Corfu

by Robert Dessaix

  One hot morning in Athens Kester overslept. When he answered the banging on his door, he found himself standing groggily in his pyjamas in the presence of one of the city’s most powerful, and colourful, men. It was Michael Goutos, tall, grey-haired, and no doubt elegantly suited, with rough edges to his suaveness that Kester must have found appealing. While Kester perched on his crumpled bed, a little flustered, Goutos strode back and forth across the room, outlining his plans for his native village, Molyvos – the tourist hotel, electricity, sewage pipes, the new road (at that time the bus from Mytilene took hours to grind across the mountains to the northern coast) … and English-speaking locals to milk the expected hordes of foreigners of their dollars and pounds and marks and francs. And Kester Berwick (or so Goutos had been told at the British Council in Athens) was the perfect man to teach the town officials, the shopkeepers, hotel-managers and knick-knack sellers the English they’d need for the job. Single, keen to stay in Greece, desperate for a work permit, a teacher by profession … Mr Berwick, come to Molyvos, come immediately. You will fall in love with Molyvos.

  Kester smoothed his rumpled pyjamas, considered the chiselled, smoothly shaven features of the towering Greek beside the wash-stand and thought to himself that he indeed might.

  It was a graceful forking of the ways for Kester. With John Tasker now back in Australia (stranded there, ironically enough, when his English lover failed to follow him to the antipodes), Kester’s homeland was like a haunted house to a child – alluring, almost unbearably so, but threatening as well. By taking the boat to Lesbos, then rattling across the mountains in that bus stuffed with peasants in Turkish pantaloons, bleating goats and half-dead chickens, Kester was turning his face in a new direction. Over the next eight years, Molyvos, with Kester’s help, was transformed into a smartish, although still sleepy, resort, and in his various barely furnished rooms, in his class-room and on the grassy headlands and tiny, pebbly beaches around Molyvos, Kester slid with as much dignity as he could muster into white-haired middle-age.

  Yanni had disappeared altogether by the time we reached this point in the story. ‘He’ll be in one of the tavernas round the back,’ Leila said, her mind switching suddenly to more immediate matters. ‘I think I’ll go and drag him away.’

  ‘But you still haven’t told me,’ I said, as she fussed with her drachmas and told me I absolutely must come up to the house for coffee (‘you’ll die when you see the view’), ‘how it is you came to be talking about me to William.’

  ‘I’m sure I told you – you’ve just forgotten. He rang me here from Corfu – such a sweetie. He’s staying in Kester’s house, as a matter of fact. Didn’t you know?’ She kissed me on the cheek. ‘Must run, darling, or I’ll turn into a pumpkin.’

  It wasn’t quite the witching hour as I watched her hurry off around the corner, but it was late. Climbing up the hill in the chilly dark, I wondered what my goddess theologians were up to at that moment, whether or not they’d pierced the veil. Would they be dancing wild-eyed around a roaring fire in a Bacchic frenzy or would Aphrodite come to them in a rush of silence? More to the point, where was William at that instant? Lying in my bed in Gastouri? Dreaming of what? Could he see this selfsame moon that I could see? Was there a ghostly triangle in the sky at that very minute: William–moon–me?

  I stood for moment by the café at the mouth of the wisteria tunnel and gazed up at the sky. The gods were certainly busy that night with their signs and portents. Around the moon, in fading circles, were haloes of pale rainbows, the faintest, most perfect pencillings in red and blue.

  But I don’t believe in signs, I told myself, turning back towards the stepped alleyway to my hotel. Just in things as they are.

  6

  Pinned to the back of the toilet door in his bed-sit in North London William had a Rilke poem (which I could make neither head nor tail of), an old New Yorker cartoon, and a Monet print: The Beach at Trouville. Vivid, light, momentary. Ochres, smoky blues, a dash of vermilion. Nothing remarkable about any of that – just an ordinary North London toilet door. But one day during the Three Sisters rehearsals, when I dropped in on him for lunch, the Monet gave me a brilliant idea.

