Corfu

by Robert Dessaix

  The trouble was that what Kester and Alan wrote bowled nobody over. Indeed, bowling people over was not what they excelled at. As one reviewer put it (admittedly in the social pages), Archway Motif was ‘no doubt much more amusing for the actors to stage than for the audience to watch’. In the words of another reviewer, one half of the audience was ‘frankly puzzled’, while the other half was ‘desperately anxious to appear au fait’ with something they could make neither head nor tail of.

  As far as I can make out, relying on scraps in old newspapers, Kester’s notes and fragments of the playscript, Archway Motif was a play about how good and evil (love and hate, folly and wisdom, and so on) – and this sounds numbingly Theosophical – when seen as part of a whole rather than as opposites, can, like the two sides of an archway, create a structure of ‘poised majesty and still splendour’. Where the gambolling, bronze-dusted fauns came in, whether they represented good or evil, I cannot say. There was also a Snow Queen in a frozen, northern ice-palace, a heroine with ‘eyes twin pools of dew’, a hero with ‘hair like honey’, and a fair bit of lute-thrumming, although to what end is now a mystery.

  Just before the ‘slow final curtain’, a ghosdy choir intoned:

  There is a state

  beyond joy and sorrow.

  There is a state

  beyond tears and laughter.

  There is a state

  beyond the opposites:

  riches

  poverty

  wisdom

  folly

  good

  evil.

  Just as opposites

  form an archway,

  so they resolve –

  all of them –

  into some great thing,

  comprising them,

  yet surpassing them.

  Behold! Here a pathway opens,

  a pathway forward,

  more endless and shining

  than the stars …

  It’s hardly surprising, after an evening of this kind of tosh, that the audience headed for the claret on the back lawn. Nobody wants to be taught anything on a hot Saturday night, particularly by art.

  It doesn’t surprise me, either, that after one shandy and a bit of ritual mingling with the crowd, Kester walked out into the darkness and made his way home. Mass jollity never appealed to him, and he must also have had some sense of an ending that night – to an experiment, to being young, to standing out from the herd in his home town. The ticket to Genoa waiting at home on the side-board would have been a comfort, but his mood that night, I would guess, once he’d left the torch-lit gardens, would have been melancholy. It can’t be true, as one particularly snaky gossip columnist suggested, that Alan also left early and in the company of a young actress from Melbourne ‘in a frock like an old Greek kirtle in that divinely heavy crêpe that never crushes and looks so expensively simple’. This is just venom, surely. On that last night at St Corantyn … well, I just don’t believe it.

  12

  When Bernie came to deliver the very last lines in the play – ludicrous, tragic lines;I’ve heard famous actresses fail to carry them off – the audience in the salon at the Big House seemed almost to stop breathing. It’s the ultimate anticlimax – not a death or marriage in sight, just the prospect of endless drudgery, unrelieved by even the hint of a higher purpose. The mood is one of cold hysteria. In the light of a single candle, while their old friend Waffles quietly strums his guitar in the shadows, Sonya kneels at Vanya’s feet, lets him cradle her head in his arms, and says with a kind of bitter meekness, crushed by the unending futility of their lives:

  ‘What can we do? We must go on living … We’ll live through a long, long succession of days and long drawn-out evenings; we’ll patiently bear the trials that fate sends us; we’ll work hard for others both now and in our old age, knowing no rest, and when our hour comes we shall meekly die … and God will take pity on us, and you and I, Uncle, dearest Uncle, shall glimpse a life which is full of light, beauty and grace, we shall rejoice and look back on our present misfortunes with tenderness, with a smile – and we shall find rest. I believe in this, Uncle. I believe in it fervently, passionately … We shall find rest! … You’ve known no joy in your life, but just wait a little, Uncle Vanya, wait … We shall find rest. We shall find rest! We shall find rest!’

