Or was it happenstance? Bucketing along across the Aegean (the winds from Turkey can be vicious), I’d fallen into conversation, against my better judgment, with the two women belted into the seats beside me. Elvira from Portland, Oregon, was large, especially in her red wind-cheater, and had a startlingly blond helmet of hair I couldn’t take my eyes off. It gleamed, almost supernaturally. Her friend Andy, who was jammed up against the window, a bit tight-lipped and greenish, was not exactly wispy, nor was she mousy, but beside Elvira looked like a glove-puppet waiting in the wings. Elvira was a witch.
‘You were expecting a pointy hat and a broomstick, right?’ Elvira snorted. ‘Not these days, my friend. As a matter of fact, at the professional level, I prefer the term “goddess theologian”, but I have no problem with “witch”. In Lesbos – you may not know this – access to the Earth Mother in her various guises is particularly direct. And that’s what we’re all about: connecting with the Earth. We say yes! to the body and yes! to the Earth!’ She paused to observe Andy, who was being sick in dainty spasms into a paper bag. ‘I see you’re reading Sappho,’ she went on. ‘Like most people, you probably think it’s all just myth and legend – those hymns to Aphrodite and Hera, the smoking altars, the burnt offerings … Form in a dream, my lady Hera, sweetest shape, O come before me … Well, you couldn’t be more wrong.’ A knowing smile. ‘I’ve been there.’
‘Where?’ I asked, genuinely interested.
But at this point the plane lurched violently, Andy groaned, I dropped my Sappho, and it wasn’t until we were waiting by the baggage carousel on the ground that we got talking again, this time about Australia. Elvira, it transpired, felt a very strong connection with Aboriginal spirituality. And that’s when things went seriously wrong – or right, depending on how you look at it. That, as it were, is when the spell was cast.
Someone tapped at the Sappho under my arm. ‘That Australian accent – it’s a dead giveaway.’ I swung around. Just for a second I thought it was Greta – the same smart cap of greying hair, the same smile and soigné stylishness. I grasped her warm, dry hand and felt the rings. That Kostas fellow clearly knew what he liked.
Shouting above the hubbub in the echoing hall, I said, ‘How kind … you really shouldn’t have,’ not quite catching what Zoe said in reply – and then I was whisked outside to a waiting taxi. A wave to my witches and in no time at all Zoe and I were heading along the seafront towards the lights of Mytilene.
Chatting to Zoe was easy. She had a sort of American affability, even an American accent, faintly Bostonian. It wasn’t until we’d cleared the ramshackled ugliness of Mytilene and seemed to be heading out into the moonless countryside beyond, that the chitchat petered out. I wondered where she was taking me. Perhaps she had a villa in the hills to the north of the town, or perhaps there was a cosy little hotel out here amongst the olive-groves by the gulf she’d decided would be just perfect. On and on we purred through the blackness. Drowsiness crept over me. And then suddenly, on a mountain pass in the middle of nowhere, she said the most peculiar thing: ‘I’m really looking forward to your paper, you know.’
‘My paper?’ Perhaps I’d misheard. My mind had long since lost its compass.
‘Yes. What’s the exact title again? Something about recontextualizing the body in late Sapphic texts, isn’t it?’
I went cold. ‘Excuse me, are you Zoe?’
‘Zoe? No.’ I couldn’t see her face in the dark, but the voice was not alarmed, just puzzled.
‘Stop the car.’
‘What?’
‘Stop the car,’ I said, ‘there’s been a terrible mistake.’ We drew over onto the gravel. The silence was drumming in my ears.
‘Who do you think I am?’ I spoke as evenly as I could.
‘Why, aren’t you Steven Werner from Sydney University?’
‘No.’
‘Well, who are you?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Oh, God …’ She sank back into her seat. There was a very long pause. Then she laughed. ‘I think I’ve just screwed up!’
So there we were, two complete strangers, sitting together in the dark in the wilds of Lesbos, one imagining she was ferrying an Australian classics scholar to a conference on Sappho, the other thinking he was safely tucked up under the wing of a Communist hairdresser called Zoe. And presumably, back at the airport in Mytilene, there was a very cross classicist from Sydney, pacing up and down in the cold outside the terminal.
