by Francis King
‘Do you swim?’ she asked somewhat unexpectedly as I levered her into a taxi.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Saturday next, twelve o’clock. Swim—then lunch.’ It was like an order. ‘Varkiza— you know Varkiza?’
‘Yes.’
‘Anyone can tell you how to find our villa.’
‘But I have a lesson till one.’
‘Come after your lesson then.… All right?’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘Good.’ She said something to the driver, the taxi moved on, and I realised, simultaneously, that I still did not know her name. In the end I had to go back to the Grande Bretagne and ask the bar-man.
I arrived at Varkiza on Saturday in far from the best of tempers. I had had a two hour lesson with one of those tiresome students who always knew exactly what they wish, and do not wish, to learn (this one, a young man from the Foreign Service, was not interested in grammar but had an insatiable craving for idioms, which he invariably used wrongly) and I had then had to stand in a ’bus which was hot and crowded with people returning to their suburban homes for lunch. I had given up my seat to an old woman with a child in her arms and was furious that it had been taken instead by a plump young priest, carrying an umbrella. At Varkiza when I asked an old labourer for the Landerlöst villa, I was sent in the wrong direction.
‘Is it far?’
‘About one cigarette’s walk.’
I could have consumed the best part of a packet by the time I found the path.
The villa was a bungalow, built in the Moorish style, with no pretence either to grandeur or attractiveness: Landerlöst never came here, and Sophie Landerlöst herself only came at the week-ends. When I arrived an oldish man-servant in a white jacket was laying a table out on the verandah and I saw that there were at least a dozen places. He glanced up as I descended the path, and then went on with his work.
‘Madame Landerlöst?’
He answered, in French, that I would find the whole party down on the beach; he pointed at a path with the fork he held in his hand.
‘May I change here?’
‘Certainly, monsieur.’
I shivered slightly when I emerged, in my slip, into the spring sunshine, even though in the ’ bus everyone had been sweating. As I began to walk down the path I realised that I had forgotten my glasses which I had taken off while changing, but I decided that it was not worth the trouble of going back to fetch them. I should not need them while I was swimming anyway.
Below me a number of people were splashing in the water; though, from this distance, it was hard to tell which were rocks and which were people, and to decide whether I knew any of them or not. A voice shouted ‘Hi’.
‘Hi!’
Then another voice, which was Sophie’s, shouted: ‘ What are you doing here?’
It was not a friendly question.
‘You asked me,’ I said.
‘Did I?’ Without my glasses and in nothing but my trunks, I felt curiously defenceless as I stood there above those anonymous upturned faces. ‘When did I ask you?’
‘In the Grande Bretagne Bar—last Monday.’
‘I don’t remember it. What is your name?’ Slowly, with vast strides that sent the water streaming to left and right, she was wading towards me.
‘Frank Cauldwell.’
‘I’ve never heard the name.’
‘We never told each other our names.’
‘Then how did you discover mine?’
‘From the bar-man.’
‘He has no right to give people’s names to strangers.… Anyway, now that you’re here, you’d better come in. But take off your slip.’
‘What?’
‘Take off your slip!’ I peered down in absolute amazement. ‘Take it off!’ she thundered.
Then I realised that as she stood before me with the water round her knees she was not wearing a pink bathing-costume, as I had short-sightedly imagined, but was in fact in the nude. There was nothing else for it: feeling even colder and more defenceless than ever I obeyed her command and scuttled, shame-facedly, into the water to join the equally shame-faced Embassy young men who were all in the same state as myself.
This was the woman whom Theo insisted that I should invite to the performance; the opportunity to do so presenting itself much sooner than I had expected. The day after Theo had been discussing his guests, Dino had driven me out into the country for a picnic; and as we passed the lower slopes of Mt Pendeli we saw ahead of us a large stationary green-and-cream American car with a C.D. plate behind it. A figure, chin supported by hand, was seated forlornly on a boulder by the roadside.
‘Breakdown?’ Dino suggested. ‘We’d better stop.’
