Fergus said, ‘We’ll leave talking about it, shall we, before we let the real world in?’
He was right; this wasn’t the time. She saw that now. Leave it for a bit yet. So it was as though the dead man had not crossed their path, or the clock kept ticking. For the next ten days it was life again as it should always be: money enough to get by on, endless sun and beaches, retsina and olives and roast lamb. And fucking, as Fergus put it, to beat the band, and the band fucking knows what it’s talking about.
Then it was September. Late September. They took a bus to Cape Sounion and found the column with the famous name carved into it, and swam in a rock pool a local directed them to, a basin of white rock and green gorgeous water. As they left the bus back in the city, their skin tingling with salt and the late afternoon sun, they were ravenous. They decided to eat wherever they came to first, an estiatorio with a smiling man flapping a cloth inviting them in. Its kitchen, as he told them from the door, was there to be inspected, how could they pass this for the expensive places closer to the centre, where tourists paid twice as much to eat half as well? He was glib and proud of his rapid ungrammatical English. Mistaking them for a moment, he told them he had worked with his brother in Austin, Texas, all Americans knew Austin? Ah, Auckland, he said as they corrected him, who does not know Auckland, thinking they had told him Oakland. But once they were at a table and gave their orders, he left them alone, conversing loudly, from the door where again he stood to entice, with his wife who busied herself at the pots of food above flaring gas rings. He brought them a dish of olives and ice-cold beers. He returned again with several magazines in English that he thought they might care to look at, implying he had read them himself and could recommend them, cosmopolitans together.
The most recent was several years old. A photograph of Gina Lollobrigida looked up at them. Apart from an air of calm which was part of her beauty, she looked natural and at ease and without the pert self-awareness of a star. Her dark sleeves came almost to her wrists, her neckline was high. Fergus recalled he had sometimes dropped in on a friend back in Grafton Road in a clapped-out wooden villa with damp-smelling carpet and worn lino where generations of students had laid one level of staleness upon another. ‘Haven’t thought about her since then,’ he said, turning the magazine towards Lisa. There had been a massive blow-up of the actress on the sitting room wall, younger and more provocative than the woman who now looked up at them. He remembered a tight black swimsuit, her breasts drawn taut and scooped high. His friend would sometimes stand as though looking at an ikon and say more in reverence than in lechery, ‘She’s made for it, know that?’ Fergus said, ‘If you’d asked us back then what Europe had that we didn’t, we’d have pointed at her.’
An hour later they were sitting with their heads against the wall behind them, finishing their second bottle of Dias, the remains of their meal pushed to the side. There was that lovely sense of languor after the swimming, the hot brilliant afternoon, the temple like a postcard when they turned from the bus to look back on it. Lisa closed her eyes, the luxury of that too, as close as one might come to thinking about nothing. A red Porsche screeched into the kerb five yards from where they sat. Its canvas hood was drawn back and its driver crossed the pavement towards them, decked out in a lot of gold even for a Greek. He whirled his car key in front of him like a small propeller. He wore black slacks sharply creased enough to slice pizza, and a grey-ribbed sweater, the sleeves pulled back to give his bangles air. He was perhaps twenty, aware of how the world was made to look his way. He held Lisa’s eye until she was the one who broke the gaze. He gave his takeaway order to the owner, who attended to it without speaking. He stood looking out to his car, whistling between his teeth, slapping his key back and forth across his fist. They had seen others identical to him parading in Kolonaki a dozen times. He probably spoke English with a fetching accent, and in the summer picked up easy New Zealanders or Australians at one beach or another.
‘A car like that is a cock in any man’s language,’ Fergus said. He felt he had a duty to dislike him, although Lisa said nothing following his remark and flicked at the magazine. He knew that if he were a Greek himself he would detest him. His family would be royalists and discreetly accept the Colonels until democracy returned, when they would say that from the beginning they had been against the dictatorship, what Greek was not?
