Corfu

by Robert Dessaix

  Then Maxwell came in the front door with Alberto. George leapt to his feet as if stung by a wasp. Banging the table, he roared: ‘Get out! Get that man out!’

  ‘Now, George …’ Greta began, putting a hand on his arm.

  ‘Get him out of my house! I won’t have that man in my house!’ And he thumped the table again with his fist, loosening one of the legs. The table tilted. A vase of purple irises toppled and rolled onto the floor.

  ‘Tha párete tsai?’ Martha asked. ‘Some tea?’

  Nobody spoke.

  ‘Ena ouzáki? Some ouzo?’ Martha was beaming. She loved seeing the house fill up with visitors and obviously hadn’t the faintest idea in the half-light who Maxwell was. The dogs were lapping at the water trickling from the vase.

  Then Prue and Bernie came in, followed by the vicar. George swore loudly in Greek (something unspeakable involving all our mothers), kicked a dog out of the way and strode out onto the balcony at the back. There was a slight pause, then Martha’s wavering voice scratched at the silence.

  ‘Tha párete tsai?’

  ‘No, thank you, Martha,’ Maxwell said, flinging the strange straw hat he was wearing onto a chair, ‘it’ll taste like dog’s piss. Coffee would be splendid.’

  ‘Kafé?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, dear,’ Greta said. ‘Let me help you. Why don’t the rest of you go and take a quick look at the garden before the light goes?’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said, and everyone nodded and began talking at once. We had to explore the garden because, when I’d told William about the orange orchard and rows of cumquat trees, the old chapel and paved courtyard behind the house, he’d said why not stage Act I out there and move inside for the last three acts? It would be perfect. Unless there were a storm like yesterday’s. You never knew on Corfu. Something always seemed to be brewing in the Albanian mountains across the strait.

  As we turned the corner of the house, I heard Alberto say to William with that faint, but annoying, American accent of his: ‘Have you thought any more about that idea of mine?’ They were just a few paces ahead of me, but I couldn’t catch what William said in reply. ‘Really?’ Alberto said, brushing the hair out of his eyes with long fingers. ‘Well, if you change your mind …’ Dawdling for a moment, he reached out one tanned arm and plucked an orange from the tree beside the steps. Following in silence, I stepped around the curls of orange-peel on the path, trying to keep my thoughts on Uncle Vanya.

  In the event we had a merry evening. Behind the boiler around in the stables William and Alberto found a plank and some rope, so we even rigged up a swing for Prue to sit drinking her tea on, and then back in the house, with a little rearranging of the furniture, we found the main salon ideal for the three interior scenes, the kitchen and balcony doors in just the right place, the atmosphere quite claustrophobic with the blinds drawn, as it should be for the gradual shrinking inwards of the final scenes. Celia turned up at last, too, with Kester’s bedraggled dog under one arm, to play the nanny. After days of indecision, waffling on interminably about the superb productions she’d seen at the Old Vic in Bristol and the RSC – Gielgud (a close friend of her late husband’s) had brought tears to her eyes, Sheila Hancock had been ‘magnificent, heartbreaking’ – she’d agreed to do it. Clearly the whole notion of mucking in with the vicar, a Chilean and two Australians was beneath her, but she rose to the occasion with grace and surprising competence. Having few lines, she was word-perfect straight away, and even brought along some knitting, as called for by the part. Even more astonishingly, when the rehearsal was over and everyone was tucking into Greta’s cold chicken and rice, it was Celia of all people who sat down at the piano beneath the countess and struck up something from Oklahoma!. Everyone gathered round ‘for a bit of a warble’, as the vicar put it, except for William and Alberto who had gone off together to scour the house for extra props. We were all swept up in a wave of lightness, a sudden desire to joke and clown about, which was an elixir after the bleakness of Act IV.

  It didn’t last long, though. After a few minutes, right in the middle of ‘Surrey with a Fringe On Top’ (the Queen’s favourite song, according to Celia), Martha came down the stairs to ask us to stop. George had a blinding headache and the singing was driving him mad. By the time William and Alberto came back in (Alberto’s hair laced with cobwebs), we were packing up to leave.