‘It’s Landerlöst,’ I said. ‘At least, I’m sure that’s his car. And it looks like him.’ Landerlöst was one of those people whose cars are easier to recognise than their faces. ‘Can we be of any help? Are you in trouble?’ Dino shouted.
The small figure rose and hurried towards us. ‘No, thank you very much.’ He peered into the car: ‘Ah, it’s Mr Cauldwell!’
‘Good morning, Mr Landerlöst.’ I introduced Dino.
‘I’ve been sitting here since six,’ he said gloomily. He was wearing breeches and a Norfolk jacket of hairy grey tweed and his long, thin, candle-coloured face looked muffed out by the hat with a feather which he had pulled over his brow. ‘My wife is there.’ He pointed up the mountain.
‘On the mountain?’
‘Yes, the Mountaineering Club are presenting her with a medal. And apparently they do that on the top.’ He added: ‘We are supposed to be having breakfast down here. They said they would be back at eight, but now it is half-past eleven. You’ll see the ’ bus which brought the Club round the corner.’
‘Did you drive yourself?’ Dino enquired.
‘No, we brought the chauffeur. He’s also up the mountain. I, myself, don’t like heights.’ Yet again he glanced at his watch. ‘ I can’t think what is keeping them.’
When ten minutes later the party appeared swaying and yodelling among the rocks and tufts of broom, it would have been obvious what had kept them even if we had not seen the wicker-covered flagons which most of the members of the Club were swinging from their hands. Sophie Landerlöst came first in a heavy pair of boots, ski-ing trousers and a leather wind-jacket, and as the stones crunched beneath her feet and the gorse made a scratching noise against her vast thighs, she never ceased to sing in a far from melodious baritone: ‘Roll me over … in the clover … roll me over … and do it again …’ Suddenly she caught sight of me, and pulling the scarf from her neck, she began to wave it in the air, shouting: ‘ Mr Cauldwell! Mr Cauldwell!’
I waved back.
‘How nice to see you! And how nice to see you in your clothes! You look so much better in them—like most Englishmen.’ I hoped that none of the members of the Mountaineering Club who were gathering round us would misunderstand; about Landerlöst I did not worry—somehow one never did.
‘Come along, somebody! Give Mr Cauldwell a drink!’ The mouth of one of the wicker flasks was pushed at me. I gulped and the raw ouzo burnt its way down. ‘You must join our party,’ Sophie cried out. ‘We must celebrate this medal I’ve been given.’
I looked enquiringly at Dino: and Dino nodded to me with the faintest of grimaces. ‘ Really—Frank—your friends!’ he would say to me afterwards.
We were all drunk when I at last mentioned Theo’s performance. ‘But I’d love to come! I’m mad about parties and I’m mad about music.… This wretched cook—he never hard-boils an egg properly.’ Sophie began to mop at one of her footballs. ‘Give me your handkerchief.… Yes, of course, I’ll come. I’ve heard so much about your friend. I was told that he goes to the same corsetière as myself.’
I found it easier to believe that Theo went to a corsetière than that Sophie did.
Theo was gleeful when I told him of my success. He rubbed his bony hands on each other and said: ‘Excellent, excellent, e
xcellent.’ Then he went to a cupboard and fetched down a tin of mint humbugs from which he offered me one. ‘These were a present from a young English midshipman in the year after the war. I was of some—er—use to him in Athens.’ I realised that I was being given what was in the nature of a reward.
‘We now have eleven guests in all, and I aim to get twenty. With Madame Landerlöst already in the basket it shouldn’t be hard to catch the other fish. You’re a clever boy, Frank!’ For a while he discussed how the other ‘fish’ were to be caught, and then moved on to the subject of what refreshments should be provided.
‘Götz will see to the tit-bits,’ Theo said. ‘Won’t you, Götz?’ Götz, who was busy darning one of Theo’s socks, nodded his head. Two months ago I might have suggested that perhaps a caterer would do the job better; but by now I had learned that for all his apparent clumsiness and squalor Götz was an excellent cook and ‘arranger’. ‘But what about drink?’ Theo continued. ‘In the old days I always used to give my guests champagne. But that, alas—’ he sighed—‘is now out of the question.‘
‘Lady Aaronson is strictly teetotal,’ I said.
