‘We’re really just passing through,’ William said. But when he mentioned staying with Greta, Maxwell guffawed.
‘So Greta’s clutched you to her bosom, has she? How’s that husband of hers, by the way? He’s had one foot in the grave for years, of course – drinks like a fish, I expect you’ve noticed. Does he still toss the bottles out the window onto the lawn?’
‘He died, actually. You’ve just missed the funeral.’ I tried to sound respectful.
‘Really? Not a moment before time. Crabby old bugger, mind half shot, don’t know why Greta didn’t throw him out years ago. They didn’t speak, you know. Haven’t spoken since the day Thatcher became Prime Minister.’ He seemed to drift off for a moment, remembering. ‘Gorgeous weather that day, I remember, the day the news came through. May, I think it was – early summer, anyway – what was it? Seventy-eight? Seventy-nine? I rang and said how about a little excursion over to Paleokastritsa – it’s divine over there in May, hardly a bloody German in sight. They were still squabbling about Margaret Thatcher when they got in the car. You could’ve cut the air with a knife. It wasn’t the Thatcher business that triggered it, though. I said: “Which way do you want to go? Overland or round the coast road?” He said overland and she said round the coast. In two seconds flat it was a screaming match – you could’ve heard them all the way to Albania. Everything was dragged in – some barmaid down in Benitses, the cat, the whisky, things she said to him before they were married – and then they just stopped talking. Lunch was an appalling strain. And not another word has passed between them since, as far as I know. He moved upstairs and she stayed downstairs. Marriage is a peculiar thing, don’t you think?’
I was on the point of wittily quoting Oscar Wilde on the subject (the bit about the widow whose ‘hair turns quite gold from grief’) when Maxwell suddenly looked up and asked how Greta’s husband had died.
‘He fell from an upstairs window,’ I said.
‘Fell?’
‘Or jumped. It’s not clear.’
‘Toppled, I dare say. He wouldn’t have had the guts to jump.’
Feeling uncomfortable about the turn our conversation had taken – however you looked at it, the man had died a wretched death – I started to ask about other friends we might have in common.
‘The widow Berwick?’ he said to William. ‘Of course I know him. Bit of a windbag, and completely potty, but you can’t help being fond of him. Australian, of course, but surprisingly well-read and informed.’
‘We’re Australian, too, actually,’ William said, with warmth in his voice.
‘You don’t say!’ Maxwell said, brushing a few crumbs of shortbread onto the carpet. ‘Well, you’ve both polished up very nicely.’
As we were leaving – in the twinkling of an eye Maxwell had grown tired and twitchy – Maxwell leant towards me and, emboldened no doubt by what he’d imbibed earlier in the evening, asked me directly: ‘And so are you two boys … you know … ?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not really.’
‘Just good friends, then?’ Maxwell was swaying slightly and steadied himself against the door-jamb,
‘No,’ said William, with a grin I found a little unsettling, ‘not yet.’
‘Fascinating!’ Maxwell said, with the touch of a finger to his purpling nose. ‘I do hope you’ll find the time one day to tell me more about it,’
‘Do you know what I’m wondering?’ I said to William, while we were ambling along one of those medieval Venetian calli up near the bus-station. ‘I’m wondering if we might have found our Vanya.’
‘You’d have to talk to him when he was sober, first. What struck you about him?’
‘His capacity for unhappiness, I suppose,’ I said, thinking aloud.
‘He didn’t seem all that unhappy to me,’ William said.
I ignored him. ‘And that marvellous voice.’
‘Yes,’ said William, ‘I noticed the voice.’
A strong but bruised voice, I thought. And that’s what I wanted for Vanya. (In the event, when I rang next day, Maxwell, as he put it himself, couldn’t have been more tickled to be asked. He didn’t at that stage know about the vicar.)
Empty and silent by the time we got there, the bus-station was just an expanse of greasy puddles. Nothing moved. A man lit a cigarette in the blackness of the bus-sheds across the tarmac.
‘It looks as if it will have to be a taxi,’ I said. And that’s how it happened.
