5
Not long after the war, Leila told me, in a large, coastal town near Sydney (it must have been Newcastle, but Leila was vague about anything south-east of Suez), Kester Berwick had been teaching drama at some sort of ‘adult education outfit’. There was lots of Movement, apparently – ‘Form and Movement were the core of good theatre for Kester, as well as Voice, but not words’ – with rehearsals like African tribal gatherings, performed to the beat of the tom-tom. ‘They had nothing, of course – no props, no real rehearsal space, no money – some mining town out in the bush just after the war, you can imagine.’
‘Newcastle isn’t out in the bush, Leila,’ I said, but I could tell from the look she gave me that she thought I was being pedantic. The whole town was stripped for props – landladies found their chairs and tea-services gone, wives missed their quilts and slippers, light-bulbs disappeared from landings and hallways, wedding photographs vanished from their frames. Books, gramophones, tables, violins – all over the city things just kept vanishing into thin air. ‘It was like some divine curse. Kester would’ve been in his element, of course – he positively relishes conjuring something out of nothing.’
They tried a bit of Ibsen, a scene or two from Wilder, but it was the staging of a French play – Martine, by Jean-Jacques Bernard, just a touch avant-garde, exquisite but numbing – which turned Kester’s life upside-down. No, not just that – it picked him up and flung him right across the world.
One night during a black-out, while Kester and his actors were huddled around hurricane-lamps reading their lines, a boy nobody knew walked out of the shadows and stood in the hissing glare, his eyes fixed on Kester. Just a boy, no more than sixteen. Thin, with a long, strong face and remarkable eyes.
(I like to imagine a sort of twang in the room – the gentle plucking of a string – when Kester looked up from his script and into those eyes. In those days, as I know from the photographs in the drawer in Gastouri, although Kester was in his mid-forties, there was a kind of drilled playfulness about him, a sort of honed sexiness – in a word, a foxiness – that I like to think locked into something in that raw but promising face on the edge of the circle of light.)
What Kester was looking at for those few seconds before the boy spoke was his joy and his doom. It was the rest of his life.
Young John Tasker had come to ask about ‘doing something’, if there was something for him to do – anything, really, he just wanted to get involved in theatre. Acting, props, sound effects – anything.
On opening night, as his innocent parents proudly noted, there was his name in the programme – twice:
Assistant Stage Manager: John Tasker
Prompter: John Tasker
Martine was a moderate success. A play about a French peasant girl’s infatuation with a city journalist by ‘the master of the pause’ was not, perhaps, an ideal choice for Newcastle just after the war. And the sky ended up green instead of blue owing to a dyeing accident in somebody’s bathtub. Still, the reviewers, while they didn’t rave, were not unkind.
After the final curtain fell, John did not go straight home with his mother and father. Instead, against their better judgment (actors had some funny habits), he joined the cast in the kitchen at the back of the hall for a little celebration. He waited, glass of cordial in hand, while the crowd around Kester thinned. Gradually (would they never go?) the dishes were washed, the chattering school-teachers, shop-assistants and secretaries drifted off home, lights were turned out and John said to Kester, alone now by the sink, under a bare light-bulb: ‘Let’s do something mad.’ And Kester went hard and soft in that way we all do, knowing this was it, he was on, and they went out the back, got on his motorcycle and roared off to the beach. And John wrapped his arms around Kester, huddling with his nose at his neck behind him, shouting insane, boyish things into the bitter wind, and when they got there, way down near the crashing blackness far from the lights, he wrapped his arms around him again, for warmth and because he was ready. And they stayed there on the cold sand a very long time. He was an angel – a loose-limbed, wicked angel – and that night after the streetlights went out Kester took this floppy-haired angel firmly, but gently, in hand.
‘It depends who you talk to, naturally,’ Leila said (now onto her second retsina), ‘but it’s hard to avoid the impression that John was in some sense using Kester, as a stepping-stone to bigger things. Perhaps that’s harsh – I suppose we all “use people” in the early stages of an affair: after all, there must be something we want from them or we wouldn’t be attracted to them in the first place.’ She looked across at Yanni, who was inspecting a friend’s new car in the shadows some distance away. ‘But I know John. He’s a passionate, stubborn, ambitious, rather wounded man. There he was, a small-town boy with talent, and no real father – his father never spoke, crushed by all the things my father was eventually crushed by… the wars, the depression, their failed lives … and all of a sudden a father-figure appeared, a teacher, a good man, who talked to him about Ibsen and Chekhov and God and London and Paris, and promised to take him there on a ship. The perfect lover – for a time.’ It sounded almost Greek.
