‘I’ve been thinking there might be. Not quite so evyénikos, this other side?’
‘Kester has a night side, yes.’ Leila blew lazy plumes of smoke out over the narrow laneway below. The blue haze was thickening. ‘I had to laugh when I read what that Australian writer friend of Kester’s wrote … Betty someone … wrote a book about Lesbos, half in love with Kester herself, I always thought …’
‘Betty Roland?’
‘That’s the one. Never liked her much myself – a tiresome mixture of the wanton and the twinset and pearls, I always thought. But that’s precisely what appealed to Kester, I think. They saw a lot of each other in London in the fifties, when she was working at the BBC and writing bits and pieces for the dailies. Then she came to Lesbos, more or less at Kester’s invitation. I can just imagine it: “Why don’t you call in to Lesbos on the way home?” he’d have said to her. “It’s beautiful, the people are friendly, life is good …” She’d have been convinced there was a subtext. So sophisticated, yet so blind.’
I could tell from the vicious jet of smoke she blew across the table that Leila relished this failure in another woman.
‘Anyway, when Betty went to Athens for Easter, Kester put her in touch with a couple of his young friends. She found them captivating, of course – lean, handsome, with eager young minds – it’s all in her book. They climbed up Lykavittos Hill with her at night to join in the candle-lit procession, and sat in cafés with her, lamenting their hopeless futures. This was the early sixties, you see, there were no jobs, these boys had starving widowed mothers and unmarried sisters in need of a dowry, university fees to pay, and God knows what other demands on them – which they no doubt regaled Betty with, as she gazed into their melting black eyes. And then, in that insufferably prim way of hers, she adds darkly that some of these boys were driven to the point of taking money from “certain types of tourist” who came to Greece to satisfy their “particular requirements”. I could practically see her hand going to her throat in horror, pearls caught up decoratively in her fingers.’
Rolling her eyes, Leila shot me another curious glance to see if she’d snared my interest.
‘Just how exactly did the silly woman think Kester had met these charming boys?’ She snorted, blowing more smoke over me in pleasurable irritation. ‘What type of tourist did she think he was? Did she think he’d met all these Theos and Georges and Spiros in the public library or that they’d spent their time poring over Plato together while their mothers dished them up lamb stew? (What, for that matter, were her “particular requirements” when she travelled? Why did she really come to visit Kester in Molyvos?) Kester met these young men everywhere – in barber’s shops, in public parks, at the beach, in the bushes around the Parthenon late at night. And took them back to his hotel room for a bit of whoopee. Night after night. And, after he and Betty had spent the evening down at Nick’s taverna, chatting intimately about life, love, art and the whole damn thing for hours on end, where on earth did she think he went? Did she think he went back to his room to mull over marrying her? Or dip into some Buddhist tract before drifting off to sleep alone in his chaste bed? I don’t think so, darling,’ Leila chuckled.
‘What he probably did after kissing her cheek,’ she went on, wrapping her shawl more tightly around her throat against the first chill of evening, ‘was wander off along the seafront in search of a hungry-eyed young sailor or two to spend, the night with. In those days he didn’t have far to look. I can just see him, wafting off into the darkness with that funny walk of his. He used to walk as if he were caught in an undertow. I saw him walking like that along Oxford Street. once – miles away, on the other side of the street. You couldn’t miss him. It looked as if someone was pulling him along by a string attached to his navel.’
Leila sighed and glanced at her watch. The sky above us was turning the palest of greens, streaked with orange clouds. ‘Have you read Betty’s book? Lesbos: The Pagan Island, it’s called!’ Here she cackled and had a brief coughing fit. ‘I think the penny may’ve dropped eventually. A distinctly miffed tone creeps into the story after a while, as if she’d suddenly put two and two together and realized she’d be catching the boat home alone. Rather abruptly, I seem to remember, Molyvos lost its charm for Betty Roland.’
Although I’d obviously been putting two and two together myself over the past few weeks, what I didn’t understand was why Leila saw these appetites as Kester’s ‘night side’. I was about to say something along these lines when the door was flung open and Yanni came into the room, with that slightly grumpy, yet elated, look on his face that men have at such moments. It’s time, I thought, to make a move.