To tell the truth, I’m still not sure precisely what did happen. On the surface what happened is that the taxi, without any discussion between us, took us both to Gastouri, where we both got out, paid off the driver and climbed up the outside staircase to the bedroom at the top.
At another level, though, I must admit I’d known there were no buses to the hills at that late hour even while we’d been zigzagging through the maze of the old town towards the bus-station – and William must have known, too. Yet it was William who told the driver to take us to Gastouri, without any mention of going on to Greta’s, and William who got out of the taxi in front of my house and shut the door, although it was I who had paid the driver without asking if William were staying. Nothing was said in the taxi about what we were doing – just a few non-sequiturs about the man we’d just met and a bar William had heard about in one of the ramshackled seaside resorts north of Corfu Town called the Hopping Kangaroo.
Perhaps it was just time. Time to close the gap. Time to see what sort of intimacy might be possible. Time to shock ourselves out of just endlessly playing games.
4
Who doesn’t remember Tolstoy’s description of the aftermath of Anna’s first adulterous coupling with Vronsky? The first time I read it, aged eighteen – and it was the sixties – I was dumbfounded: I thought I’d never read such a load of old Christian drivel in my life. ‘What for nearly a year had been the single thing Vronsky desired in life …; what for Anna had been an impossible, terrible, yet all the more bewitching dream of happiness – now this desire had been satisfied.’ (At this point much sobbing, guilt-ridden appeals to God and the lowering of shame-stricken heads.) But then came the puzzling part: gazing at the woman he has just had sex with, Vronsky ‘felt what a murderer must feel when he looks at the body he has robbed of life’. Murderer? At eighteen I couldn’t for the life of me see why that which for at least four years had been the one absorbing desire of my life should be called murder. ‘The body he had robbed of life was their love, the first stage of their love … And, just as the murderer throws himself with fury on the body, as if with passion, dragging and hacking at it, so he covered her face and shoulders with kisses. She held his hand and did not move.’ Extraordinary.
Now, all these years (and many an unchurched coupling) later, I’ve begun to see what Tolstoy might have meant. Still, a child of my times, I’d put it differently: I can see now that in knowing beauty – seizing it, I mean, and knowing it with a fierceness that leaves you unconscious of whether you’ve been ravishing beauty or been ravished by it – you must entertain bereavement. A poem, an orchid, a sky, a Daphnis, a Chloe – it doesn’t matter what or whom you seize, for the instant you stretch out your hand to touch it, you hear the whisper: This will die. Not the poem or orchid, not the beloved – not this Daphnis or this Chloe – but this particular moment of enchantment, this particular experience of the orchid’s or Chloe’s beauty. We fear that the beauty that is making us feel so alive might prove to be nothing but what it seems. Where there was a living body, so to speak (to echo Tolstoy’s perception), we fear we might soon wake to find a corpse. And so, in a frenzy, as if with passion, we try to breathe new life into it – you’ll be a wife, we say, you’ll be a friend, a cherished being, a beautiful memory … but you will live. An illusion, naturally – and we know it. Beauty – an embarrassing word, but I can’t find a vaguer one – and mourning go hand in hand. Tolstoy got it exactly right.
Climbing that iron staircase to the bedroom that night, however, with William’s light, fi
rm step behind me (the touch of a drumstick on the rim of a drum), it wasn’t Tolstoy and his corpses I was thinking about. It’s so life-quickening, that moment, when Eros takes the last arrow from his quiver and, smirking, stretches his bow, that it’s easy to leave all thought behind and just drown in feelings. All the same, I knew when the door clicked shut behind us and we felt no need to say another word that, whatever happened next, something was about to die and what might spring to life I couldn’t name. It’s a moment shot through with exquisite terror.
Some kinds of beauty, especially in men and women, excite us to know – to know utterly, body and soul, to take into ourselves – what we can never be. Then the disrobing, the inch-by-inch undressing, is an unbearably arousing prelude (or so we imagine) to a timeless reliving of our bliss. After unexpected mergings of this kind it can be off-putting next morning when time is real again to find the beloved sitting up, bright as a button, waiting for coffee and toast, for example, or wanting to help you paint the house. Sweet in prospect, sour when it happens.