The Newcastle community was shattered in 1951 when Kester told them he was off to Europe. He’d been a pioneer. If any eyebrows were raised when it became known that their youngest member would be accompanying him, if any knowing glances were exchanged or vague qualms voiced, we’ll never know. Off they sailed, John just eighteen, to Italy, then on to the Tyrol (where Kester had lived before the war), and finally to London.
Everything John saw, though, everything he tasted – the chaos of Genoa, the emerald-green slopes of the Tyrol with its red window-boxes, steeples and tiny castles, tea at the countess’s in Paris, the circus that was London (and its pubs and clubs) – he saw and tasted through the bars of a cage. But Kester loved him too much (as he put it to Leila) to keep the door shut and, after some time, off John flew. There were arms open wide for him all over London.
‘That was all rubbish, of course,’ Leila said, flicking ash into a handy saucer.
‘What was?’
‘The “loving him too much” business. I never believed in that for a moment. Mustn’t clip the fledgling’s wings, mustn’t stand in the way of Destiny, mustn’t want, mustn’t hold on. It’s nothing but self-delusion.’
‘It might be the Buddhist thing.’
‘I don’t know what it is, darling, but it certainly makes him miserable. To tell you the truth, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with Buddhism, I think it’s the teacher thing. It’s invariably fatal. Always the teacher – that’s Kester’s trouble. Always wanting to bring light, always wanting to bless. And that’s always a disaster. What is the pupil supposed to do, once he’s been taught? What is the acolyte to do, once the mysteries have been revealed? Anyone with an ounce of self-respect will obviously stand up one day, say, “Thanks very much, it’s been a real education”, and head for the door.’
Sometimes, too, I thought to myself, like Sappho’s simple ferryman, who panicked one day and took off for Sicily, the pupil begins to choke on the teaching, leaving the master to his refined delights (and wrinkles) for other, often earthier, philosophies. Unlike Sappho, Kester didn’t set off in pursuit or throw himself off a cliff, but took on more pupils. According to Leila, all you ever saw at the studio in the days following John’s defection was a kind of measured calm:
’Of course, he believes in reincarnation,’ she said, grinding out her cigarillo with a couple of vicious stabs, ‘so I suppose for him it’s all part of a longer story. Personally, the idea of reincarnation frightens hell out of me. The thought of having to go through the whole damn thing over and over again …’
We sat there for a while, the two of us, listening to the lapping water and thinking (Leila, too, no doubt) of the unequal bargains we had both struck in our own lives, afraid to be left with nothing – all the times we’d said yes’ when we’d meant ‘no’, fed someone when we’d been famished
ourselves, laughed at jokes we didn’t find amusing, been sisters, uncles, fathers, friends and lovers to people who in the end had needed something else. And the slow unstitching that had followed, endlessly painful, an infinity of wounding rents and jabs.
’It was the third time for Kester, you see, that’s the point,’ Leila went on. ‘The first time, just before the war, he’d taken a young man called Alan Harkness to England with him to break into the theatre there. Kester would only have been … what? In his mid-thirties, I suppose. They’d been running a sort of experimental theatre company together in Adelaide. One day Sybil Thorndike had popped along to some performance of theirs – or so the story goes – something Japanese, I seem to recall, Kester always had a penchant for masks and robes – and after the performance Dame Sybil had said to them both, as one does at such moments: “Do keep in touch,” or “If you’re ever in London …” – you know the sort of thing. Well, you should never say that to Australians, as we know, because they almost certainly will. Not that she was much help when they eventually got to London – she probably had difficulty remembering quite who they were. They ended up at Dartington Hall down in Devon – do you know about Dartington Hall? I’ve never got to the bottom of it all myself – it’s one of those idealistic sorts of set-ups … you know, a bit of pig-farming and pottery in a medieval setting, all terribly umbilical and spiritually improving. It’s still there as far as I know.