  And the silence in the room was so brittle – nobody clapped, nobody stirred – that I thought the walls might fall in if anyone so much as sneezed. Not one of us believed her – not for an instant, not even the vicar’s wife in the front row with Ashley – yet she made us yearn to. Every single person in the room – the consul and his wife, holidaymakers from Benitses, Arthur, Greta, the owners of the Hopping Kangaroo, even George – every last one of them seemed to be stretched to breaking point between wanting to shout Yes! a ruined life can be redeemed and bursting into mocking laughter at the mere thought of such an illusion.

  Then they began to clap, softly at first and then with growing exultation. Thousands of miles from Russia, separated from Chekhov’s blathering nonentities by a whole century of tumult, the audience was swept with a kind of jubilation (there’s no other word) simply because they’d heard voiced things they’d felt but had never dared say to each other about their own deeply unremarkable, unrewarded lives. When Bernie came into the kitchen where I was watching and waiting, I whispered: ‘You’re a genius! You did it!’ and, befuddled with relief and pleasure, we hugged each other (briefly). Then, with the applause continuing – there were even a few bravos from the back, mostly from Kostas, Greta’s jovial paramour – the actors all trooped back out into the salon, beaming, to take another bow.

  While the crowd was ambling around to the back of the house to the trestle tables on which Greta had set out the refreshments, I stole off alone up the drive towards the gates. There were still two hours until the second and final performance at seven, the afternoon, although still sunny, had turned pleasantly cool high up on the hillside, and all I wanted to do was to walk with my own thoughts amongst the olive-trees and broom, and rest. For a short while the sound of excited chatter and peals of laughter still reached me in muted gusts through the trees, but then, once beyond the old stone gates, all I could hear was the occasional chirruping of some invisible bird in the olive-grove beside the road. I knew I should be back in the courtyard, chatting with our guests, praising the actors and saying goodbye to people I’d grown quite fond of – after all, we’d be leaving for the ferry-wharf straight after the next performance. My suitcase was under the table in the kitchen. I was ready to vanish into thin air as soon as the clapping died away.

  Suddenly, through the gnarled tree-trunks, I caught sight of William walking quickly along the roadway in the sunlight, peering about him as if he were looking for someone. I called out, and he stopped and stared into the grey-green shadows beneath the foliage. Then he waved and began to make his way towards me, stumbling slightly amongst the stones and fallen branches.

  ‘What are you doing out here? Everyone’s looking for you,’ he said when he got close. No peck on the cheek.

  ‘I suppose that’s why I’m out here!’ I said, trying to make a joke of it. ‘Well, we did it, they loved it, it was fantastic. Are you pleased?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, but he didn’t look elated. He stared at the ground briefly and then, running his fingers through his hair, said: ‘Let’s sit down for moment – there must be a log or something we can sit on.’ I followed him deeper into the grove. A mosquito bit me on the neck.

  ‘Look, I don’t know quite how to say this,’ he began, still looking at the ground, once we’d perched ourselves rather awkwardly on a rotting log. I didn’t try to break the pause that followed – why bother? I just let it stretch and stretch. When someone says a sentence like that, while looking at the ground, no more words are needed. You know what will be said. And he knows you know.

  ‘You’re not coming tonight,’ I said eventually, my eyes on the tip of his boots which were scrabbling in the
dust.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Had you guessed?’

  ‘No, I hadn’t. How could I have? I’m not a mindreader.’ My voice sounded dull, I knew, there was no fire in it, as there should have been. The bird chirruped again, brightly. Out on the sunlit road the vicar trundled past in his battered old Vauxhall, ferrying Ashley home, away from scandal and temptation. ‘Well, are you going to tell me why you’ve changed your mind so suddenly? Is this something you and Alberto have … cooked up between you?’

  ‘Alberto? No. Why Alberto?’ He looked genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Well, I just thought …’

  ‘No, it’s got nothing to do with Alberto. He’s said I can move in with him if I want to – have you seen his flat? It’s enormous, views right across to the mainland – but no, it’s nothing to do with him.’

  ‘What is it then?’ This time something inside me was going dead. This time I didn’t want to play.

