If I’d imagined a bit of limb-loosening boyishness in the bathroom of a morning – nothing too vivid: a flash of soaped flesh through the steam, a moment of vigorous towelling, a bit of playful banter while we shaved bare-chested at the sink – I couldn’t have been wider of the mark. By the time I opened my eyes, William had had his coffee and croissants, gone for a run along the boardwalk in the icy wind, and was now standing quite unsheepishly at the end of my bed, ready for action.
‘So where did you and Jungle Jim go last night?’ I said, as evenly as I could, hoisting myself up on my pillows.
‘The casino. Is there anywhere else to go in Trouville at midnight?’
‘And was it … fun?’
‘The casino? Well, slot-machines are much the same anywhere, I guess. The casino’s themed – you should see it – it’s all cartwheels and cowboy hats, it’s hideous!’ He laughed. ‘It’s stopped raining. Do you feel like getting some bikes and going for a ride?’
An image of quaint, half-timbered Norman barns and wagon-sheds flashed through my mind. I could just picture the two of us, sailing along the clifftop road towards Honfleur, waving to rosy-cheeked peasants herding geese among the apple orchards … green, the rolling hills would be a deep, juicy green, the air heavy with the smell of mud and hay … we’d shout into the wind, swooping like larks uphill, downdale …
‘No, I think I’ll stay here and read a bit,’ I heard myself say. ‘But you go.’
‘Are you sulking?’ A mischievous glint in his eye.
‘Sulking? Why would I be sulking? No, it’s just too bloody cold, William. You go, though, while the rain holds off.’
I didn’t read, of course – in fact, I didn’t have a book. I tramped up the hill behind the town, past all the mock-Norman villas with their prissy gardens, feeling foolish, nettled, crabbed and elated all at once. Later, down in the Sunday market, jostled by the seething, garishly dressed crowd, I felt nothing at all. Sitting eating a sandwich where the fishing-smacks were moored, I flailed at the seagulls. Disgusting birds, seagulls, with their greedy, yellow eyes and vicious squawk. Turning back towards the crowd, I noticed two cyclists propping their bikes against a lamp-post beside the ice-cream cart. It was William and Jungle Jim. I pulled my scarf up to my nose and set off for the Flaubert.
’Ah, monsieur! Votre ami vous a téléphoné tout à I’heure…’ It was Lemon Lips, offering me a small slip of paper and a very thin smile. Why she thought a chartreuse blouse was flattering to a woman of her complexion was beyond comprehension,
Rendez-vous Brasserie Le Central six heures.
Such decorum in one so young! And would the Legionnaire be joining us, in full regalia?
‘Merci, madame.’ A twitch of the lips, no more.
‘Je vous en prie, monsieur.’
The bang of my door, when I slammed it, came to her, I’m sure, as no surprise.
I was running a little late. Not so late as to appear inconsiderate or ruffled, but just late enough to make a point. The restaurant wasn’t crowded. An uncluttered pre-war décor which felt oddly modern. Shaking my umbrella at the door, I scanned the faces for mon ami. No sign of the spiky hair and slender neck anywhere. Just Alex. Good grief!
She was alone, at a table near the bar. Red curls, white scarf, blue jacket – quite nautical, in fact. A little wave (as if I could miss her).
‘Hullo! Having fun?’
There was that word again. Fun. What was it? Whatever it was, I wasn’t having it.
‘Yes, we’re having a great time.’ I settled gingerly across from her. ‘Despite the cold.’
‘Where’s Will? You haven’t lost him, have you?’ She giggled, but tightly.
’Will? Oh, William. Actually, I’m not sure. He’s been out cycling all day.’
‘He got my message, though, didn’t he? He knows we’re meeting here at six?’ So this was the friend who’d rung to suggest a rendez-vous at six.
How infinitely tempting it was to say ‘yes’, wait for an hour, watching her keeping her eye on the door, her pale, English fingers starting to drum after a while, and then say: ‘God, he’s so unreliable! Sorry you’ve come all the way from Honfleur for nothing … see you back in London.’ And then dash back to the hotel and lock William in for the night. I could feel myself flushing pink at the thought of it.