The owner arranged slices of tomato and onion on the meat he placed on circles of pita, and squirted dabs of garlic sauce from a plastic container. He rolled the bread into tubes, wrapped them in greaseproof paper and set them in a shallow cardboard box. He worked quickly, nonchalantly. Without a hint of courtesy, he said bluntly how much he was owed. As bluntly, the boy—he would have hated the description—handed over a note, shoved the change into his pocket without glancing at it. As if to rub salt, he looked up to the photograph of the man in uniform that hung above the door, and raised a thumb toward the tourists in the otherwise empty room. As he went out to the late dazzle of the sun he flipped his sunglasses from where they sat on his hair. He was back behind the wheel of his car when he took the note-wrapped coins from the pocket and smoothed the note on his knee. He flung back his door so it stayed opened as he rushed back into the restaurant, as angry now, Lisa thought, as he was handsome.
He started calling out as he entered, speaking quickly to the man who casually walked back from the kitchen, his contempt obvious and provoking. He rested his fists on the stack of paper squares below the slowly turning grill as the younger man shouted at him. He watched his rage without apparent concern. He then looked past the expensive clothes, the golden chains and the raised vein in the smooth young neck to hold Fergus’s eye. In his maimed but fluent English he said, ‘You musta see it, my friend? You sit this close you musta see the note this malaka give me?’ This masturbator. There could not be more offensiveness in what he said.
He had not raised his voice, but the surprise of his word further enraged his customer, who turned to them and said, ‘I gave this liar five hundred drachs and he gives me the change for one hundred. Did you see that, despina?’, addressing himself not to the man the owner had appealed to but the woman who sat with him. His assumption that she would have been watching him, and would now speak on his behalf. She thought yes, I did see the note he passed across, and yet I scarcely took notice of it. I could be wrong. But for Fergus it was a moment of quick instinctive decision. He looked through the window to the car, to its sleek lines in their swathe of late reflecting light. Its driver stared at him, confident that he would come, of course he would come, to his defence. Instead of smoothly flicking his key as he had done a few minutes before, he now swung his tinted glasses in his hand. ‘Yes,’ he said, his tone now insolently patient, ‘you must have seen?’
The owner too was looking at the foreigner, his eyebrows raised. The two Greeks vying for him in a frank theatrical way, a rapid moment of class war. He too was inextricably part of the performance. When he spoke he had the sensation of another speaking through him, words he had no choice but to say. ‘I saw you give him a hundred. You were playing with it while you waited, that’s how I know. I saw you give it to him.’
The young man stood for a moment as if deciding on what to do. He looked down at Fergus from where he stood on the raised step beside the counter. His expression had changed. Then with neither surprise nor anger but something the tourist did not expect, and that stung him as surely as if the Greek had covered the few paces between them and slapped him with his opened hand, he looked with such coldness that Fergus knew he understood perfectly the game that he was playing at, the working man against the rich boy, yet behind that, a deeper truth, the push-button foreign socialist lying because lying was his nature. The young man’s rage gone as surely as if an ignition key had turned it off. It was no more than two or three seconds in which he looked at Fergus. He then turned and walked to the car, its door still open, and slid behind its wheel. He sat for a moment before driving off. It seemed to Fergus
that the boy with his chains, his bracelets, his expensive toy, at the last was disappointed not that he had been stolen from, but lied against by a man he didn’t know. What one person would do against another. Then Lisa stood up from the table and went to pay. She thanked the man who nodded to them as they left, but that was all.
Back at the flat they listened to a local radio station, the high insistent whining that Fergus dismissed as ‘that half-Turkish stuff’. But Lisa enjoyed listening as she heated coffee, put two pieces of baklava on a plate and took two glasses of water from the fridge. She arranged the sweets and forks in the way Greek women did. She liked to copy them. There was not much then to say. They drank the coffee and sipped at the cheap Metaxa which only through the courtesy of labelling is related to anything called brandy elsewhere in the world. Lisa had grown to like that too, for all her saying the first time she tasted it that it was wrung through sacking.