  I dreamt last night of empty, cobwebbed paths strewn with orange-peel. At the end of the trail of white-and-orange coils, William was lolling on a swing amongst the trees, drinking tea. ‘Tha párete tsai?’ he called across to me, but by the time I got to the swing, he’d vanished. It didn’t matter: my eye had been caught by a bandstand strung with fairy-lights not far away through the trees. In the middle of the bandstand stood the Queen, singing bits and pieces from South Pacific. ‘Do have an orange,’ she said when she’d finished. ‘I’ve already eaten six.’ I can’t remember what happened next, but when I woke up this morning I was in an unaccountably excellent frame of mind. Even the thought of dipping into Cavafy seemed quite appealing all of a sudden, so I dropped him onto my breakfast tray and took him out onto the terrace with me into the sun.

  10

  Those two young men lounging on the cover of the Cavafy give the wrong impression. I can see that now. In the first place, it turns out to be a David Hockney print. Hence the whiff of gay coupledom in Maida Vale. Cavafy’s Alexandria – the one he recollects when no longer young: the seedy, sensual turn-of-the-century city of furtive loitering and voices choking with desire – is not even a ghost in the Hockney pair’s nondescript, suburban livingroom. All they’re thinking about is who it might be amusing to invite back for supper after the ballet on Saturday night. They’ve never courted doom, as Cavafy did. Moreover, in the second place, this recollected Alexandria of corruptible, pale faces glimpsed in darkening streets and exquisite, naked bodies given to debauchery without bounds, is hardly the most engrossing thing about his poetry any more, not at the century’s end. I’m sure the two young men in the Hockney print would find Cavafy’s pinpricks of memory inconsequential, sad, embarrassing – poems about handsome young men with black and perfumed hair vanishing into the shadows of arcades, barely glimpsed (decades before) in their godlike beauty as they passed in front of lighted shop-windows … Who hankers after this sort of thing nowadays?

  The act of recollection is engrossing, though – that’s what I missed when I snapped the book shut the other day on that poem about an August evening (‘was it August?’) and blue eyes (‘I think they were … Ah yes, blue: a sapphire blue’). It’s not the month or colour of the eyes that’s interesting – perhaps it’s not even the poem that’s interesting (it’s just one tile in the mosaic): it’s watching the delicate creation of the mosaic that is so entrancing – not these fingers straying to this sculpted chest, not these grey eyes or this rumpled bed, but the taking shape, the moving towards, that some kinds of poetry (and some great paintings – paradoxically, in an instant) can embody.

  I wish, by the way, that Kester Berwick felt freer to recollect with Cavafy’s honesty.

  None of this was of much interest to me this morning, however. What took my attention on the terrace this morning, especially given that I was using my ferry ticket as a bookmark, were two early poems, both written in the same year, 1894, which seemed to contradict each other in quite a startling way – and on a subject I urgently need to get straight in my mind: going home.

  In the first of the two, ‘Ithaca’, there’s a lightly borne wisdom that’s hard to credit in a thirty-year-old clerk in the Irrigation Service with the scrappiest of educations and still living with his mother. Almost everyone has heard the opening lines:

  As you set out for Ithaca

  hope your road is a long one,

  full of adventure, full of discovery.

  Nothing too earth-shattering here – it’s the sort of thing you might find inscribed on a tasteful greetings card, or the kind of improving message an aunt might think
of sending a nephew about to set out on a trip to India, not realizing that Ithaca is actually home. Cavafy is talking about going home.

  As I read on, though, the poem gathered force. It looked me in the eye and spoke to me. After racing through it once, I went back and began to read it again, this time out aloud. Agape, who’d come round with some artichokes in an onion and carrot sauce she thought I might enjoy – and to snoop, of course, although she’s never found anything remotely scandalous in the house – caught me at it and I flushed. When she wandered off, however, I did it again, very slowly.

  Laestrygonians, Cyclops,

  angry Poseidon – don’t be afraid of them:

  you’ll never find things like that on your way

  as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

  as long as a rare sensation

  touches your spirit and your body.

