‘Do you believe in roots?’ I asked, instead of answering her question (to which the answer, in any case, was obvious).
‘Roots?’ Someone’s cigarette had ashed itself in the sugar bowl, so there was a pause while she scooped it out. ‘You didn’t see that, did you … Roots. No, I don’t give much thought to my roots any more. I’m a snail, not a daisy – I carry everything with me. Which are you?’
I shrugged. I didn’t know what to say.
Greta put the tray down on the bench. ‘Are you wondering if it’s time to go home? This island is full of people wondering if it’s time to go home. They had small lives at home, so they came here. Now they have small lives here, so they dream of going home. Carry on about it all the time. And Kester’s the worst of them. Every time I see him he brings it up. “Do you think I should move back, Greta? Do you think I’d be better off back home? Things have changed, you know, I might be quite happy there.” It drives me mad. I’ve told him I don’t want to hear another word about it. “You know where the airline office is, Kester,” I said to him. “If you want to go home, go and buy yourself a ticket. Otherwise for God’s sake shut up about it.” If you’re small, you’re small – Adelaide, Abu Dhabi, Timbuktu – it makes no difference.’ Picking up the tray again, she sailed off through the french windows onto the terrace.
‘So what’s wrong with small?’ I called, after her, but she was already serving the vicar. ‘You’re a treasure, Greta,’ I heard him murmur, helping himself to two large spoonfuls of sugar, ‘and your quince crumble is a miracle.’
I can see what you mean, Greta, I thought to myself, but it’s not the whole story. The words are wrong – ‘small’ and ‘big’ somehow miss the mark. Yet the right ones kept hovering just out of reach.
Yesterday morning, since it was drizzling and I didn’t feel like sitting in my bedroom talking to ghosts, I took the bus into town and bought myself a ticket on the ferry for Brindisi. Since everything’s been decided at last – the dates for our two performances and where we’ll stage them – there’s no reason to put off my departure any longer. I’ll leave at midnight straight after our second performance. The following afternoon I’ll be in Rome. A day or two later, if that’s what I want to do when the moment arrives, I could be home.
Actually, not quite everything has been decided. I’ve only booked one ticket to Brindisi. William doesn’t know I’ve booked it yet. I was going to tell him last night, but somehow or other the moment was never right – Bernie burst into tears because I was sharp with her, Maxwell couldn’t walk because his left leg was gouty, Greta was all atwitter because Kostas, her síndrofos, was arriving on the late flight from Athens, Act IV was a mawkish mess …
I’ll tell him I’ve booked when he comes to pick me up this afternoon. My ticket in its blue and white cardboard jacket is already lying prominently on the kitchen table. If William wants to come with me, he can go into town and book his own.
‘So, did Kostas eventually arrive?’ I asked William, when I opened the door to him about three. He ducked inside quickly out of the shower, spiky hair glistening with raindrops, grinning broadly. Behind him the sky was a brilliant buttercup yellow after the lunchtime storm. Everything glowed. The roadway in front of the house was a trail of mirror shards, jagged little pools of gold.
‘Eventually, yes,’ he said, shaking himself like a puppy. ‘Well after midnight.’
‘So Greta’s purring?’
‘It’s weird – Greta of all people. As soon as he walked in the door, she turned into a kitten. Incredible. But he’s great, I really like him.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Well, not young, must be in his seventies, white-haired, but quite wiry, not your usual pot-bellied —’
‘No, I mean, what’s he like … you know, is he friendly? What docs he talk about?’
‘He talks about everything,’ he said, sprawling in a chair at the kitchen table. ‘Never stops talking. And he’s got a wicked sense of humour – makes us both laugh. Asked us about Uncle Vanya – he loves everything Russian. He’s terribly well-read, Dostoevsky and all that. Made me feel a bit of an idiot.’ He was looking idly around the kitchen as he spoke, but didn’t seem to notice the ferry ticket. In his hands he had a book.
‘What’s the book?’
