by Francis King
She herself opened the door to us, revealing to the first glance the kind of hard, bright, anonymous interior to which one grows so accustomed in modem flats in Athens: but on a closer inspection I saw that everywhere there were signed photographs—of royalty, of actors and actresses, of famous jockeys and boxers and politicians—their silver frames glittering among the white furnishings and upholstery. Although it was still sunny outside, the curtains had been drawn; one felt that they had probably been drawn all day.
‘So this is your young Englishman.’ I was not sure that I really liked the ‘your’. ‘Theo tells me that you are a writer.’
‘Yes—I do write,’ I said lamely.
‘Excellent. There’s something I want you to look at for me, if you would be so kind. I’d rather you didn’t take it away, as I have only one copy. I don’t want advice on what’s in it, you understand, but only on the English.’ She gave her exquisite smile: ‘My spelling is terrible! … Still, come and sit down—we can talk about that later.’
The tea was already out on a table before the fireplace, and Nadia Grecou now plugged an electric kettle into the wall.
‘Where’s Maria?’ Theo asked. ‘Is it her day off?’
‘She is away,’ Nadia Grecou said shortly. Then she added, with emphasis: ‘But she will be back.’
‘Oh,’ Theo said. He caught my eye at the same moment, and I had the impression that he gave me a lightning wink. ‘That reminds me. I brought this along for you.’ He drew the long brown envelope out of his breast pocket and held it out to Nadia.
She stared down at it for a moment, and then her arm shot out from under its draping of chiffon. She snatched. Eagerly she tore the envelope and scrabbled through the notes: her beautiful tranquil face was momentarily contorted with rapacity, as though a sudden squall had flicked over a lake. She got up, unlocked a drawer of her desk, and put the envelope in. When she returned her face was once more smooth and expressionless. She had never said a word of thanks.
‘I wish I could have brought more,’ Theo sighed. ‘But I’m a poor man, Nadia—a very poor man.’
‘Don’t talk like that!’ All at once she stiffened, looking bony and rigid under the flowing draperies. ‘How can you expect to be anything but poor when you refuse to hold the thought of being rich. Hold the thought, Theo—hold the thought!’ She herself, as I discovered later, had so successfully held the thought of being rich that even at their moments of greatest financial crisis she had refused to make any cuts in her standards of life.
Theo, looking humbled by her scolding, began to prepare the tea.
Nadia Grecou was not an unintelligent woman, as her conversation now revealed, and she had a certain grandeur which impressed itself on one and made one accept from her remarks which one would not accept without offence from another woman. She knew a great deal about English and French literature of the nineteenth century, German romantic music and the art of the Italian Renaissance. But she was scornful when one mentioned even a painter now so popularly accepted as Vincent van Gogh or a composer as Ravel. ‘If that is the kind of thing you like, Mr Cauldwell, you must meet the little son of the caretaker of this block of flats. He was born without hands, and he is a hunchback, and he has no hair.’ There was a certain gusto in the way she brought out these repulsive physical details. ‘If you like the ugliness of Picasso, you will like his ugliness too.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I am afraid I am old-fashioned, and prefer Beauty.’ She saw that I had finished my cup of tea, and without offering me a second, she retired to the desk to fetch me her manuscript. ‘ It’s only—’ she flicked through the sheets—‘ forty-three pages. It’s a play I have written in verse for the B.B.C.… Now come and sit here by the light.’ Obediently I got up. ‘But don’t, please, mark the typescript. Just note anything you want on this piece of paper.’
‘You will be in a draught there,’ Theo said. ‘ You know you had lumbago yesterday.’
‘Theo!’ She gave what I can only call a snarl: at the moment I would not have been surprised to see her take a bite out of his leg. ‘Don’t talk like that! Why will you persist in willing illnesses on to others? I’m convinced that all your troubles are basically due to that kind of wrong thinking.… Pay no attention to him, Mr Cauldwell. Come and sit here.’ I sat down in the draught; and whether because of the draught or Theo’s wrong thinking, I had lumbago the next day.