  Laestrygonians, Cyclops,

  wild Poseidon – you won’t encounter them

  unless you bring them along inside your soul,

  unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

  My Ithaca, needless to say, furnished my soul with few sea-gods, one-eyed monsters or giant cannibals to carry with me – indeed, my years away may have been more life-quickening if it had. Nor, to be honest, did it leave my spirit and body as vulnerable to ‘rare sensation’ as Cavafy’s apparently were (at thirty). When I was young in Adelaide, ‘rare sensation’ was something you bought in bottles, or in small twists of paper on the back verandah around midnight at somebody’s party. Is my journeying doomed, then, to be a waste of time? Might I just as well have stayed at home?

  In the second poem, ‘The City’, written seven months later, Cavafy’s answer seems cruelly categorical: yes.

  You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:

  there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.

  Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,

  you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

  Who knows why his vision soured? He wrote those lines in August, 1894. At some point that summer, had one of his taut-bodied young men, handsome as a discus-thrower on an ancient coin, abandoned him? Married, perhaps, or moved to Athens?

  In ‘Ithaca’, by way of contrast, while you can never completely escape your home city – nor should want to – voyaging (does he really mean ‘living’?) need not be pointless even if your life has been ‘a black ruin’. Not if you keep your eyes and ears – and nose and mind – open:

  May there be many summer mornings when,

  with what pleasure, what joy,

  you enter harbours you’re seeing for the first time;

  may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

  to buy fine things,

  mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

  sensual perfume of every kind –

  as many sensual perfumes as you can;

  and may you visit many Egyptian cities

  to learn and go on learning from those who know.

  Summer mornings, harbours and cities there have been aplenty, but I know I haven’t looked and listened, marvelled and sniffed the air as often as I should have. Cavafy is an Alexandrian – his twin gods are pleasure and learning. I’m not from Alexandria. Too often on this journey I’ve looked out on the world through the template I was given and so, as he warned, I’ve seen my Ithaca everywhere.

  Yet I must not blame Ithaca, according to Cavafy, or cast it from me. On the contrary, he writes:

  Keep Ithaca always in your mind.

  Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

  But don’t hurry the journey at all.

  Better if it lasts for years,

  so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

  wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

  not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

  Wealthy? Hardly. But no poorer, I suppose. And I don’t expect Adelaide to make me rich. That’s not why this ticket is in my hand. Why go back at all, though, if at root I never left and all I can take back with me are a few ‘fine things’ from Phoenician trading stations, a bottle of perfume and a couple of lessons learnt in ‘Egypt’? Why bother?

  It’s true, of course, as Cavafy goes on to say, that

  Ithaca gave you the marvellous journey.

  Without her you wouldn’t have set out.

  He means, I suppose, that she made me whatever it is that I have been on this journey and I should acknowledge that – think through what it means, not be ashamed of it or let it go. That’s fair. But then he says (and it’s an arrow in the heart):

  She has nothing left to give you now.

  And if you find her poor, Ithaca won’t have fooled you.

  Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

  you’ll have understood by then what these Ithacas mean.

  End of poem. I’m lost again. What do these Ithacas mean, these Ithacas which have nothing left to give us now?

  It took me half an hour and a plate of basted artichokes to see: I must go back to find out. And these years of journeying, since I am Ithacan, won’t make sense until I do. Unless I go back, it won’t have been my journey – or my life – at all. All the mother-of-pearl and coral, new harbours and Alexandrian sages in the world won’t make these years part of the epic (however dun-coloured) my life could be (to me, at least). The old beginning must be made new. Otherwise my life will be like one of those shapeless conversations you have in trains with complete strangers – interesting enough at the time, but in the end little more than random noises.