‘It’s for you. Greta asked me to give it to you. She said you might find it interesting, after the conversation you had the other night.’ He put the book on the table next to the ticket. As he read ‘Strintzis Lines: Passenger Ticket’, I read ‘C.P. Cavafy: Selected Poems’.
Not Cavafy again, I thought, with a surge of irritation. A couple of my older London friends could hardly finish a sentence without mentioning Cavafy. What was this cult of a versifying Egyptian civil servant all about? On the cover, smeared with raindrops, was a pen sketch of two lumpish young men, one lying back on a couch with one arm behind his head, the other, wearing a tie, standing hand in pocket behind him. This insipid cover more or less summed up my impression of Cavafy. I flicked.
A skin as though of jasmine …
that August evening – was it August? –
I can still just recall the eyes: blue, I think they were …
Ah yes, blue: a sapphire blue.
Faded memories of an effete lust. August, blue, September, green – what does it matter?
The ageing of my body and my beauty
is a wound from a merciless knife.
I’m not resigned to it at all.
Well, the rest of us resign ourselves to it without much fuss. If anyone delivered himself of a line like that in real life, we’d all just think drama queen and roll our eyes. I snapped Cavafy shut and dropped him back on the table. William was studying my ticket.
‘You didn’t tell me you’d booked to go home?’
‘I was going to today. It was a spur of the moment thing. Tea?’
William was silent while I stood at the stove, boiling the kettle. ‘Perhaps I should come,’ he said. ‘Would you like me to?’
‘You know I would, William, but it’s for you to decide. Are you ready to go home? Are you ready to go home with me?’ With my back to him, I kept my eyes on the tea-pot I was filling.
The hesitation was momentary but it was there. ‘I’d like to give it a try, yes,’ he said, then stood up, hands in pockets, and went to the window. ‘I’m not blind, you know. I can see you’re worried that it’s not going to work.’ He chuckled and turned to look at me. ‘I can tell … in the morning sometimes, from your eyes, from the way you don’t want to talk about what’s happening, the way you want to talk about the play or Kester or the weather or anything, just not about what’s happening.’ He came over to the table and picked up his mug of tea. ‘Well, maybe it’s not going to work – who knows? But maybe something will work, something we haven’t thought of yet. What do you think?’ He took a sip of tea, watching me over the brim of his mug. Marvellous arched eyebrows. Poised for flight.
What did I think? A thousand things, in tumbling drifts. I thought, for instance, of what it must be like to have a friend whose mere existence in the world, each time you contemplated it, was a kind of joyful homecoming. And I thought in tingling gusts, as we drank our tea, of what it must be like to want somebody’s beauty so much your whole body strained to lay hold of it, bear it aloft and fly into the future with it in your arms. And I looked at William, as I turned out the light and locked the door, and thought: I certainly like you very much.
‘Don’t you think, for instance,’ he said a few minutes later as we putt-putted past Sisi’s palace in Greta’s Volkswagen, ‘that we could start something in Adelaide – I don’t know, something on the fringe, something
‘Experimental?’
‘Why not? Something different, something with a bit of pzazz. What have we got to lose? It’d do us both good to spread our wings a bit. There’d be an audience, I’m sure of it, even in Adelaide.’ I wasn’t so sure, but I smiled back when he shot me a glance and grinned. He drove
with a new zest.
We dropped by the travel agent’s office in town on the way to Greta’s and William bought his ticket for the ferry to Brindisi.
Although it was not August, his eyes were certainly blue this afternoon, as blue as opals, no doubt about it. In London they’d always struck me as sky-grey.
8
‘Ravishing!’ was Violet de Mole’s first word to Kester at the close of the first performance of The Demon’s Mask. Then, grasping Alan’s hand, she said it again. Or perhaps she said ‘Ravissant!’ (which is not quite the same thing, but Kester could never quite recall which she’d said) because they were, after all, at the Alliance Française and the whole thing had been done in French. Not that it mattered what language they’d used: it was a Japanese noh play, written by two Australians, Kester and Alan, and the few words spoken in it were simply not of the essence. Noh, as the French would understand, being foreign, was all about stylized movement, poetic utterances, mime, song and dance. (‘Dance’ was perhaps to put too fine a point on it. ‘Rhythmic movement’, to which kimonos were so kind, was perhaps a more accurate description.) Noh was a visual, rather than intellectual, experience. Adelaide, however, unlike Violet de Mole, was simply nonplussed.