‘Just let me call the hotel and check what’s happened,’ I said.
William answered the phone. That little catch in the voice. ‘Hi!’
‘William – or should I say “Will”? – it’s me. Look, Alex is here –’
‘Where is she? She said she might call.’
‘Well, we’re in a brasserie called Le Central, down on the quay near the town hall –’ There was a sudden crash on the other end of the phone.
‘Shit!’ said William under his breath. And then giggled.
‘What was that?’
‘It was just the ashtray falling off the um … bedside table. It didn’t break.’
‘What’s Alex doing here?’
‘She’s been staying with her mother. She said she might pop down. Look, I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I’ll just take a shower.’
‘OK.’
But William didn’t smoke.
It was pure butoh: a painfully slow, long-drawn-out dance of tortured souls, miming feeling. It began as soon as William and Max pushed the door open: we all smiled, ritually, and then quickly froze over, settling into a subtle, almost imperceptible shuffle this way and that – excruciatingly tedious, mesmerizing, coolly febrile.
Alex froze at the sight of shaven-skulled Max, as did I (already frosty over Alex), while Max in his bright yellow ski-jacket stiffened slightly at the sight of Alex. William went as taut as a cat. A chill descended. We all smiled and began to dance.
Slowly, Max warmed towards Alex, and she to him, so William inched his way in my direction. I shrank from him towards Max, William from me to Alex. We all took a minute, malicious step forward, one to the side, then back again, eyeing each other through the slits in our masks. We ate our fruits de mer, our moules and marrons glacés, we passed the salt and cider, all infinitely bored, as alert as cornered rats.
‘So, Will, what have you decided?’ Alex said finally at about seven. ‘Do you feel like a couple of days at Honfleur?’
Decided? The dance stopped. We all stood stock still. Max lit another Gitane.
‘Would you mind?’ William asked, turning to me.
‘The thing is, if you’re coming, you may as well drive back with me now, don’t you think? You were leaving in the morning anyway, weren’t you?’
‘Honfleur,’ said Max, ‘I’ve never been to Honfleur.’
All of a sudden I realized I was acting in the wrong play. This wasn’t a gut-wrenching tragedy, this was a farce.
I stood up. I was about to say ‘Would you excuse me?’ or ‘I’m suddenly dog-tired – must go’, but nothing came out. I made a little fish-mouth to say something, but then turned on my heel and walked out onto the street.
‘Where are you going?’ It was William’s voice behind, me.
‘Just fuck off, William,’ I said, not even turning round. For one exciting moment I considered facing him and having a scene, but decided against it. Those four words more or less covered it.
Back at the Flaubert, I stuffed William’s things into his knapsack and took it down to reception. Lemon Lips was almost rigid with suppressed delight. Soon afterwards there was a knock at the door, but I ignored it. The telephone rang, but soon fell silent.
Next time you see me with other people, he’d said, you must promise me faithfully you’ll come and get me. So what the hell had he meant by that? Was it just a cute line he’d read in a book?
During the long, rainy night I began to understand. My eyes were on the gleaming, empty boardwalk below my window, but my mind was on that speck of an instant in Clive’s kitchen. William had reached out towards me, coaxing me to reach out towards him. Mystifyingly, drawing together meant
much the same as drawing apart, and I had no idea how to step into the space between us. Indeed, I had no idea who should step into it.
The next morning, while I was waiting for the taxi, a little boy was spinning a top on the pavement near my feet. I was transfixed. In a flash, as the taxi pulled in, I stretched out my foot and stamped on the whirling cone. Then I slid into the back seat and was gone.
8
Perched on a rock in the sun behind the ruined castle, I’d just sunk my teeth into a cicada when I heard the holler. I nearly bit its head right off.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ It was Elvira, aglow in her red wind-cheater and all alone.
‘I’m biting my first cicada of the season for luck.’
‘Really? Is that what they do here?’