‘Anyway, Michael Chekhov, the playwright’s nephew, set up a theatre-workshop there in the mid-thirties to teach his famous Technique. Don’t roll your eyes – everyone thought he was a genius … Yul Brynner, Gregory Peck… a lot of very fine actors have been devotees. Actually,’ she said, opening her tin of cigarillos but not taking one, ‘Marilyn Monroe once said that working with Michael Chekhov was the most spiritual experience she ever had.’
I could just see it: the hand-picked students improvising Living Statues on the lawn beside the banqueting hall, all searching for their Higher Egos, radiating Invisible Essences and striving to please their Russian master – a dangerous cauldron of rivalries, infatuations, alliances, betrayals and arcane beliefs. And bobbing around in this soup (according to Leila) was Kester Berwick, watching his friend Alan falling under the Russian’s spell.
‘Won over body and soul, he was, while Kester, one gathers, began to sense that he didn’t belong. Well, that’s not quite how he explained it to me – what he told me was that he decided he didn’t want to be an actor after all, locked into somebody else’s method, he wanted to teach. As for Alan, it wasn’t just the Technique that won him over. Bit by bit he was won over by some of the young women in Chekhov’s collective as well.’
Taking another sip of retsina, Leila eyed me over the rim of her glass in the hope that I might ask for details.
‘Really?’ I said. I would not be teased.
‘Yes,’ she said, enlivened as always by the prospect of airing a spot of dirty linen. ‘Let’s be brutally frank – Alan was spreading his wings-which is what Kester would have said he wanted him to do, but still, to have to watch it happen, day after day … the empty bed night after night, the glances over breakfast … well, it must have been torture.’ We both sat in silence for a moment, picturing it in vivid detail.
‘To tell you the truth,’ Leila went on, ‘reading between the lines, I get the feeling that Kester was a dud at Dartington Hall. Chekhov, after all, wanted to create a troupe of first-class performers, he wanted to reinvent the theatre, he was a guru with a worldwide mission, and this young Australian, I think, failed to impress him in the end. Not a complete washout, just not up to the mark. Basically, although Kester’s an excellent teacher (partly thanks to Chekhov), I suspect that he can’t act. So, gathering up his skirts, he said he’d leave the studio and get on with his writing. Well, as we know …’
Reaching across for Kester’s book, she flicked through a few pages, reading a few sentences at random, then snapped it shut. She sighed. ‘Life’s a let-down for almost all of us, let’s face it,’ she said, with a sudden rueful smile, ‘but in Kester’s case, ever since he was booted out of Dartington Hall, it’s been downhill all the way, really, an endless anticlimax. I shouldn’t say that, should I? But, to be honest, what has he ever achieved? Where are the plays and novels he was going to write? After all, he’s had fifty years. Where’s the recognition, the trickle of students who’ve gone on to fame and fortune? Yanni would put it even more brutally: Where (he would ask) is the house, the car and the wife and kids?’ She paused, lowered her voice, and examined her mauve fingernails. ‘Yet I know that’s a cockeyed thing to say. I know it, but I can’t quite put my finger on why.’
We both sat and contemplated the night beyond the hubbub on the quay. Leila finally lit the cigarillo she’d been fiddling with.
‘The word that comes to mind,’ Leila said after a smokey pause – it was almost a murmur – ‘is beauty. It’s got something to do with beauty. But for God’s sake don’t ask me what I mean by it.’
When Chekhov decided to move his studio to America to escape the looming war, Kester tried to talk Alan into going to France with him instead. ‘Damned if I know how he thought they’d survive – writing radio plays and teaching method acting? In the south of France in 1938? They’d learnt their French in evening classes in Adelaide, for God’s sake. No, Kester didn’t have a hope in hell. Alan went to America with the studio, naturally, and after the war got married – to a Swiss woman, I think, one of the members of the collective, with a strange name I can’t recall. Mathilde, was it? Something like that. Alan became quite a successful theatre director later on, apparently, somewhere over on the West Coast.’
‘How did Kester react? He must have been distraught.’