Nothing daunted, in a flurry of mask-making and hessian-dyeing, Kester and Alan began working towards another season of scenes from Old Japan: a short farce or two followed by several Japanese poems set to music and, with the aid of subdued lighting from jam-tin reflectors, ‘interpreted’ by Kester and Alan in masks and flowing robes.
I hear you call,
Pine-tree –
I hear you call upon the Hill
By the silent pond where the Lotus-flowers bloom;
I hear you call,
Pine-tree –
What is it you call,
Pine-tree –
When the wind blows,
When the rain falls …
Very affecting, I imagine, in the original Japanese, but, even with Kester and Alan waving about in yards of green chiffon as they intoned these lines, it’s easy to understand the audience’s puzzlement. Older patrons regularly walked out, tripping and stumbling as they picked their way amongst the bodies huddled on cushions on the floor.
However, despite the mockery of the press – ‘a display of St Vitus’ dance’, ‘the audience froze with boredom’, ‘the average pugilist could give them points in footwork’ – the Ab-Intra boys and their clutch of followers seem to have struck a chord with what the Adelaide Truth called ‘the arty set’. It was dazzled by the sensuousness of each jewel-like scene, the revelling in sheer visual beauty. Each low-lit cameo for them was like an incantation, and they thirsted to be inducted into the panoply of rites.
For the next few years (as far as I can make out from the press-cuttings Kester has pasted in no particular order into albums) Adelaide regularly woke up to read in its morning newspapers about some new sensation at the Ab-Intra Studio. If it wasn’t something avant-garde by Pirandello or Thornton Wilder, it was Joan Joske with one of her terrifying (and untutored) ‘plastic interpretations’ of de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance. After interval – and Ab-Intra intervals were famous for the hobnobbing over coffee in a fug of Russian cigarettes – there might be a Persian offering, such as The Poetasters of Isfahan, a swirl of orange silks and green organdie, or some of Kester’s poems recited by a half-naked man (Alan) swathed in cyclamen velvet. In the old draper’s shop on King William Street which was Ab-Intra’s new home, girls in close-fitting tunics danced spontaneously to Debussy; obscure French and Russian plays, full of tearless sobs and furtive glances, stunned the audience into respectful silence; on one occasion, since anything Russian seemed so thrilling, they had a wild success with a ‘Russian’ play by a certain Alex Svetloff which Kester and Alan had actually written themselves; they even held a bridge night interspersed with scenes from Macbeth. All this was heady stuff in Adelaide in the early 1930s, so the notices preserved in Kester’s albums are as often outraged as they are admiring. Humbly, he’s kept them all, good and bad. They sit yellowing side by side, in happy disagreement with each other, in this record of a promising youth.
Young man, Prot., ‘refined’, wants furnished
room with fireplace close to city.
This, I imagine, is the kind of advertisement Alan Harkness must have placed in the newspaper once he’d had time to find his feet in Adelaide – once the awkwardness of finding himself à deux with the intense, strong-jawed young Theosophist he hardly knew had passed. I have to imagine it because, although I’ve stuck my nose into every notebook, diary and cache of letters I can find, I’ve come across no mention anywhere of how Alan and Kester lived during those first years. Not at Mrs Perkins’, clearly, although she’d no doubt have been pleased to have her son’s nice new friend from Melbourne stay for a few days when he first arrived – feed him up a bit (he was painfully thin), arrange a tennis afternoon with a couple of delightful girls from the Society … not that her son ever seemed to make much headway with any of them, but still, this Alan did seem to be a rather superior sort of young man … very well-connected in Melbourne, Frankie said, and he also painted, knew the theatre inside out –
But how would I know what Mrs Perkins thought? How, for that matter, would I know what Kester thought? He will not tell me.
