love,
William
Good God!
Frantic calculations. He could turn up on the doorstep at any minute. He could be striding down the road from the bus-stop in his blunt-nosed boots at that very moment, as I stood there, gazing up the hill. Was that the bus revving its motor right now at the top of the rise? What would I say? What would he say? Thunder-struck, he’d vanish back up the hill in silence. He’d get that sullen look and say something wounding, horrible. His eyes would widen with surprise, he’d give me an impish grin (always wide open to the unexpected, our William) and move in.
No, no, it was impossible. I’m no coward, but I know what I can bear without falling apart and what I can’t. Suddenly in Rome, to put it bluntly, it had been cherry-tree chopping time and (as Clive had once tried to tell us, right at the beginning of our rehearsals) that need not be a tragedy. If those cherry-trees hadn’t been chopped down at the end of Act IV, for instance, we’d have all kept circling each other like a mob of silly sheep, bleating on and on about ‘love’, until we drowned in our own fetid quagmire of it. Or gone mad and shot each other. At the first thud of those axes in the orchard off-stage, off we’d all flown like startled birds, out into the big world. Three cheers for the axemen!
Throwing a few clothes into a bag, I wondered where I could escape to. A couple of weeks should be enough – William wouldn’t hang around. I admit to a pang or two – wanting to see those tender, bluish hollows just below the eyes, the knees poking at the jeans, hear the chirpy wise-cracks, just for five minutes, just long enough to start to lose my reason – but I quashed them by searching through Kester’s bookshelves for something to take with me, reading out the titles one by one aloud. Head of Orpheus Singing, Kester’s novel set on Lesbos – why not? And some Sappho, too. She seemed appropriate. Perhaps I could get a nice English murder mystery at the airport, something with a vicarage in it. And at the last minute I threw a few of Kester’s dog-eared manuscripts into the bag as well – interesting to see what sort of thing this man (this elderly scribbler William seemed to find so fascinating) laboured away at.
Leery of the ferry-terminal, I got a cab to the airport. When I finally got to the head of the queue and had to say where I wanted to go, my eye lighted on the Sappho sticking out of my bag and I heard myself say ‘Lesbos’. You couldn’t get much further away from Corfu than Lesbos – it was practically in Turkey, having indeed been Turkish within living memory.
‘Mytilene,’ the clerk with the swallow’s-wings eyebrows said tartly. ‘Nowadays we don’t say “Lesbos”, we say “Mytilene”.’
How oddly squeamish of them. ‘Whatever,’ I murmured.
‘Just one?’
Just before we boarded, a fit of good manners over-took me. I tried to resist – there should be no shoulds for the lone traveller – but my upbringing got the better of me. I rang Greta.
‘Just thought I should tell somebody that the house will be empty for a week or two. I suddenly felt like a change of scene.’
‘I was wondering when boredom would strike. Where are you off to?’
‘Lesbos.’
‘Then you must meet Zoe. You’ll adore her.’ I didn’t want to meet anyone. I wanted to float free. I especially didn’t want to get entangled with someone called Zoe.
‘Who is Zoe?’
‘We’ve been friends for years. She’s actually Kostas’s wife … didn’t I mention Kostas? You know, my síndrofos in Athens. What’s the polite English word?’
‘I don’t know. But please don’t bother her, Greta —’
‘“Lover” sounds so messy, I always think. “Gentleman companion”? But you must meet Zoe. Sometimes I think I’m fonder of her than I am of Kostas. Pots of money – she owns a chain of beauty parlours. Born and bred on Lesbos. Knows it inside out. A Communist, of course, like Kostas. I’ll telephone immediately. She’ll be tickled pink – she’ll probably pick you up at the airport.’
Why this fetish for connections? It was almost as if Greta feared that, unmet by Zoe, I might fail to exist. However, as we soared above the harbour where Alcinous had once moored his sleek, black ships, up and off towards the mainland (Ithaca a burst of yellow to the south), what my mind came to rest on was that blue-black Horus-eye just under William’s collarbone. ‘My wedjat,’ he used to call it – one of his little affectations, knowing as he did almost nothing about Egyptian mythology. He’s just a magpie.
I’m always prey to strange fixations in aircraft cabins – it must be the air pressure. When chalky-brown Athens appeared beneath our wings at dusk, tinged with a deceptive rosiness at that hour, the Horus-eye was still imprinte
d on my mind. And the silky skin around it. And other things. But Athens airport is no place for dreamers – neon-lit, foul-smelling, raucous – and I raced off to find the gate for Mytilene.
Untethered again. Panic and pleasure. I shuddered. Suddenly, from the top of my head to my toenails, I was totally, electrically alive.
PART TWO
I MORE THAN ENVY HIM
He is a god in my eyes, that man,
Given to sit in front of you
And close to himself sweetly to hear
The sound of you speaking.
Your magical laughter – this I swear –
Batters my heart – my breast astir –
My voice when I see you suddenly near
Refuses to come.
My tongue breaks up and a delicate fire
Runs through my flesh; I see not a thing
With my eyes, and all that I hear
In my ears is a hum.
The sweat runs down, a shuddering takes
Me in every part and pale as the drying
Grasses, then, I think I am near
The moment of dying.
Sappho
1
This was sheer sorcery. When I awoke the next morning in a town I’d never heard of and gazed from my window at coastlines whose beauty cut me to the quick (although I somehow knew those piercing blues, those jagged silhouettes, they were an old dream come to life); when I stumbled down the stairs and crossed the cobbled street to stand and stare down at those ancient roofs tumbling in crazed zigzags to the bay below, I felt I’d been spirited there. I felt as if, in the hours of darkness, I’d been magicked away to a place that had been waiting for me. This was Molyvos. This, as it turned out, was ancient Methymna. This was where the head of Orpheus, still singing, had drifted to shore. This stony hillside village, in other words, was where Kester Berwick had lived for eight years before moving to Corfu. Sorcery – no other word will do.
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