Other kinds of beauty, however, seem to excite us to do the opposite: not to know what is strange so much as to know ourselves – or at least to amplify, each time we meet, our sense of who we are in the world. A ‘special friend’, I suppose I mean, a ‘soulmate’, the sort of friend Montaigne loved four hundred years ago (his name was La Boétie) and loved for no other reason than ‘it was he and it was I’. Here the body is of little account – even when the love is almost frenzied – because your own is of such little erotic account to you, there being too little space between you and it. (All the same, some standards may apply: bus-stop legs, say, or halitosis may stop friendship in its tracks.) Real time is now of the essence: you fill it lovingly together, talking, walking, probing, arguing, sitting, having breakfast and painting the house. The moments you have together are all you have.
Is there a middle course here, where these two kinds of love might stay intertwined? For a while, perhaps, early in a marriage. And possibly in France, where they have a special term for this sort of intertwining (amitié amoureuse), but not, generally speaking, in Adelaide. Or London or Corfu or Toronto. Not really. Not nowadays.
‘Beautiful enemies’ had been my little stab at translating amitié amoureuse. Emerson, I’d thought, with this quirky phrase of his, might magically have shown me a middle way: the loved rival, as it were, whom you fight in order to embrace.
What William actually said, by the way, when we awoke next morning was simply: ‘How did you sleep?’ He grinned and lay back against the pillows, arms behind his head, scratched his scalp and said: ‘Let’s have a coffee, then I’d better be off.’ No rabbiting on about Montaigne or amitié amoureuse, the nature of friendship or murdering love. But then, at that point, that’s why I was in bed with him – he wouldn’t.
He bit me on the neck, threw off the sheet and, naked, went over to the window to stretch in the shaft of sunlight slicing between the half-closed shutters. Downstairs the clock struck nine.
5
Maxwell, as I’ve mentioned, made it quite clear from the start that he found the vicar insufferable, and the vicar who’d been all tea-and-scones with the rest of the cast, froze the instant Maxwell came into the room the following evening. ‘Silly stuffed toad,’ Maxwell muttered a few moments into the first rehearsal when the vicar started in on one of his little homilies apropos of something Vanya had said about fidelity. ‘There’s no logic to it,’ Vanya cries in frustration at Helen’s faithfulness to her ‘dried-up old haddock of a husband’. ‘Deceiving an old husband you can’t stand is immoral, while trying to stifle your wretched youth and vitality is not immoral!’
What the vicar had to say about marriage and fidelity was predictable, but hardly offensive (not that I took much of it in, my mind being a bit all over the place after what had happened the night before). It was the sort of thing we take in with our mother’s milk: sexual intimacy, unredeemed by committed love, is wrong. (As one of Vanya’s companions points out to him: once you start betraying your wife or husband, the next thing you know you’ll be betraying your country.) No one believes it, naturally, possibly not even the vicar, which is why there was a lot of stroking of Greta’s new kitten and chit-chat about who did and didn’t take sugar in their coffee while the vicar held forth. Still, as even Vanya should have understood, fidelity in marriage is a useful ground-rule for other people.
‘What’s going on between the vicar and Maxwell?’ I whispered to Greta between Acts II and III. She was slicing up an orange tea-cake on the kitchen bench, trying not to step on the new kitten. Everyone else was taking a breather on the lawn outside.
‘There was an unpleasantness, dear,’ she said. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t know.’
‘What sort of unpleasantness?’
‘A storm in a tea-cup, really. Are you sure you need to know? It was at last year’s Christmas party up at the Big House. Maxwell was over from Tunisia as usual – Christmas is a bit of a wash-out in Tunisia, apparently – and around midnight Martha – you remember Martha, silly as a goose, but they won’t get rid of her …’
‘Yes, I remember Martha.’