I threw it up into the sky. We both watched it lurch off drunkenly towards the cliff-edge and Turkey. It would drown before it got there.
‘So how was the ceremony?’
Elvira looked at me with such intense joy that I felt embarrassed. I knew that my question had been inappropriate and banal, but I never know how to approach these things. If I show too much interest, I’m likely to be mistaken for a seeker after truth, whereas all I want to know (genuinely) is what happened, what it felt like to be there. When I was a teenager, I once asked Mrs Evans, our neighbour, the one whose letter-box we used to put dog-turds in, what happened at her New Thought meetings, and for years after that she dropped pamphlets in our letter-box – pale-green, misspelt invitations to lectures on ‘The Secret of a Beautiful Life’or ‘Our Godlike Humanity’, with music by Miss Sarah Codd. But I didn’t want to know about any of that (we were Presbyterians) – I just wanted to know what it felt like to be Mrs Evans. In the end my mother had to have a word with her.
‘We scried her,’ Elvira said at last. ‘We scried the goddess!’
‘Scried?’ Careful here.
‘We don’t usually say “see”, we say “scry”.’ She considered me for a moment, as if pondering whether to say more. Was I worth saying more to?
I bent and picked a red poppy, twiddling it while I waited.
‘I’ll just say this once,’ Elvira said, ‘so don’t ask me to say it again. Once, when I was a small girl, eleven or twelve, I was waiting with my brother on a railway-station for a train. We were going to visit an aunt in another town. I was sitting staring at the puddles on the platform, thinking about nothing. Suddenly there was a brightness – not a light, it had no source – and in that brightness there was no measurement any more, no now or yesterday or tomorrow, no movement or stillness, no me and them, no here and there, I was everywhere and everything and nothing at all – the puddles, my brother, the chocolate he was eating, even you now, and also none of it, just the point where everything crossed, the flying of an infinitude of arrows to their target, never to be reached, yet already hit.’ She was very fluent, and I wondered how often she’d told this story just once. ‘And I heard a vast sigh, and then myself saying to my brother in the brightness: I am dead, you should go home. And then we were home, and the brightness faded, and everything could be measured again, with some things behind us and some ahead, and my mother came running to the front gate, as white as a ghost, telling us she’d had a phone call to say that our aunt had died. I said: None of us was ever born.’ She paused. I smelt wild rosemary. ‘Well, that’s what it was like last night. There’s nothing else I can tell you.’
I couldn’t help thinking, being who I am, that it would be interesting to have a chat one day with Elvira’s brother.
‘You’re wondering about my brother, aren’t you,’ Elvira said, with a laugh. I felt pierced. ‘You’re wondering what his version of the story might be. Well, he says we never left home. That doesn’t bother me. In a sense he’s right.’
‘What I don’t quite understand,’ I said, still twiddling the poppy, ‘is whether you believe that Aphrodite actually exists.’
‘Oh, only in the sense that you do,’ she said, staring off towards Turkey. ‘Feel like a walk? It’s such a marvellous morning.’
A little way off we heard the dull clunk of goat-bells and we turned to see an ancient goat-herd ambling across the road with his goats towards his stone shelter. Just a few hundred yards away behind us, beyond the fort, people were telephoning Berlin and Barcelona, booking flights to Singapore, watching people talking in Athens live on television screens, reading about what had happened in New York the day before – I could hear their doors banging and their motorbikes starting up from where we stood. Yet, looking the other way, I was in a world so ancient I’d not have been surprised to see a bunch of Lydian pirates come scrambling up over the edge of the cliff, waving iron swords, to loot the town, or a trireme go scudding past, headed for Egypt, oars thrashing the blue-black waves, loaded with corn and sacks of figs.
Elvira set a cracking pace.
9
‘They scried her?’ Leila thought the whole thing preposterous. ‘I wish I could scry Yanni once in a while – he’s been gone since breakfast. Down by the harbour, I suppose, yacking with his mates. What am I supposed to do all day? Arrange the flowers?’
Sappho was right about love the limb-loosener: it’s not bittersweet, it’s sweetbitter. In time the honey burns.