10
‘It’s not a tragedy,’ Clive said, looking us in the eye one by one when we gathered for rehearsal after the weekend in Trouville. At last we were in the church hall off the Holloway Road. Typically, William had not shown up. ‘That’s the whole point, don’t you see: it’s not even a tragedy.’
‘It’s hardly a barrel of laughs, either,’ Gareth muttered. He was having trouble with the drunken doctor. Lines like ‘We don’t exist, we only seem to exist … Anyway, what does it matter?’ didn’t come easily to him.
‘I heard that, Gareth,’ Clive said, ‘but that’s not the point, either. My point is that the three sisters and their hangers-on are so ordinary that they can’t even rise to tragedy. That’s why our hearts go out to them. Do you see what I mean?’
‘The point? Look, it’s snowing. Where’s the point in that?’
‘Thank you, Gareth. Perhaps you should be playing the baron. Where is our baron, by the way? It’s nearly ten o’clock.’
‘The baron’s a fine fellow, but one baron more or less – what does it matter?’ Gareth took aim with an imaginary pistol and shot the absent baron dead.
‘OK, places, everyone, we’ll start without him. Olga, Masha, Irina … Irina, sweetheart, you’re not looking lost in thought – remember the stage directions? – you’re looking bored witless. Alright. It’s midday, it’s sunny, the atmosphere’s almost cheerful, Chekhov tells us. The table’s being set for lunch. Olga …’
OLGA: It’s exactly a year since father died, one year today, the fifth of May, your name-day, Irina. It was very cold, it was snowing. I thought I’d never live through it, and you lay there in a faint, dead to the world. But now a year’s gone by and here we are, remembering it all without any heaviness of heart, you’re even wearing white again, and your face is glowing …
And we were off, tracking in interminable, broken-off conversations, the minute shifts in our aimless, futile lives – with remarkably good humour. At that stage it didn’t have quite the ‘riveting’ quality Clive wanted brought out – ‘Think of Monet,’ Clive kept saying, ‘think of the impressionists, think of van Gogh’s bedroom, think of those boring haystacks and rows of poplars, all those women with parasols sitting in deck-chairs on beaches or picnicking … and think about why you can’t take your eyes off them’ – but something was starting to shine through the haphazardness, the happenstance of our characters’ lives. I wondered if Gareth’s eyes, or Alex’s, for that matter, had ever rested on a Monet or van Gogh, except on the back of a toilet door in Islington, but even they seemed to intuit what Clive meant. Something was working.
All of a sudden, right after lunch at that rehearsal after Trouville, like a vision of the Virgin Mary, it struck me: in Three Sisters the key number was three, it wasn’t about a tangle of meandering lines, it was about overlapping triangles.
Nothing ever looked the same again.
What I mean is this: Three Sisters wasn’t a play about dispossession, hope and despair, or lives petering out in failure and death – or not just about those things – it was about people bending the straight lines of their lives into triangles, trying (as we all do, it dawned on me) to make a space in which to play with their deeper desires. In other words, I don’t sneak off at night with the doctor to gamble just to get away from my vapid, baby-talking wife,
but to give my life a different shape, to stop it turning into a one-way ride into a dead-end, with Natasha and our two children trailing along behind. I make a triangle. We all do. All the time, everywhere. Natasha starts her ludicrous affair with the chairman of the town council (my boss – even better), the baron and the bilious staff-captain use each other to make a triangle with Irina, who triangulates with her pathetic fantasies about working for the masses, while Masha creates an amazing lopsided triangle with the battery-commander and her Latin-speaking husband, the battery-commander zigzagging between his suicidal wife and Masha, and the husband between his wife and his Latin verbs.
Only Olga, I suppose, the most solitary of all the characters in the play, the least touched by passion, the most strikingly ordinary, whose words open and close the play, makes no effort to conjure up a triangle. She just stands at the apex, as it were, of the triangle of the three sisters.