‘So what do we do now?’ I asked. The driver sat quietly smoking while the two foreigners sorted themselves out. My Sappho expert from Massachusetts sat and thought. Then she sighed. ‘Lets just keep going. Let’s go on to Molyvos. We’ll call it fate. I’m sure Sappho would have.’ Then, as we pushed out onto the road again, she added: ‘Anyway, to tell you the truth, the very thought of recontextualizing the body in late Sapphic texts bores the shit out of me.’
2
So. Shadowed – that’s how I felt that morning in Molyvos. Shadowed by the ghost of a man I didn’t know and wasn’t sure I cared to. Like the head of Orpheus, ripped off by the Maenads in far-away Thrace to float, still singing, to this bay below me, Kester Berwick would not fall silent. Wherever I went his disembodied voice pursued me.
As I soon learnt, the Molyvos I was gazing down at – this brownish, Turkish-looking town falling away across the hillside like a crumpled skirt – had actually been almost created by Kester Berwick. Well, not literally – Achilles rampaged through it on his way to Troy, after all – but, at the very least, he was mid-wife, so to speak, to its rebirth. To put it another way: the blond-haired tourists ambling along the seafront far below me would not have been there without him. Nor would I.
Not that I knew any of this when I walked up the empty, cobbled street that first morning to the café hanging out over the drop. It was a sort of closed-in, wooden-verandah affair, perched on the cliff-edge just where the street became a tunnel beneath a canopy of wisteria. From the lilac gloom I stepped into the sweet-smelling café, hoping to give the ghost pursuing me the slip. But another, as it happened, was hovering, ready to pounce.
When the roughly shaven waiter stretched out his hand to put my coffee and baklava on the table, I could scarcely believe what I saw: traced onto that tender web just where the thumb and forefinger part was a Horus-eye. I stared at it. It stared at me. It twitched. And was gone.
I first saw William’s Horus-eye the autumn after The Cherry Orchard closed. Late September, possibly October.
Summer had raised my spirits – Leila had got me work in a touring company putting on plays for children in a string of towns along the south coast. Still Ranyevskaya to my Peter Trofimov, she pricked at me now and then with remarks about William – ‘William rang last night, he’s off to Sicily with friends’ (what friends?) or ‘William might drop in on us tomorrow,’ he’s in Torquay, something of Joe Orton’s, I think it’s Entertaining Mr Sloane’ (but he didn’t) – just little niggles, hoping I might unzip and tell all. But I didn’t. And after all those months with few reminders I actually quite enjoyed the tiny spurts of pain she caused, like little jabs at a tender gum.
Then I saw the Horus-eye. Late one evening on Piccadilly station. William was leaning against an advertisement for Silk Cut, chatting with two friends. Lanky, at ease, one booted foot crossed casually over the other. One of the girls, the one with red curls with her back to me, was almost certainly Alex from The Cherry Orchard. I looked away. The girls laughed. When the train came in, the three of them squeezed on, but when I got to the doorway my courage failed me. The doors snapped shut. I stared through the glass at the bodies jammed against the door. William lifted an arm to grasp a strap. His shirt ballooned and there it was, just six inches from my nose, looking straight at me from its hiding-place under his right collar-bone: the Horus-eye. There was a jolt, then they were gone.
It was like an omen. A day or two later, flushed with the success of our Cherry Orchard the previous winter, we were to plung
e into rehearsals for Three Sisters.
Most of the old gang was in it: Gareth was playing the drunken doctor, for instance, and Alex, with her wild, red curls, was playing that minx Natasha, while I got the part of Andrei, her husband, who means to become a professor in Moscow but ends up working for the local council in a provincial backwater, married to a grasping, unfaithful wife. (Again, I was a wee bit old for it at nearly thirty-five, but Andrei goes to seed so rapidly – marriage always has that effect on Chekhov’s characters – that by Act II it hardly mattered.) Leila, not entirely with good grace, took the part of the eighty-year-old nanny. ‘Yes, it’s a small part, Leila, sweetheart,’ Clive kept saying, ‘but utterly pivotal.’
On the second or third night of rehearsals, when I walked in the door of Clive’s living-room, there, lying back on the beanbag in the corner under the lamp, looking at me through his knees, was William. He raised one hand from his knee in a casual wave.