What I do now know is that, whatever Kester’s feelings were for Alan – and I’m sure he saw him as slender, not as thin; a tender sapling, not a stick – he’d have thought of their twosome as the intertwining of two ‘special’ natures, a many-sided love affair with beauty, not as some sordid Oscar and Bosie affair, just lust for another man propped up with highbrow theatrical escapades. When Kester first read the small item in the newspaper about the bank messenger ‘charged with having committed an unnatural offence’ (it’s tucked away at the bottom of the page he’s cut out for the review of Ab-Intra’s Christmas pageant), I doubt he’d even have felt any connection with the hapless youth.
I try to find a word for what I imagine this twosome was, but none of the usual words seems to fit. Scenes from their life together, on the other hand, are easy to conjure up: pouring sodden paper into clay moulds to make their fantastic masks; slurping ice-creams down at the beach in a heatwave, both oiled up for a ‘nigger brown tan’, as it was called then, watching the youngsters toss their rubber beach-balls on the sand, one ear out for the lifesavers’ shark-gong; lounging in a deck-chair in the dark at an open-air cinema, eyes fixed on Greta Garbo or Clark Gable in some romantic melodrama; Sunday lunch en famille around the solid oak dining-table at Mrs Perkins’, perhaps, before setting off for the city to attend the evening’s lecture at the Society … the everyday round is easy to picture. It’s the right word for the kind of love they had that I find hard to come up with. Strangely, the word that keeps buzzing around in my brain is ‘romance’. Such an old-fashioned, syrupy word, so rosy-cheeked, so wafting, courtly, seemly, smiling at you like Ginger Rogers, two rows of perfect, gleaming teeth … And yet …
Under all the painted perfection of romance lies buried a sense that I like of a spiralling story. It’s a double helix: desire coiling around adoration. And so, at a loss for another word to describe it, what Kester and Alan had, I suppose, was a Great Romance. It’s rare. And doomed, naturally. To ordinariness. The wonder vanishes – as it does from any long-winded tale in prose, however rollicking. So does the desire. But at the beginning when, awash with pleasure, you stand amazed by what you’ve just seen, the spiralling tale is still all in your head. That’s romance.
Tonight is our big night at the Big House. No old draper’s shop for us. Bernie offered her bookshop, but it would have been awfully cramped; Maxwell thought one of the rooms at the old Reading Club would be perfect, but its gloominess depressed me – the smell of dead flowers and furniture wax was overpowering; the vicar offered his church hall, but I’m fed up with echoing church halls, however you spruce them up they feel sad. And then Greta said: ‘Why don’t I give George a
ring and ask him about the Big House?’ So tonight we’re all trooping out there for a run-through. I think it’s going to work.
9
It’s definitely going to work.
When we came in the door out of the heat, George was sitting up at the table facing us in the half-dark, like a king waiting for the barbarians. Other cars were driving up outside and we could hear the scrunch of footsteps on the gravel outside.
‘This is a crazy idea,’ George barked across the room at us. ‘You’re mad. A Russian play. Who wants to see a Russian play? Is he a Communist, this Chekhov of yours?’ Silhouetted against the evening sky filling the doorway, his face was just a black mask. A whiff of dog-pee pinched my nostrils.
‘How are you, George?’ Greta said brightly. ‘So sweet of you to let us come! Martha, dear! Kalispéra!’ Martha had come wandering in from the kitchen with a dog or two, smiling broadly and wiping her hands on her apron.
‘Well, what do you think?’ I murmured to William, who was still standing by the front door, looking around the room, wide-eyed. After the late afternoon glare outside, it was hard at first to make anything out, but I could see him starting to take in the flaking, blotchy walls, the dark oak table and sideboard and the mournful countess high above the piano to our right. He nodded slowly. ‘It’s great,’ he said, still peering about him. ‘We can do something with this.’
Corfu Page 21