‘A Cretan Romeo and Juliet,’ I read. ‘A Tragedy in Poetry for Radio. Specially written for the B.B.C. Third Programme by Mrs Nadia Korchinska Grecou (Diploma in Fine Arts of the Athens Polytechnic).’ I turned over and saw that the whole of the first page was occupied by the Narrator; and the second; and the third; and the fourth …
‘Have you read as far as that?’ Nadia’s voice sternly asked from behind my shoulder.
‘No, I was just trying to get some idea of the shape of the whole thing,’ I stammered.
‘Oh, I see.… You know the story, of course—you must have read it in the papers?’
‘You mean, about the——’
‘The two families who have a feud, and the young man of one family who abducts the daughter of the other—you’ve read about that, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, I——’
‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t. The play speaks for itself.’ Laboriously I began to read through the first page: mis-spelled, written in a curiously stilted and foreign idiom, and twisted into couplets that reminded me of pantomime, the lines blurred before me into an incomprehensible mass. Nadia tapped with the nail of her right forefinger on the seventh line: ‘You see the reference there?’ she demanded.
‘The reference?’
‘You have read Hugo, haven’t you?’
‘A little.’
‘Well, you know the line about ‘‘la mer sonore’’, don’t you?’
‘Oh, yes—yes,’ I said feebly. I had never heard the line.
‘Here we have cow-bells—’ again the nail tapped—‘and here—very simple—a single sheep neighing. You do say neighing of a sheep?’
‘Bleating.’
‘A single sheep bleating. I imagine the B. B.C. can produce that kind of sound quite easily?’
‘Quite easily.’
‘Of course it mustn’t be too realistic. It must be—poetic.’ Her white hands fluttered delicately in the air; the chiffon billowed round her.
So it continued.
‘You’ve spelled ‘‘apple’‘ with only one ‘‘ p’’.’
‘Oh, what a pedant you are, Mr Cauldwell!’
‘But I thought that was the kind of mistake you wanted me to point out to you.’
‘Do you think the people on the Third Programme will like it?’
‘There’s no way of telling.’
Fortunately she all at once looked at her watch and gave a small scream: ‘A-i-i! I’m already ten minutes late for my bridge. Come, you must go! Let us all go together. But you will return another day, Mr Cauldwell.’ She went into the next room and minutes passed as we waited for her to finish her preparations. Theo walked up and down the small room, from time to time smiling at me indulgently. Once he waved a hand in the air and said ‘Exquisite taste’. Then he whispered: ‘I must try to find that maid of hers and tell her to come back—now that there’s some money with which to pay her.’
‘Then it’s not her day off?’ I queried ingenuously.
‘Sh! No wrong thinking!’ And Theo began to giggle into his khaki handkerchief at his joke.
In the lift, Nadia asked Theo, for the first time that afternoon, how he was keeping. ‘Oh, one mustn’t complain,’ he sighed.
‘You’re happy,’ she said, not as a question, but as an affirmative statement which she obviously did not intend him to contradict.
‘Who can say? I have my house and my possessions and my music and my fantasiometry. Above all—’ he put a hand on my shoulder as the lift hissed to a stop—‘I have my dear friends. But money—that’s what al
ways worries me.’
‘But, Theo, why don’t you sell the house?’
‘Never.’
‘In ten years’ time it will have fallen to the ground anyway. It’s not as if it were a particularly beautiful house,’ she added. I imagined that for Nadia a ‘particularly beautiful house’ would probably turn out to be one of those overgrown Swiss chalets or shrunken Monte Carlo casinos so popular in the suburbs round Athens. ‘If you sell it now, you would realise some money and could also insist on being given an apartment for as long as the block of flats stands.’
‘No!’
‘Oh, don’t be so obstinate! What possible reason can you have for wishing to hang on in that old ruin?’