Seeing the play in this new way (for me), as a jagged maze of interlocking triangles, I felt suffused that afternoon for the first time with a real warmth for these lost souls. Even if there were no meaning, no point to anything – ‘Look, it’s snowing. Where’s the point in that?’ – there could at least be a pattern, straight lines could be twisted into new shapes, trembling with possibilities for new tugs-of-war, new balances, new sorties into new territory.
Olga, Masha, Irina, the baron, the doctor – I didn’t see them as shallow any more. Ordinary, but not empty or shallow.
Walking back to the Underground that evening in the biting cold, I held that vision to my chest like a guttering candle. Gliding down into the roaring, fuggy depths on the escalator, I kept thinking of something the lieutenant-colonel says in Act II. It sounds banal unless it’s delivered with just that balance of lightness and ardour Chekhov demands – and I’m not sure, a century after Chekhov, we quite know how to capture that. The lieutenant-colonel (saddled with a suicidally miserable wife and pointlessly in love with married Masha) is gently trying to explain to Masha that all dreams of finding happiness in Moscow are an illusion: once there, everyday life would be as bland and stale as it is in the provinces. Moscow is not the point. So he tells the story – so trivially true it’s barely worth repeating – of a French government minister jailed over the Panama swindle who writes in his prison diary about the birds he sees sitting on his window-sill outside the bars. Just ordinary birds – sparrows or pigeons or something, not toucans or peacocks – so common-place they’re not even worth naming, birds he’d never even noticed when he’d been busy being a government minister, although no doubt they’d sat on his window-sill at the ministry just as they did at the prison. And he’s seized with a kind of intoxication, a joyful wonder at the mere thought of these sparrows and pigeons. Then he’s released and, of course, again these utterly ordinary birds just fade into a blur. And that, I knew, is what the theatre is about. That was why I was there. There are no toucans in Chekhov. But intoxication and joyful wonder … well, bit by bit, day after day, we were reaching for it.
11
There was no reply when I first knocked on the door. But I could hear the muffled jabbering of the television set just inside it, and tried again. It was the Friday night of the week after the Trouville fiasco. Although I hardly expected William to be home on a Friday night – weren’t the young always out having endless fun on a Friday night? wasn’t it social death to be caught at home watching television? – I’d suddenly leapt to my feet in the middle of the BBC detective drama I was watching (who gave a toss who’d robbed the gaga pensioner of her life savings?), threw on my overcoat and set off to have it out with William. He’d never appeared during rehearsals at the church hall – perhaps he was busy painting the scenery somewhere – and Alex, my ruthless, simpering, bat-brained wife, had not once deigned to mention Honfleur, the French Foreign Legion, William or anything else. During breaks she’d sat twittering away in French with Mireille, who was Costumes. I was buggered, quite frankly, if I was going to ask.
By 8.08 on the clock on the stove I’d had enough. Something (although I wasn’t sure what) had to be straightened out. To be honest, though, in the Underground, my eye alighted on one of those Silk Cut advertisements and it was all I could do not to turn around and go home.
Now I banged on the door a third time. The chain jingled, the door jerked open and there was William in his floppy blue sweater, grinning at me nonchalantly as if I’d just been out for ten minutes buying cigarettes. I could’ve knocked him to the floor, but I kissed him lightly on the cheekbone and walked on into the room. Sitting on the couch, her feet scrunched up beneath her, was Alex. No one spoke. Alex’s hair flamed red in the lamplight.
‘So,’ I said, refusing to mention France.
‘Take your coat off, sit down,’ William said. Was he flustered or just a bit unfocused, as usual? ‘Although, actually, Alex and I have to go out fairly soon. But there’s time. Do you want a coffee?’ The accent, the timbre, the easy gestures melted something inside me.
‘No, thanks, William. I really just wanted to have a talk.’
‘What about?’ He was genuinely interested. So was Alex. The mass of red curls under the lamp was boring into my right eye.
‘Things.’
‘OK.’
‘Maybe now’s not the best time.’
Silence. Alex, piss off. More silence.
‘Tell you what,’ William said, reaching down to turn off the television. (A tiny squeak from Alex.) ‘Why don’t you come with us? We’re just going to see a friend of mine, someone rather special. Then afterwards maybe we can talk.’