‘I’ll have another,’ Fergus said. ‘That tells you how desperate.’ Already he felt less shamed by what had happened an hour before. When they unfolded the bed they made love, and he put his hand across her mouth, which was a joke between them, ‘the Colonels’ ploy’ as they called it, pretending neighbours would report erotic signals as they may have done the sound of typing in the afternoon’s forbidden hours. She bit hard on the side of his hand, so that for days after she had left there was the tender purplish swelling from her bite.
Because that is when Lisa left, the next day, soon after noon. Fergus had gone to the baker’s on the corner as on any other morning. When he returned the dish of honey was on the table, the mugs of black tea with the saucer of sliced lemon between them. While they broke chunks from the warm freshly baked rolls, she told him what she would do. He watched her finger scoop at the runnels of honey at the roll’s edge. He supposed she had planned through the night what she needed to say to him. It was simpler, briefer, than he expected. She began, ‘You lied about the money in the restaurant.’
As directly, Fergus said, ‘Anyone would have.’
Then again as calmly as if they were discussing something so much less enduring, ‘You play at everything, Fergus. It’s turned you into a shit.’
There were times in their months together when they had argued and raised their voices at each other and each knew they enjoyed the drama of it. Not often, but a few times, about things they knew were not of great importance, about friends one wanted to visit and the other did not, once even about politics, when neither deeply accepted the point they defended, but they had been drinking, and there was the fun, for Fergus especially, of guessing what a real argument might be like. But this morning Lisa was practical and concise, saying that this must never be thought of as a ‘misunderstanding’. It was more important than that. ‘We are talking like this because we understand.’
Water suddenly cascaded down in front of their window and splashed to the concrete area beneath it, as the woman on the balcony above watered her stacked levels of pot plants. This happened every morning, and each time it startled them. They had never seen the woman who lived there, nor heard her at any other time. Water sparkled on the iron railings and on the pavement, and on the bars at the window. The sun already glared on the upper storeys of the building across the road, where the metal shutters were still down. The people there had moved away soon after the coup. Fergus held his mug of tea with both hands, looking at Lisa through the wisping steam. He asked her, ‘Is that a reason to leave?’
‘Yes it is.’
He began again. ‘It’s been nearly a year.’
‘I know that.’
‘If we’re not together we’ll be unhappy for a long time.’
‘I know that too.’ And then, reasonably, ‘I was going back soon anyway. We knew that. Dunedin. Getting on with my degree. ’
‘And after that?’
‘All this has been lovely. We both know that.’
‘More than.’
They sat silently until Fergus went to the stove to top up his tea from the saucepan of boiling water. He looked back to Lisa, her head tilted slightly as she looked up to the street, to the fall of sun across the balconies on the other side of the road. The paleness of her arms, for all the Mediterranean sun, the massing of her tightly curled jet hair. He felt the prickling at his eyes, the tears that he would have hated her seeing. He came back and sat close to her. He touched her wrist. He tried to make his voice sound jokey. ‘It won’t seem right, you know. Not being together.’
Again she said, ‘I know that.’ And then, accepting how it would hurt him, but there were more important things than that, she told him how she had no choice, not now. ‘Otherwise I’ll be corrupted too.’
1976
Miss McGovern said as she walked into the pharmacy, ‘This is not a place to talk. This is a shop.’
She stood in front of Stephen, insistent, heavy, soft in that way he so disliked her for, as though melting towards something other than she was, this grotesque woman with her shiny lilac scarf. He thought resentfully of her jollity when she and Babcia were together, yet her facing him now, austere and demanding on the other side of the counter. She held in front of her the scuffed handbag with one corner of her Bible tilted too high for the zip to be drawn across it. Her eyes quivered oddly as she looked at him, instructing him, so Stephen thought, you do not rebuke me, you do not impress me.