They continued to wrangle with increasing bitterness until we had to cross Stadium Street which, at this hour, is always thick with traffic. Nadia, with complete recklessness, stepped off the pavement and, with cars hooting, brakes screeching and bicycle bells ringing all about her, began to walk, slowly and in an absolutely straight line, to the other side. Her head, held wonderfully straight in its close-fitting grey hat trimmed with ostrich feathers, her feet in their elegant high-heeled shoes, and the general elasticity and vigour of her movements all suggested, at this distance, a woman of thirty. Theo was dithering: he caught my arm, as if to drag me to the same catastrophe with him, as a tram thundered towards us, and then pulled me back. Again he ventured forward. This happened three or four times until, suddenly, he lowered his head, as I had seen him do in Salonica, and scuttled over the road.
‘And about time too!’ Nadia greeted us. ‘ I’ve never seen such a cowardly exhibition.’
‘Something should be done about this traffic,’ Theo grumbled. ‘It’s all these wretched Americans with their cars like hotel suites on wheels.’ Theo, like most Greeks, ascribed most of the difficulties of life either to past British, or present American follies. ‘But, Nadia, you really must be a little more careful. You might have been run over.’
‘Theo! I forbid you to do that! How dare you? Do you want to murder me?’ Her small face was contorted and white under its make-up; she stamped one of her feet. ‘How can I live when you keep pressing those horrible errors on me? If you are going to talk like that, it’s better for us not to see each other. I will not be the victim of your fears and wrong thinking. I’ve told you that before.’
‘I’m sorry, Nadia,’ Theo said humbly.
‘Apologies are not enough. You must change your whole attitude of mind. You have no idea what harm people like you inflict.… Goodbye, Mr Cauldwell. I shall leave a message with Theo when you must next call about the play.’ I found myself saying thank-you. ‘Goodbye, Theo—and remember—no wrong thinking!’
Theo watched her as she rapidly walked up the steps of a block of flats that looked like an enormous upturned concertina. Then he turned, and the expression on his face was an odd mingling of admiration, exasperation and hurt feelings. ‘ What a woman!’ he said. ‘How young she looks! What charm, what elegance, what savoir faire! … And what intelligence, too! I’ve no doubt that if she had really set her mind to it she could have been one of the world’s greatest writers. Don’t you agree?’
I made no reply.
Chapter Six
AS I have so far recounted this story I have probably given the impression that my relations with Theo were always amiable and smooth: but I doubt if Theo’s relations with anyone, except Götz, had ever been only that. In proportion as he cared for a person, so his fury was the more intense at some imagined slight or ingratitude; and it was not, unfortunately, difficult to appear to him to have been guilty of slights or ingratitudes. He was a man capable of any sacrifices for his friends; but in return he expected a similar willingness to make sacrifices. He lived, as he often said, for his ‘little circle’; his ‘ little circle’ must live, in turn, for him.
For Götz this was easy; he had a few acquaintances but no other friends and, except when he was in fruitless pursuit of some woman, his time was always Theo’s. But for Cecil and myself it was always difficult to avoid being accused of treachery or time-serving. Each of us had other friends and interests, and I had my work. We enjoyed Theo’s company but we also enjoyed the company of other friends of ours who were unlikely to appreciate him or be, in their turn, appreciated. Yet, whenever we spent a day without going out with him, the next day we would, at best, have to face his coldly silent disapproval or, at worst, make a superfluous defence of our friends and ourselves against the vehemence of his attack.
Most mornings he would telephone me, and I give the following as typical of such daily conversations:
‘Shall I be seeing you today, my dear?’
‘I’m not sure. I think I shall be awfully busy.’
‘Waiting to see what will come along, eh?’ Theo chuckled to take the nastiness out of the words. ‘Where are you lunching?’
‘Oh, at home.’
‘I can understand your preference for Dino’s French cook.… By the way, how is Dino?’
‘He’s writing letters at the desk beside me.’
‘Give him my—er—regards.… Tell me, how did his party go?’
‘His party?’