‘Why even ask? He didn’t believe in wild displays of feeling, except on the stage when called for by the script. Kester took himself off to France and Austria collecting folk-tales for Michael Chekhov – and Alan Harkness – to turn into uplifting plays over in America. Pathetic, really. Until he got a telegramme to tell him his services were no longer needed. In Austria he taught English for a while, mostly to Jews, I think, wanting to get out to England or America. When war finally broke out, he got himself onto the last ship to leave Italy for Australia.
‘He taught again on board, of course,’ she said, pouring herself just a little more of the yellow-coloured wine. ‘It’s a curse with him, this teaching business. A bit of English during the day, some ballroom dancing in the evening. He’d have been in his element, obviously – a whole shipful of rootless people. Teachers adore the rootless, have you noticed? The moment they clap eyes on them they yearn to give them roots. I dare say at this very moment he’s broadening the mind of some bored young recruit he’s picked up outside the barracks in Athens. Is it Athens he’s gone off to?’
‘Nobody seems to know.’
A scrawny ginger cat slunk out from beneath the table to rub itself against Leila’s legs and she bent to stroke it, but distractedly – she was still remembering. ‘The Alan Harkness story ended rather sadly, I must say. One day, when Kester was on his way back to England after the war – with John Tasker in tow, as it happens – the ship put in at some small port on the west coast, and Kester ducked into town to buy some fresh fruit. Last chance to stock up before the long haul across to … wherever ships stopped in those days. India? Africa? He’s always been a bit of a health nut, you know, terribly picky about what he eats. Funny, isn’t it, how so many “spiritual” people are. Have you noticed? Anyway, he brought the fruit back to the cabin and started to unwrap it. One of the sheets of newspaper it was wrapped in fell to the floor. When he bent to pick it up, he saw a little headline near the bottom of the page: AUSTRALIAN ACTOR KILLED. It was Alan. Car stalled on a railway crossing. I believe Kester wrote a very gracious note to his widow.’
A sudden gust of wind off the water sent napkins, ice-cream wrappers and scraps of paper scattering across the cobbles, then just as abruptly died away. We just sat qu
ietly and thought our own thoughts. From somewhere behind the restaurant came a muffled burst of bouzouki music.
‘You said there were three …’ (I searched for the word) ‘… failed loves, Leila. The first was Alan, the last was John – who was the second?’
‘Number Two was an Austrian soldier, killed in the war, fighting for Hitler. Just a boy, really. Raymond. Kester showed me his photograph once – Raymond’s parents sent it to him with the most touching letter after the war. Not exactly handsome, but open-faced, guileless. I’m not sure which trip he met him on, or how – all those Franzes and Willis and Rudis he kept in touch with, I could never keep up. Anyway, by the time I met him at the studio in Hammersmith in the mid-fifties, he must have been riddled with grief. Not, as I say, that you’d have known to look at him. Still, inside, the sense of sliding without a companion into old age, not having made much of a mark in the world, must have been almost unbearable, don’t you think?’
To be honest, I wasn’t sure. It depended on what Leila meant by ‘a companion’ (although I had a fairly good idea). Uncompanioned by a spouse or lover, was one really a failure as a human being? And as for ‘making a mark in the world’, almost all of us had to bear passing through it without trace.
‘At any rate,’ Leila said after a thoughtful pause, ‘he seems to have felt defeated.’
And, in his defeat, he drifted south, like thousands of others, looking for nothing more than some work to pay the rent and a measure of tranquillity. Just an ordinary little boat, much buffeted, in search of a quiet anchorage.
Athens looked promising in 1959 for someone with Kester’s inclinations – plenty of idle young men for him to draw out, to take a Socratic interest in; cheap rent; an Australian climate without (as he’d have seen it then) the disadvantage of being a cultural backwater at the end of the world. (Greece was, needless to say, a cultural backwater of the most stagnant kind, and still is, as bad as anything the three sisters suffered, but it was not at the end of what was thought to be the world, it was dirt cheap, it conferred a certain status on foreigners who would have been nobodies at home, and turned a blind eye to the kind of prowling which would have been scandalous at home. And if you ever woke up one morning and wondered what on earth you were doing there, you could always think of Pericles or Plato, which was out of the question in Turkey or Tasmania.)
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