  Since the moment of the ballooning bubble and the plunged coffee in Clive’s kitchen, I’d felt an urgent need to find the right words to describe what was happening. New words, my own words, today’s words, not last week’s or Hollywood’s – and not Leila’s, either. (‘So where’s your friend tonight?’ she’d whispered huskily right into my ear the first evening the beanbag under the lamp lay empty. And once when I completely forgot my lines in Act IV, Gareth snorted: ‘I think the poor possum must be in love, girls and boys, don’t you?’ And everyone – except Alex – giggled. With these words they were railroading me into feeling things I wasn’t sure I felt.)

  Anton Chekhov was of absolutely no help in sorting out what was happening. Night after night we tossed, the word ‘love’ backwards and forwards across Clive’s living-room – Three Sisters is crawling with ‘love’. I love’ my wife Natasha, for instance (or so I keep saying), although not for herself – she herself, as I finally admit, is petty, boring, vulgar, barely human – but as one might ‘love’ old furniture one has grown accustomed to and can’t be bothered to throw out. She for her part ‘loves’ my boss, the chairman of the town council – or at least has an affair with him, a bit of slap and tickle in the troika – while also ‘loving’ her children, naturally enough. (Our children are very likely my boss’s, too.) The Latin teacher ‘loves’ his wife Masha (madly), while Masha ‘loves’ the battery commander, who in turn ‘loves’ her (although not his own wife, not even as old furniture). Masha’s sister Irina is ‘loved’ by the baron with an embarrassing passion, as well as by a young poseur of a staff-captain whose ‘love’ comes straight from the pages of romantic novels. Irina, however, ‘loves’ neither of them, although she quite likes the baron – enough to marry him, anyway. And they all ‘love’ the old nanny and each other (more or less). It’s not a play, as Chekhov himself said – it’s just a tangle.

  Yet, as far as I could tell, what happened when William plunged the coffee that night mirrored none of these ‘loves’. It didn’t feel like a rush of sibling affection, for instance, nor did I want to be his mate (who would we close ranks against, exactly?) or his teacher à la Kester Berwick. It had something to do with an unbidden bolt of pleasure that he was who he was and I who I was, it’s true; but something had also been laid dangerously, enticingly bare. In North London at that time – and in the Adelaide Hills when I was younger – laying bare often blurred quickly into unclothing, and disclosure into undressing, but what I felt was not as straightforward as the steamy desire to ravish his body – like Daphnis, I couldn’t quite picture what that would entail – nor was it even run-of-the-mill romantic passion, that giddying technicolor jumble of every kind of love in the world that ambushes all of us from time to time and for a season sends us mad. It was a puzzle.

  In Act IV of Three Sisters, trying to explain to the baron why, although she’s happy to become his wife, she does not ‘love’ him (‘it’s not in my power to’), Irina says: ‘I’ve dreamt about love, I’ve dreamt about it day and night for years, but my heart is like a beautiful piano which is locked shut, and the key’s lost … It torments me, this lost key, I can’t sleep because of it.’ One night, a couple of weeks into rehearsals, I heard these lines as if for the first time. To tell the truth, they’d always struck me as rather mushy. I mean, did anyone ever really talk like that – ‘my heart is like a beautiful piano’ – even unmarried post-office clerks in provincial Russia a hundred years ago?

  That particular night, though – I’d just wheeled the wretched pram off and was standing in the kitchen doorway, listening, acutely aware of William in his beanbag, listening – for some reason, what Irina said that night made perfect sense. All the words I’d tried to open the piano with had turned out to be old, blunt keys to something else, so it had stayed locked up. What we
re the right words?

  A few minutes later, as we know, the baron is shot to death in a duel, Irina weeps for fully ten seconds, and the idea of love and locked pianos flies straight out the window. Instead of looking for the key, she decides to go away and become a school-teacher – ‘to work, just work’.

  Nobody shot William, though, so I kept scrabbling about erratically for the Key to the Piano of my Heart, Stupidly, I said something along these lines to Leila a day or two later in the Shalimar. I thought she might be touched and say something wise. Instead, she rolled her eyes disdainfully. ‘You know what Picasso said about looking for things, don’t you?’

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘I don’t look for things, I find them.’

  Arrogant bugger. But perhaps he had a point.

  I’ll bring it to a head, then, I thought. I’ll put it to the test. I’ll find the word for what we are, William and I.