‘It is a shop because it is where I work.’ He was not a man who raised his voice, who made an effort to impose on anyone. But he disliked her bowling in on him, her assumed right to disturb him. The shop fortunately was empty. He waited for whatever it was she might have to say to him. On that one day of the month when she visited her old friend, it was her habit each time, at four o’clock, to ask Eva to phone a taxi for her. ‘Time to leave, I think.’ Always the same phrase. Leave after the two hours in the sitting room with its tilted venetian blinds, the constant pouring of tea, the plate of faworki that Ruth had spent the previous day preparing. The two women talking quickly together, laughing, running through names, their leaning towards each other. And sooner or later during each visit, the mood changing between them, the torrent of their chatter running thin, their hands meeting, holding each other. A quiet settling in the shadowed room, the women content to speak sparingly, the air heavier now with the mix of talcum, the sachet of herbs Ruth at times turned absently in the hand lying against the sofa, the lingering sweetness from the plates on the small table in front of them.
Apart from bringing them a fresh pot of coffee as they sat together, Eva left them alone. There were repeated words they came back to, ones that carried special weight for them, phrases she partly grasped the meaning of, but she knew what she took in was so little of what passed between them. She knew at times her aunt spoke of the years before the camp, because the names of streets, of relatives, were there as well, but mostly it was of those years that could never be truly spoken of to others, in the language Eva poorly grasped at and quickly lost. ‘The visit go all right?’ Stephen asked each month, and Eva as briskly told him, ‘As it always does.’ An afternoon she meant of such ease, such contentment between two crazy women, the adjective Stephen reserved for his own thinking of them.
He guessed, without pressing his wife to say so, that she in some way envied them, those two old friends, so gifted with each other in God knows what place it was they met. But closer, as Eva sometimes thought, than she herself might be even to those she loved. Yet ‘It does me good,’ she would say to Stephen, ‘just seeing them together.’ And joke of it. ‘So much life crammed in, along with all the cakes. Apart from what’s already here.’ For Miss McGovern arrived always with her own tribute, the brown paper bag with its smears from where the icing on the Sally Lunn stained through. The bag placed on the kitchen bench as she came in and then the little ritual, each visit, as she handed across a more enduring gift she brought each month, the cheap and trivial things she watched out for in the messy bric-a-brac shops along the stretch she walked from the top of Newton
Road to Pitt Street. Stephen had bought a folding card-table Babcia placed beneath the window in her bedroom, where she arranged and rearranged the gifts each month as a child compulsively returns to displaying presents.
But today broke the pattern of many years. It was not a Thursday, for one thing. It was early afternoon. The time was wrong. Miss McGovern felt no compulsion to explain. She waited, as though the next move must come from him, from the reserved, cautiously hostile man she faced. Her thinking vaguely that if you witnessed, you were used to resentment. It was there since her first breaking in on him on the Rangitata, his impulse to speak coldly, to make little effort to conceal distaste. More than a quarter of a century. All of that. From the boat trip when Ruth had been with them for only months, Eva pregnant with Lisa although that was not yet known. He had been reading the H.G. Wells book Mr Golson had given him that last day in the shop in Finchley Road, the generous eccentric David whom Stephen’s son would be named after, his quietly spoken and polite final telling him how he hoped Eva might one day come back to her people, Baruch hashem. ‘Stranger things have happened, my young friend.’ As more pragmatically Sam Abrams had tapped the rim of his schnapps against Stephen’s glass, offering as his parting wisdom that whatever happens in the world, he said, good things or bad, he would tell him this, the world will always need windows that open and shut. That is a trade to keep in mind. Then Sam had cried. He always did this, he said. He was too soft-hearted for his own good. Memories coming to Stephen within seconds as he looked across the glass-topped counter and Miss McGovern then asking him, was that woman who comes in to help him the way Lisa did when she was a girl, was she with him now?
All This by Chance Page 9