‘Wait till you see his sketches for this one!’ Clive said. ‘They’re brilliant!’ William grinned.
The first time I ever saw Three Sisters, as a teenager in Adelaide, I was bored witless. Even in my twenties, when I went to an English production with Lisa, I was nearly frantic with boredom by interval, and we argued, I remember, about whether or not we should skip the second half or stay the distance. Almost all the characters in the play are bored as well – numb with boredom, occasionally even hysterical with boredom. ‘Who cares?’, ‘What does it matter?’, ‘I’m tired of it all’ – the play is peppered with these cries of desperation between random silences. The only escape from boredom the sisters can imagine is moving back to Moscow.
The first read-through – at Clive’s again – had been a dispiriting experience. What we had to work with, after all, was three sisters – a school-teacher, a post-office clerk and the bored wife of a Latin master – and a gaggle of army men, scratching around for something to make sense of their shallow lives in a nameless town in the steppes where the height of sophistication (they think) is to speak a little halting Italian. (No wonder I’d found it a bit close to the bone in Adelaide.)
‘Listen to me!’ Clive had said when we’d come to the end that first night, the room a virtual morgue of broken lives, failed dreams and lost loves. ‘In real life these people might have been tedious nobodies leading drab, trivial lives. So what? This isn’t life, this is theatre, this is art. This play is beautiful.’ We all stared dully at the carpet. There was a stale curry smell in the air, too, mixed with the acrid tang of Leila’s cigarillos. ‘They may be unhappy and not know what the point of living is, just flying on blindly like migrating geese; their loves may all go awry and happiness escape them; they may chatter on about working for the poor and future generations (as if drudgery, even in a good cause, could really bring contentment); but one thing they are is honest – they look their failed lives right in the eye and name things by their proper names.’
‘What about the “Moscow! Moscow!” business?’ Gareth asked, quite reasonably. ‘How honest is that? They were obviously stuck out in the boondocks for life.’
‘Yes, and what about all the adulterous love-affairs?’ Leila said, drawing on a fresh cigarillo. ‘What’s honest about them?’
Clive was having none of that. ‘What’s dishonest about the adultery? Everyone knows, everyone understands, everyone forgives. Wouldn’t you commit adultery if you were married to Andrei, for example? It’s a lot more honest than the sort of tacky hypocrisy you get –’
‘Careful!’ said Leila.
‘And as for Moscow,’ Clive went on after a minute pause, ‘well, of course the sisters know they’ll never get there, obviously it’s just a dream – what’s wrong with dreaming? They never lift a finger to actually go there. Moscow doesn’t really exist.’ We all coughed and shifted in our seats, thinking about adultery and our own private Moscows. ‘On the whole they’re good to each other, too. Love may prove an illusion, but there’s affection and warmth in abundance in all that muddle, and very little bitterness. That’s what we have to bring out.’
Clive thought for a moment, not unmindful, I imagine, of how gossamer-thin the veil was between the lives he was describing and most of the ones in his living-room. ‘And one other thing: did you notice how it’s the least important of these characters, the least self-regarding, even the most clownish – the ones Gielgud and Olivier would never have dreamt of playing – who seem to have lit on the secret of contentment. Like Masha’s silly husband. It’s her husband, the Latin master, spending his days teaching a dead, useless language to bored schoolchildren, who understands, as he puts it, that without form, life is over. Form (and isn’t that what “beauty” means, the “poetry” the sisters ache for in their workaday lives?) is something he finds in the smallest, most deeply ordinary things in the life he’s actually living in that shithole of a place. He even finds it in Latin verb endings. The rest is all just words.’
This was sobering and quite unexpected from Clive. By the time he’d finished we were all looking at him rather than the carpet. ‘So,’ he said, as we rose to leave, ‘I want our audience riveted by your provincial school-mistresses and empty-headed lieutenant-colonels. I want them bringing down the rafters with their applause. I want them to feel they’ve never seen anything so fucking beautiful since the day they were born.’
A couple of days later in Clive’s kitchen during the break, making a show of looking for tea-bags while William made the coffee, I told him what Clive had said that first night. It was the first time we’d found ourselves alone together, and it was my way of being friendly without being intimate.