  The very next afternoon, wandering back into the kitchen from the toilet as casually as I could, I said to William, who was frying fish for our lunch: ‘What do you think about going over to France for the weekend? Normandy, say – Honfleur, Trouville, somewhere like that.’

  ‘Great idea – let’s do it.’

  ‘You don’t need to think about it?’

  ‘No. I’ve sort of been expecting it.’

  This was odd. I’d only just thought of it myself.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Alex read my cards last week.’

  ‘Did she, indeed.’ Keep the curled-lip tone out of your voice. It was the one thing that annoyed me about William – this penchant for horoscopes and Chinese herbs and reincarnation. ‘And she said you’d meet a handsome stranger from across the seas and go to France with him?’

  ‘No, not exactly. In any case, you’re not a stranger, are you? But France did come into it, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I’ll bet it did,’ I said, a little too sharply. ‘Her mother has a house near Honfleur, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Yep.’ He turned the fish on its bed of sizzling onion. ‘Right on the beach.’

  ‘Have you been there with her?’ I hated myself for asking.

  ‘Yep. Once.’ He started scooping the soft, white flesh onto plates, sprinkling it with the curls of onion. Was he waiting for the next question or busy with the fish? ‘How much sauce do you want?’

  ‘Lots,’ I said. We carried our plates over to the table in the sun.

  7

  Hotels have an amazing effect on my libido. The games with the desk-clerk, the key in the lock, the smell of the sheets, the fluffy towels, the glances from strangers … I feel a spring in my step the instant I hoist my suitcase out of the taxi. On the ferry from Portsmouth, queasy with indecision about what part to play, I’d brought up my cheese roll and Fanta quite spectacularly all over a West Highland terrier on the upper deck. Roué, scoutmaster, big brother, pal – what was my role in this scenario? (Perhaps ‘scoutmaster’ covered it nicely, I thought dolefully, recalling three weeks in the scouts when I’d been fourteen.) Not that William had seemed troubled by any doubts: he’d been in high spirits from the moment we’d met at Waterloo all the way across the Channel. He’d nosed around the ferry like a frolicsome puppy, bantering with strangers, sniffing the damp air, gobbling down pies and doughnuts with pink icing, and chatting with me about anything that came into his head.

  One sniff of the floor-wax in the vestibule at the Hôtel Flaubert, however, and I perked up. I flirted with the desk-clerk (Bonsoir, messieurs! Vous désirez? – the tea-party manners of a duchess, heart of ice), I took command, I slid the key into the lock and twisted, threw back the curtains, took possession of the room. And it was vast, with ante-room and alcoves, lamp-lit corners and shadowy doorways. We peered out at the blackness beyond the windows. Strips of grey sand in pools of light, ghostly façades with tall, glowing windows, a man with a dog on the boardwalk beneath us, rugged up against the gusts of rain. It wasn’t quite Monet, but it was Trouville. I stood there for a while, nose against the glass, pleasantly on edge, half bewitched by the inky possibilities beyond the pane, then turned to find William stretched out, eyes closed, on his bed.

  ‘William!’ I said softly, perching on the edge of the bed beside him. ‘What do you feel like doing?’

  ‘Sleeping,’ he murmured, not even opening his eyes. ‘I’m stuffed.’ He smelt of salt air and damp wool.

  ‘I might go and get something to eat.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, and nestled into the duvet. ‘I don’t need anything, I’m full of pies.’ I studied his peaceful face for a moment, thought of lightly kissing one eye-socket, decided against it and quietly let myself out.

  When I got back an hour or so later, he was dead to the world, buried deep under the duvet. I was relieved, up to a point, to have been let off the hook.

  There’s only so much mooching around a seaside resort in the off-season you can do, especially in the rain. A walk along the deserted beach, looking across from time to time at the yellow-grey waves; drinking coffee in a beach-front café, a few white hulls glimpsed bobbing mistily through the steamed-up window; idle window-shopping in dim, stony side-streets; another coffee; lunch.

  Waiting.

  For the sky to clear, for something to happen, for dinner, for bed. It’s vaguely threatening, like mid-afternoon in the home they put my mother in. It’s your everyday life stripped of all the little distractions that hide its emptiness: the telephone calls, the trips to the corner store, the evening news, walking the dog, work.