‘Well, around midnight she went round to the old stables to light a candle to the Virgin behind the boiler where she had her vision – did I tell you about her vision?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, when she struck the match, she had another vision, but not of the Virgin Mary this time. My Greek isn’t good enough to have caught everything she said – screaming like a banshee, she was, setting the dogs off, and George was roaring like a bull, the priest was crossing himself – but I gather she’d stumbled across Maxwell and the vicar’s son, Ashley, in flagrante delicto. Do be a sweetheart and take this cake out onto the lawn, would you?’
‘Was there trouble?’
‘Oh, a bit of a stink for a while, but, to tell you the truth, it was the most interesting thing that happened all afternoon. Nice boy, Ashley, goes to one of those schools boys like Ashley go to in England … can’t think of the name, not Roedean, that’s for girls, isn’t it, but somewhere like that down in Surrey. Just comes here for his holidays. I think the vicar’s hoping he’ll read Classics at Cambridge.’
When I got out onto the lawn with the cake, the vicar took me aside. He’s a gentle, slender man – it’s actually Maxwell who is the more toad-like, oddly enough, an intriguing cross in middle-age of Noël Coward and a rugby coach – but he took me firmly by the elbow and edged me over to a spot behind the terrace wall.
‘Look,’ he said with a vehemence I hadn’t noticed in him before, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not at all sure I can take part in this production of yours if Maxwell Coop’s involved.’
‘Why not? You’re doing a terrific job. I think you’re bringing to the role of the professor something —’
‘I can’t go into details, not here, but relations between Maxwell Coop and me are, to say the least, extremely strained.’ He was sounding more and more like the professor every second.
‘I’d hate to lose you at this stage. I think we should just try to be professional about this.’
‘But we’re not professionals. It’s an amateur production.’
‘All the more reason,’ I said, with a persuasive lack of logic. The vicar was momentarily stumped. ‘Let’s go back in, read through the last two acts and see what happens.’
Act III (the crisis act, as usual in Chekhov) fizzed and rumbled then went off like a land-mine, thanks largely to the undertow of hostility between the vicar and Maxwell. When the professor (conceited old fraud of a man) has finished trying to swindle Vanya and Sonya out of their inheritance, and Vanya, half-crazed with hatred for this has-been who has enslaved him, rushes out to get his revolver to shoot him, I wondered for a moment if we might see a repeat of that scandalous performance in the Ukraine a few years ago when Vanya really did shoot the professor over some messy off-stage affair with his wife. In this Ukrainian version, Vanya even failed to fail – he’s supp
osed to shoot twice and miss – and so vaudeville turned into farce. Or tragedy, depending on one’s point of view.
But no. After Act III the air cleared nicely. The final after-the-storm scene, in which everyone recovers their mediocrity, was deeply moving. I was quite proud of my little band of enthusiasts that night – they hardly seemed to be acting at all. As fat as they were concerned, Chekhov had already written Vanya in Corfu. Every syllable was perfect.
6
If you set out due west from Adelaide – directly to the west, following the sun at the equinox – you won’t hit land again until you get to Uruguay. You’ll miss Africa altogether. It’s true that you’ll first have to skirt a flat, yellowish prong of land not far offshore, shaped a bit like a miniature Italy, but it’s of no account. In principle there’s nothing but water all the way to South America. You’re at the bottom of the world.
Standing on the jetty at Largs Bay as a child, staring westwards, with nobody for company in the late afternoon except for a couple of seagulls, I would think about that watery emptiness, that light-blue blankness on the map. It was there, not far from where I stood, that my great-great-grandfather, or perhaps great-great-great-grandfather (I’m vague about family trees) must have been rowed ashore from the creaking sailing ship he’d crossed that vastness in over many months. He’d then have either walked or been pulled in a dray across the sandhills and through the scrub to the settlement some miles inland on the banks of the Torrens. What must he have thought, stepping down from the dray, of this yellow, fly-blown jumble of huts and limestone buildings he’d crossed oceans to come to rest in? Perhaps he wept, or perhaps my great-great-grandmother did, if he had a wife with him. The air would have been alive with the piercing squawks of parrots and cockatoos, and at night (so they say) the hills to the east would have lit up with menace – the fires in the native encampments.
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