‘I’m riveted already,’ he said in that slightly broken-voiced way of his.
‘Really? Why?’
He grasped the plunger. ‘Do I really have to analyse it?’ But he wanted to say something. ‘I suppose I like it because it’s so raw and so gentle at the same time. How’s that?’ He glanced up almost shyly and grinned. ‘Not good enough? It’s an irresistible combination, though, don’t you think? OK, what else?’
He considered the dishmop. ‘I love the way everything seems so all over the place in Chekhov, so out of control – it sounds like an orchestra with no conductor at first. Actually, you all sound deaf – you sound like an orchestra of deaf musicians. And then it hits you: there’s a score alright, and every note’s in place, not a single one’s wasted. It’s just not the kind of music you’re used to, that’s all, like Chinese opera or something. You have to learn how to listen to it. No, not Chinese opera – it’s more like Debussy or someone the first time you hear them. Do you know what I mean?’
Then he plunged. And, as I watched his wrist push down on the plunger, at the instant it hit the bottom, something inside me tautened, almost to breaking point. For just a speck of a moment, as we stood motionless at Clive’s sink, a bubble of understanding ballooned around us. The wrong word, the wrong tone and it would burst.
‘I saw you the other night,’ I said at last, ‘at Piccadilly station.’
‘Why didn’t you say hullo?’ His eyes were on the swirling coffee.
‘You were with other people.’
Still looking down, he picked up the pot of coffee. ‘Well, the next time you see me with other people,’ he said, and then looked up at me, with the faintest of teasing smiles, ‘you must promise me faithfully you’ll come and get me.’
3
The best place to read a book in Molyvos is not down by the toy harbour behind the break-water where all the cafés are huddled and the fishermen mend their indigo nets – there’s too much coming and going down there, too many Danes and Dutchmen filling in time. Nor is it on the pebbly beach beyond the old olive-press – the mussel-blue bay, the bobbing caïques and strolling, half-naked bodies are too beguiling, the eye wants no words, it just wants to look. No, the perfect place to read a book is in the ruins of the old Genoese fort.
Built by the Gateluzzi family from Genoa over six hundred years ago, before the Turks came, it
crowns the cone-shaped hill Molyvos is draped over. Nobody much seemed to go there – at least not while I was there, during the lull between Easter and the full onset of summer – so I could perch up on the crumbling battlements, with a view across the empty straits to Turkey, with nothing but the fragrance of a few violets and wild roses to distract me, drifting off into other times, listening to long-dead voices. Occasionally I’d hear the cracked clanging of church-bells far below, and now and again the watchman would saunter out of his little stone hut and blow his nose noisily, but by and large it was just me, the warm stones and, distantly, Turkey.
The more you read about it, the more Lesbos appears to abound with miracles and with love. Every stony village on the island seems to harbour a wondrous icon, every tree to hide a cupid with stretched bow. And if you were to believe the stories that are told, the Lesbian forests of pine and oak were once alive with lissome nymphs, the glades with goatish shepherds; in Sappho’s day the altars were thick with the rich, burnt fat of she-goats offered to Aphrodite, goddess of love; in her day ‘Love the limb-loosener’ loosened limbs and ‘Love the honey-bee’ swooped and stung until half the island was mad with love – the very sails of the ships off-shore were lovesick, Sappho tells us.
It is somewhere between Mytilene and Molyvos, I realized – not far, probably, from where I stopped the taxi that fateful night – that Chloe is supposed to have first watched Daphnis wash his naked, sun-burnt body in a spring and known in a flash that there was something she wanted to do with this goat-boy with hair as black as myrtle-berries – but what? And so she’d kissed him. Instantly set on fire, Daphnis knew there was something more he wanted to do with pink-and-white-skinned Chloe, too, apart from pelting her with apples and teaching her the Panpipe – but what could it have been?
As it turned out, what he wanted was to ‘lie down’, ‘get big and ready for action’ and then be ‘guided into the passage that he had been trying so long to find’. (The author, Longus, is quite specific about this in my modern, unexpurgated edition.) This comes as no surprise to a modern reader, but what is disarming is the length of the passage from innocence to knowledge: it takes a year and a half of dalliance and tomfoolery to get to it. Then the story abruptly ends with Chloe going to her wedding a virgin.
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