  That first day William seemed to revel in it all. He wondered about everything – why there were no fishing boats out today, what everyone was doing in those shuttered, narrow houses in the side-streets, why the impressionists loved the sea. ‘Look at the colours now,’ he said, nudging me when the sun came out for a moment, dissolving all the brownish greys in a wash of blues, pinks, whites and emeralds. It was just slightly irritating.

  When the rain squalls hit again soon after lunch we went back to the hotel. Time yawned. William flopped on the bed. Had the moment – or at least a moment – arrived?

  ‘I wonder if this is where Flaubert stayed,’ William said. ‘I mean, I wonder if that’s why it’s called the Hôtel Flaubert. It looks old enough. We should ask.’ He rolled, onto his side. ‘He wanted to write a novel about nothing, you know.’ How did he know that? ‘Un livre sur rien.’

  ‘So you speak French?’

  ‘I can get by. I told you: I went to a very expensive school.’ He grinned. ‘This would’ve been the perfect place to write it, wouldn’t it.’

  And so we began to circle each other, motionlessly, me on the floor, William lying back on the bed. Flaubert, Emma Bovary, love, disappointment, my marriage, Harold’s head in the bucket, Adelaide (at last), his stuffy school, his pushy father (a suburban chemist), his painting, his drift into the theatre, the escape to London, Chekhov, failed love, boredom, suicide, Emma Bovary, Flaubert. There was a pause.

  Inside I was coiled like a spring. Flurries of rain hissed on the windows. I was ready. I’d open my mouth and say it – something, anything … I think I may be falling in love with you … Feel like a fuck?… anything to make the spring snap. I looked across at him. He smiled that funny smile of his – a little jet of impish warmth. I cleared my throat.

  ‘Feel like something to eat?’ I said.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, swinging his legs down onto the floor. ‘Where will we go?’

  Bloody William. At the table next to us was a shaven-headed soldier. Some distance from his plate, safe from splashing wine or drops of sauce, lay a snowy, white cap. Outrageously white. William kept casting furtive glances at it as he ate his crêpes.

  ‘He must be a Legionnaire,’ he whispered, nodding at the cap. ‘A Foreign Legionnaire. The cap! God, how romantic!’

  Trim, square-jawed, self-possessed, even sexy – but not, I thought, romantic. A well-trained animal, feeding. He caught William’s eye and nodded. Then, leaning back to enjoy
a cigarette with his wine, he casually opened a newspaper. The front-page headline read in English: US HOSTAGE FREED IN BEIRUT. Further down there was a picture of a familiar face under the headline: EX-PM CAUGHT OFF STRIDE IN MEMPHIS.

  ‘Don’t tell me he’s English,’ William said, quietly agog.

  When I got back from the loo, as I half expected – half wanted, perhaps – William and the Legionnaire were deep in conversation. Max was from Manchester and had been in the Foreign Legion for five years. He had the weekend off, (So why was he kitted out for the jungles of South America?) He regaled William – and bits splashed over onto me – with tales of derring-do in French Guiana and the mountains of Djibouti. William was transfixed. I had the impression that Max was starting to think of freshfaced William as the plat du jour.

  ‘Feel like going on somewhere, guys?’ he said eventually, stubbing out his fourth or fifth cigarette. ‘I know a couple of places —’

  ‘Sure, why not?’ said William, with that little spurt of eagerness I was getting to know quite well.

  ‘You go,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘I’m a bit whacked. I’ll head back to the hotel.’

  ‘Come with us, it’ll be fun,’ William said. The square-jawed Legionnaire said nothing.

  ‘I’m not in the mood. I think I’ll call it a night.’

  I strode back to the hotel in the freezing drizzle, so angry – with myself, with William, with Max the Legionnaire, with Trouville – that I rang my brother in Adelaide and tore at him like a fighting-cock for twenty minutes. I do this once or twice a year, often around Christmas, and always feel much better for it. He’s a complete shit – a real estate agent up in the Hills. Then I turned out all the lights and went to bed. When William crept in, smelling slightly odd, well after two, I was still wide awake, but lay still and said nothing. Needless to say, he was sound asleep in seconds.