‘Kester’s a bit prone to that sort of thing, you know,’ Leila said, taking me out onto the tiled balcony to enjoy the late afternoon sun and the view. Yanni’s house was indeed spectacularly situated, high on the hill just below the fortress, although, as usual, it was furnished in that comfortless, very Greek way – a rug here, a chair there, a vase, an icon, no books – as if life were essentially to be lived elsewhere.
‘What sort of thing?’ I asked. I was drowning in the blueness of everything below.
‘Well, not goddesses, of course, but, you know … spirit presences, the odd spot of table-turning.’ Leila, as I knew, was not above reading her stars in the local newspaper herself, and was ready to excuse all sorts of eccentricities in herself on the grounds that she was a Taurean with Libra in the seventh house or some such nonsense. ‘We sat for hours once in his flat with one of those planchettes, waiting for a message from my brother Giles, who’d just drowned in France.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Not a thing. “He’s there,” he kept saying, “I can feel he’s there.” And he’d put his fingers on the planchette, and it would shudder a bit and scrawl a bit of gibberish – there’s a pencil stuck through a hole in it, you see – and Kester would sigh and wait and try again. Eventually it wrote VA TE FAI and then stopped and wouldn’t move. Kester was sure this was significant, but I was jack of it by then and went home. Of course, I never really got on with my brother, perhaps he was just sulking.’
Leila looked across the bay into the blue haze, remembering. ‘Then there was the time, back in the thirties, quite soon after they arrived in London, when he took Alan Harkness to one of those dance performances that were all the rage in those days – you know the sort of thing: women floating about, draped in white, expressing the lost rhythm of the cosmos. Anyway, well into the evening, with the audience all Apprehending Being or whatever it was they did with great intensity, one of the dancers, a woman with a withered arm, suddenly stopped and pointed at Kester and Alan in the front row (with her good arm, I presume) and said: “I can see you many lives ago … you were together then as you are now … I see you both in Persia, at the court of the king, at Isfahan … one of you is a master of music and dance, the other his assistant … you’re travelling players, you’ve come across seas and mountains to entertain the king and queen, I can see the flaming torches and hear the drums … and as it was, so it shall be.”
‘Kester was thunder-struck, naturally. “It all tallied, you see,” he said to me (that was the sort of slightly wishy-washy thing Kester would say). He and Alan were travelling players, they had come across seas and mountains – well, seas, anyway – to the seat of empire, and Kester was in a sense Alan’s assistant, and had been even back in Ad
elaide. So Kester naturally saw it as a sign.’
‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you.’
‘It was certainly a sign that madam had done her homework. But she was wrong: Alan went to America, as I told you, got married and died on a level-crossing. Kester’s such a treasure, but heart-breakingly easy to swindle.’
‘You really have a great affection for him, don’t you,’ I said. I was moved.
‘It’s not hard. Even Yanni feels a fondness for him – I can tell. Amazing, isn’t it? The man I meet on St Pancras station turns out to have been taught English by the man who first taught me to act. It’s as if we’re all caught in this huge web of connections spread across the globe, and right in the middle, arms folded, quietly waiting to see what butterfly or gnat might fly into it this time, sits Kester Berwick.’
‘You make him sound like a spider.’
Leila just smiled. ‘Do you know the word the locals all use about him? “Evyénikos”, they say. The mayor, the village policeman – they all say the same thing: tóso evyénikos, so good-hearted, such a gentleman, so … kind, really. Such a good man.’
‘It makes him sound a trifle dull.’
‘Dull… Must goodness be dull?’ Leila lit a cigarillo and examined her gleaming fingernails – a vivid fuchsia this afternoon. Far below us in the village cats started fighting. Someone somewhere was frying fish. ‘Few women I know would call Kester dull. Men tend to draw a blank with him, it’s true. Even Yanni never knows what else to say about him except how evyénikos he is – and a marvellously patient teacher. I don’t think he was ever popular with the taverna crowd. But there’s another side to him, you know.’
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