‘You go,’ I said. ‘I’ll come round another time.’ Melting, hardening, stung, soothed, I made for the door. Alex still hadn’t spoken, although she’d uncurled her legs. ‘Have fun,’ I said, reaching for the door-handle.
But I went with them, naturally.
Seb lived in a depressing terrace in a cul-de-sac not far from Tuffnel Park station. An abandoned plastic tricycle stood in the middle of the path to the front door. There were chimes, which whimpered like a very small animal in pain every time there was a gust of wind.
‘We’re just getting under way!’ Seb said in a loud whisper, beaming at us as he greeted us in the cluttered passageway. Dressed in an ivory cotton caftan (which took me straight back to the Adelaide Hills in the seventies), Seb was almost ravishingly handsome, with gleaming blond curls and a clipped, blond beard like a chisel. His eyes seemed to be a disconcerting violet. Perhaps it was the purple light-shade. I took a deep dislike to him on the spot.
There must have been a dozen or so people filling the low-lit living-room at the end of the passage. There were smiles and nods as we came into the room, and several of the young men and women sitting cross-legged on the floor squeezed up to make room for us. Jammed between William and a gypsy-beautiful young girl swathed in batik, I kept my eyes fixed on the golden figure of Seb, glowing like a Burmese buddha in a high-backed, red-plush chair beneath a yellow lamp. The odour of long-dead geraniums was wafting through the air from smouldering tapers. I sneezed.
‘A wise teacher once said to his eager pupil,’ Seb began, after a pause to allow deep calm to settle, ‘that, if he wished to follow him, he must first be beheaded.’ Seb smiled – my God, he was handsome, in that way that kills desire in a flash – while his eyes moved lightly from face to face around the room. No one stirred. ‘Tonight, my friends, I invite you to your own beheading.’ Since my left buttock was already going numb – the gypsy’s trailing beads seemed to be wedged in tight under it – I shifted up against William. He smiled.
‘Tonight, in other words, we’ll be taking a journey deep into the heart – not, of course, into that ball of beating muscle in your breasts, but into Being …’ I knew it had a capital B from the way he lightly pursed his lips. ‘I want you to close your eyes and let your everyday self slide down, down, down … and into your hearts … Breathe deeply, let your breath sweep your mind clean … don’t rush it, just let your minds empty out, thr
ow open every window one by one and let the winds of Being blow through … Your bodies are beautiful, you must cherish them, but they are just the echo, not the Voice itself. Let your self become faceless, let your features dissolve … eyebrows, nostrils, lips, chin … let them thin into nothing … This is the First Merging.’ William’s knee relaxed against mine. Somewhere in the house, I was aware, there were dirty nappies.
‘Down … down … slide slowly down into the heart, into bliss, into love, into Being. Relax the neck, let the neck become liquid; relax the throat, let the throat thaw out and soften; relax the shoulders, let the shoulders sleep …’ The pale-faced young man on William’s right lolled against his shoulder, his long hair dangling down onto William’s arm. On the couch in the corner Alex looked still and waxen. I tried to edge my buttock off the beads.
‘Are you all relaxed? Are you all coming down? Take it slowly, leave the head behind, merge down … Watch those shoulders, just let them float into nothing … In a moment, when you’re ready, we’ll drop down into Being, we’ll let go and just drop into pure Being…’ William’s long thigh quivered warmly against mine.
All of a sudden there was a sharp chill in the air, a tiny hiccough in the merging, something I sensed, rather than perceived. Are you all relaxed?’ A new tautness in the voice, although it was now a murmur. ‘Someone is not letting go. Someone is not relaxing. Please, everyone … everyone let go … gently … gently … no need to bully yourselves …’
My left buttock was killing me. I had to get off the gypsy’s beads, but when I tried rolling to the right, I jerked her lolling head smack into my shoulder. ‘Sorry!’ I whispered. It ricocheted round the room like a bullet.
‘Someone is not with us,’ Seb said quietly. ‘I’m sorry, but someone here is not merging. Someone here is kicking against his beheading.’ Surreptitiously, I knew, the whole room was trying to catch a peek of who it might be. I was rigid with shame.
Corfu Page 14