‘I heard about it from Nondas Spiliotopoulos.… Wasn’t that the day when you said you wanted a quiet evening at home?’
‘It wasn’t a party. We asked in one or two people.’
‘So I shan’t see you at lunch. And I suppose you’re invited to one of your smart tea parties.’
‘Not smart at all. I’m having tea with two old nannies.’
I could hear him making ‘Tsk-Tsk!’ at the other end of the telephone. ‘ You won’t get far up the social ladder if you do that sort of thing. What about dinner?’
‘Dino and I are going to the Galistras.’
‘Better, much better. Up—and up—and up …’
Usually, now that I was giving lessons, it was in the evenings that we met; and such meetings would invariably resolve themselves into one of two patterns. Either we would sit in his house, drinking tea or cheap cognac and eating Turkish sweets which tasted like wads of tissue paper soaked in thick syrup; or we would go to a taverna, usually in Peiraeus. If we stayed at home, the evening rarely passed without Theo playing us some part of his Concerto, Götz whistling from the window at the girls who passed below, and Cecil sending me to tell some unwelcome soldier or sailor that he had come to the wrong address. Cecil was always making dates with what he would call ‘monsters’ whom he would then have to avoid.
If we went to a taverna, we usually took a taxi for which Cecil and I would pay. Theo would say ‘ I hear that the Arachova’—or ‘Machi’s’, or the ‘Katakosmo’—‘ is likely to be interesting this evening,’ and we would usually go where he suggested: but since the things that were likely to interest Cecil would not interest Götz—and vice versa—I was never sure what Theo meant by this word. They were happy evenings; though when I think of the spongy liver we used to be brought to eat (it was probably spleen), of the resinated wine, a drink for which I have never acquired a taste, of the hiss and grind of the gramophone blaring out pre-war jazz or Greek popular songs, of the dust rising from the floor as the dancers shuffled round and the penetrating odours of charcoal, sweat and cigarette smoke, I find it hard to say why such evenings should have been so happy. As always in Greece, I suppose it was the people who made the difference. These artisans and sailors and soldiers would send us over a can of wine and, having drunk to their health, we would send them a can back. Cecil would invite some of them to join us or would watch, with a kind of moody intensity, as one or a couple would perform a traditional dance. ‘Extraordinary, the grace of these lumbering peasants,’ he would often say. It was a thing which never ceased to surprise him.
‘They are possessed,’ Theo would reply.
Certainly, as the dancers gyrated with bowed heads and ceaselessly clicking ringers, they gave the impression of a trance-like activity.
‘But what a pity they don’t keep their he
ads up, like Spanish dancers,’ Cecil remarked.
‘One must be humble before the mystery of artistic possession,’ Theo said sententiously.
‘Oh, come!’
Theo thought again; then he added: ‘The earth is our mother and we look to her as we dance.’ At this moment one of the dancers struck the earth with the palm of his hand: ‘And we strike her in order to take strength from her.’ Cecil scoffed at what he obviously regarded as an explanation of the moment, but Theo continued with a kind of hurt patience: ‘You have read, of course, of how Hercules had to lift the giant Antaeus from the ground before he could overcome him? That was because the giant derived his strength from his mother, the earth.’ Whenever one began to suspect that Theo’s folklore had no genuine basis of scholarship, he would somehow be able to confute one’s doubts in this way.
‘Dance, Theo, dance!’ Götz would now cry.
The old man would shake his head and smile down at the glass of retsina into which he was dropping pieces of apple to soak. ‘ Let me get drunk first. Unfortunately I have many inhibitions.’
Theo danced beautifully; and those who would at first smile or even openly mock at the spectacle of the old man marching stiffly on to the floor, removing his hat and coat which he would hand to the waiter, and then calling for the music he wanted, would shout out ‘With your good health!’ and send him over a carafe of wine as soon as he had ended. When he danced, he moved with an extraordinary dignity and calm and grace, wholly unlike the rigid, jerky manner in which he normally walked.