  ‘I’m just not ready to go home. That’s all it is. I haven’t finished … oh, I don’t know … I haven’t finished …’ But he couldn’t think of what it was he hadn’t finished doing. Entering harbours he was seeing for the first time, stopping at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, visiting Egyptian cities … I knew what it was he hadn’t finished doing. He felt no need yet of a new beginning.

  ‘And, to tell you the truth, Kester’s coming back any day now – he knows you’re leaving today, he’s been in touch with Greta – and I’d really like to see him again. It’s been a couple of years.’

  I stood up to go, feeling very weary all of a sudden. ‘It’s probably not for long,’ he was saying, as I looked away from him, down towards the nunnery at the bottom of the hill. ‘Not for long at all. I’ll come, but first I’d just like to spend a bit more time here. Alberto —’

  ‘Alberto?’

  ‘Alberto says he’s sure he can fix me up with some work in a hotel down at Benitses. Just for the summer.’ I winced despite myself. William in a hotel at Benitses over the summer would never sleep. I could hear the music in the night, see the oiled and suntanned bodies strolling, sprawling, lounging on the sea-wall, conjure up strange lips and fingers on my Horus-eye. ‘Then I’ll be ready, I’m sure.’

  ‘To come?’

  ‘Yes, to come.’ He stood up himself now, unfolding his long legs in the gangling, slightly coltish way he always did, but this time nothing melted inside me. ‘I did mean what I said to you that day, you know. About being together.’

  ‘I’m sure you did, William,’ I said, looking at him now. But he was drifting away on some tide he’d just miraculously caught. He couldn’t believe his luck. Perhaps he’d been fearing I’d start pleading with him, or arguing, even violently. Maybe he thought I’d threaten to drag him to the ferry-wharf by force.

  ‘I’ll come, I promise you I’ll come,’ he said, grinning now, relieved. ‘Going back to the house? Come on, let’s go.’

  ‘No, I think I’ll just walk for a while, I’d quite like to be by myself. Just down to the nunnery and back. See you in a little while.’

  He shrugged, gave me a quick smile and turned back towards the road. Through the tree-trunks, I watched him emerge into the sunlight, a moving, glowing patch of blue and russet reds, and then, in ever smaller scraps of colour, disappear. And that, without a doubt, is the last I’ll see of William.

  13

  Nose pressed against the glass to watch Albania glide past, I know I should be engrossed in the sinister drama of the searchlights, clawing at the darkness from the cliffs to starboard. Although its rocky shore is so close I could swim to it in five minutes if I jumped overboard, I might as well be looking at Jupiter through a telescope. Instead, my mind keeps floating back to the quay in Corfu. What happened there an hour or two ago – it seems like moments – gave me quite a jolt. To make it seem like seconds, all I have to do is look around: spangles of yellow light draped around the bays, the hills, the castle … the town has hardly moved at all in half an hour, perhaps Corfuis coming with me, perhaps Corfu is going to tag along behind me like a naughty fairy all the way to Italy, casting spells.

  Speaking of mischief, I didn’t go ‘just down to the nunnery and back’. Even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew they were nothing more than random syllables. ‘Nunnery’ is just a particularly delicious word. Nor did I have the slightest intention of seeing anyone ‘in a little while’. I’d gone. I’d set sail the instant the words ‘I don’t quite know how to say this’ reached my ears. Aware, meandering about in the olive-grove, of birds’ wings whooshing, the humming clouds of gnats, dogs yapping in the valley far below – alert, in other words, to how the emptiness surrounding me was full of life – I also had the strange sensation of soaring off into space at the speed of light, away from the Big House (just a speck now on the smudge of hills on Corfu), away from Uncle Vanya, Chekhov, Greta, Bernie, Prue, Alberto, William, even Kester, far, far away from foolish Austrian empresses, dogs with colic, boiler-rooms, hotels in Benitses where the music would thump and thump deep into the night … and there in a faraway Nowhere my mind (Cavafy would say my ‘soul’) turned gentle somersaults, not even knowing it was waiting.