  I was not unmindful, as I read and reread these lines about fullness and emptiness, shape and shapelessness, that for Odysseus, home, when he reached it, was no haven – landing on Ithaca was in some ways the most dangerous step he ever took. ‘Whose land have I lit on now?’ he cries in anguish, looking around him, heart racing. ‘What are they here – violent, savage, lawless? or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?’ I was aware, too, of Sisi’s palace, ablaze in the summer sun behind the cypresses and holm-oaks on the hill in front of me. Every time I lifted my eyes from the page, there it was, a stone’s throw away, vulgar monument to a traveller who did not ‘keep Ithaca always in her mind’ and therefore ended up not a traveller, but merely adrift. She died on that quay in Geneva with no new beginning in sight.

  There was time, before William came to pick me up, for a quick walk up to the palace and back. The view from the garden across the city and the straits was, as it was bound to be, spectacular on such an afternoon.

  In the event, I didn’t stay long, though, because it was too vast for my mood. Too many cloud-shrouded mountains and shimmering coves, too many islands, villages and towns, all too far away. The sweep knocked the breath out of me, my mind went blank.

  Walking back down to my house in the hollow, I came to life again with thoughts of more intimate landscapes – the darkening drawing-room in Uncle Vanya, the balcony Cavafy stood on year after year watching the street below (watching Alexandria become a memory), the smell of fish in the sun on the jetty at Largs Bay (they smelt of Uruguay) – things that were small, but by no means empty.

  11

  For years afterwards, what everyone first recollected about the Ab-Intra boys’ farewell performance at St Corantyn, on the eve of taking ship for Europe, was the extraordinary scene on the mansion’s lawn after the final curtain had fallen. It wasn’t the play they remembered, nor the flamboyant floral display (brass bowls of zinnias, asters and hollyhocks in every corner), nor Mrs Lavington Bonython’s sensationally strapless black matelassé gown, but the sight of a dozen lithe young actors in nothing but loin cloths and a dusting of bronze glitter, cavorting in the moonlight at St Corantyn with the cream of Adelaide society. Glasses of claret glinted and clinked, cigarettes glowed like fireflies amongst the trees, and Mrs Prosser even threw off her fox-fur stole and danced with a man in a purple coat. Nobody had understood what on earth
the play was about (although everyone agreed that ‘intriguing’ was a useful word to bandy about), but the party afterwards was a Roman orgy on a scale not seen before in polite society in Adelaide. Kester left early.

  It had been a coup, having Mrs Lavington Bonython offer St Corantyn for their farewell performance. As soon as she heard that the boys would only have thirty pounds left in the kitty between them, once their fare to Genoa had been paid, she put out a hand, gold bangles jangling, to touch Kester’s arm. ‘I think I can give you my word that when you get off that ship in Genoa you’ll have a lot more than thirty pounds in your pocket, Mr Berwick. Just leave it to me. I’ll think of something very special.’ At the very apex of the Adelaide social scene, Mrs Bonython, whatever might be said about her taste in clothes, was indefatigably committed to good works. Her clothing appeal during the Depression was legendary, as were her working bees for destitute mothers and the campaign she’d led for years against cruelty to animals. These two plucky, talented boys deserved to be sent on their way in style. A slapup do at St Corantyn would be ideal, something dazzling that would loosen people’s purses. With its chandeliers, its spacious white ballroom and gracious gardens, St Corantyn would be the perfect setting for Ab-Intra’s final performance – something really out of the box this time. A curio stall in the drawing-room, say, might raise a few pounds, too (an eye-catching display of red lacquer trays, some pottery coffee pots, a few sketches by the Heysen girls, if they could be talked around). In fact, she wondered if Hans Heysen himself might be persuaded to donate a painting or two to be auctioned. All Kester and Alan would have to do would be to put on a play.

  ‘What do you say? It could be tremendous fun.’ Mrs Bonython loved a mission. In her mind’s eye she could already see the parade, up and down the grand staircase in the entrance hall, of deliciously modish young women and excitingly disreputable young men. As the boys stammered their thanks, she drew on her gloves, patted her orange pork-pie hat (a bit of a mistake, but with the stiff green quill in front it was certainly striking) and picked her way amongst the cushions on the floor towards the door. ‘It’s a deal, then,’ she said, turning in the doorway to seal the arrangement with a smile. ‘Now you’d better get busy and write something that will really bowl us over. Au revoir!’