  When the last cars had chugged up the drive to the house for the second performance, and everything was still again – not a trickle of sound from the house, no slamming doors, no squawks of laughter, no hum of a crowd – I knew Act I must be under way in the courtyard. The house would be empty. And indeed I was in luck: there was nobody in the salon and nobody in the kitchen, not even Martha. I was just bending down to slide my suitcase out from under the table when I heard a woman’s footsteps behind me. It was Greta, an empty wine-glass in her hand.

  ‘So there you are! Where have you been? Is something wrong?’ Her smile faded when she saw the suitcase in my hand.

  ‘I’m going to leave, Greta. Now, before everyone comes back inside. I’ll call a taxi.’

  For a moment I thought she was going to tell me not to be so silly, how bad it would look, how hurtful to the actors and my friends. But she didn’t. I’m sure it was on the tip of her tongue to snap, How dare you just sneak off like that! How rude! How spineless! – But instead she took her wine-glass to the sink, rinsed it, stood it upside down to drain, and then, turning to me, said:

  ‘Alright, I’ll drive you. Let’s go quickly, I haven’t got much time.’

  She knew.

  When you’ve already left inside, waiting for your body to catch up, as it were, is nerve-wracking. You want to whip time like a horse, make it fly to where you’re already waiting for it further down the road. So I was hardly conscious of the meadows and houses we were driving past, hardly had the patience to say all the things I should have said as we threaded our way through the outskirts of the town towards the wharves. I forgot to say goodbye to the Venetian fort, the arcades by the cricket-ground where I’d so often sat drinking coffee, the spot where we’d lifted a dazed Maxwell to his feet – I even forgot, in a sense, to say goodbye to Greta.

  ‘You’ll come back one day, I’m sure,’ she said, kissing me lightly on both cheeks on the pavement outside the ferry-terminal. ‘And nothing will have changed – we’ll all still be here, bickering with each other as usual and talking vaguely about going home – at least for Christmas!’ She laughed. ‘But you’re right to go now. I think we’ve probably given you all we can.’ With a wave, she slammed the door and lurched off into the traffic. It was a very strange last line.

  With hours to spare – it wasn’t even dark yet – I sat in a grubby café across the road for a while, wrote a note to William, tore it up, wrote another, scrunched it up and jammed it into my empty coffee cup. Out on the twilit street the crowds were thickening, horns were blasting, music was pouring from tavernas and radios, and the smell of roasting meats and sweat and car-fumes was seeping into my clothes and up my nostrils.

  Sea-monster-like, the ferry from Brindisi suddenly loomed up out of the darkness, out of nowhere, ablaze with lights, and all those wond
erful wharf noises started up like an orchestra – bangs, clanks, whistles, raucous shouts. I felt as I’d often felt before, waiting at a bus-stop for the bus home after I’d left the theatre. Make-up wiped off, the theatre empty, my stage self (lover, husband, pirate) long since cast off, hung up back in the dressing-room with my stage clothes, I would stand at the bus-stop, nobody for a while, just watching dogs saunter by or lights going out in upstairs windows. Then slowly I would begin to recover, with delight, my own ordinariness.

  What broke my reverie at the wharf, however, was not a bus. Walking up to the glass doors into the terminal, I saw Kester Berwick standing facing me on the other side of the glass.

  Like me he was wearing a crumpled mackintosh and holding a small, brown suitcase in his right hand. Neither of us moved. I looked at him, filled with a kind of wonder that I knew this man I didn’t know at all so utterly, so presently, that no words were needed any more. And, strange to relate, he looked at me a little quizzically as if to say: Which one are you, now? And then the door slid open and we moved past each other, each back into his own world. Just as it’s enough sometimes, when a dearly loved friend rides by in a bus, simply to see the face, not even to wave, just to know that somewhere in the world today he is being himself, and all is well just as it is, so I didn’t even turn around to watch him vanish.

  Now, as I write these lines in an exercise book on my lap, Corfu is just a faint smudge of gold in the blackness far behind us. We’re beginning to toss a bit and heave.