‘But our other guests must have something to drink.’
‘Tea?’ Götz suggested. ‘Or coffee?’
‘Sophie Landerlöst will be furious if she’s brought here for a cup of tea or coffee. And so will most of the others,’ I thought; then I said: ‘ I know; you’ll have to make a Cup.’
‘A Cup?’
‘Yes, to people who don’t drink a Cup always sounds quite innocent. They think it must be made out of lemonade and a dash of cider, with some cucumber and strawberries to give it a flavour. I’m sure Lady Aaronson would approve of a Cup.’
‘Excellent idea! … I have a bottle of Cointreau I was given at Christmas, and that store-keeper from Ealing has promised me some more Naafi gin at his usual black-market price.’
Lady Aaronson was, as we had expected, the first to arrive. She was wearing a black woollen dress, with a single rope of pearls, pearl ear-studs and a gold brooch that spelled out her name: ‘ Mabel’. I remembered that the last had been given to her one Christmas by my girl cousins at an age when they did not know better. (‘Look at the jewellery,’ Theo hissed at me. ‘Perfect taste—discreet—no vulgarity.… That’s what tradition does for you English.’)
‘Am I the first? I’m afraid I’ve arrived early.’
‘On the contrary,’ Theo said. ‘The others are arriving late. It’s a bad Athenian habit.’
Mabel Aaronson was wandering round the room, examining Theo’s fantasiometric objets d’art with a mingling of astonishment and disapproval. Under her close-cropped sandy hair her face had been powdered white so that her freckles were obliterated; but her bare arms and the vee of her neck still looked as if they had been sprinkled with demerara sugar. ‘What is all this?’ she eventually enquired.
‘This is my art,’ Theo explained, hurrying up behind her. ‘I call it fantasiometry.’
‘What?’ She used to use the same tone, I remembered, when, as children, she had caught us out in some improbable flight of imagination. She was blinking her eyelashes which were coated with powder, and drawing her mouth in tight. Fortunately, at the same moment, Götz and Cecil appeared.
‘Ah, Lady Aaronson. Let me introduce two of my dearest friends to you. The Honourable Cecil Provender … and Freiherr Götz von Joachim.’ Though I had frequently had to tell Theo not to call Cecil ‘The Honourable’, this was the first time I had ever heard Götz dignified by a title. They began to shake hands.
It was obvious that even apart from his nationality (I knew that Mabel Aaronson would already be sniffing out a ‘war record’ to ‘get straight’) Götz was unlikely to make a favourable impression on someone who, all her life, had set such an importance on the governess’s virtues of cleanliness and tidiness; and it was no less obvious that Cecil, who could, when he wished, exert a wonderfully distinguished if patronising charm, would be a success.
‘I believe you know my mother,’ he started.
It was the perfect opening; for Lady Aaronson was one of those women who still think it charming when an unmarried man discusses his mother at length.
The woman whom Theo never called anything but ‘my old girl’ now came in with a plate of canapés in either shrivelled claw. She, a paralysed sister and a brother who worked at an undertaker’s all lived together in a room which Theo had given them at the back of the house, and in return she was said to help with the rough work. But since, except on those occasions when Götz went round with a mop or a broom, the house was never cleaned, it was hard to discover what duties she performed. Tonight she had been asked to act as a waitress. She smiled at Lady Aaronson and gave a little nod of her head on top of its thin, chamois-leather neck; then, having put down the two plates, she held out a hand which Lady Aaronson, somewhat startled, took in her own. Muttering something in Greek, she perched herself on the arm of the chair in which I was sitting, crossed one bony leg over the other, and gave an excellent performance of following the conversation which Cecil and Lady Aaronson now resumed between them. Sometimes she would murmur ‘Yes … yes … yes’, and the wizened little head would shake up and down.
Suddenly Theo noticed her: ‘Katina—I think you had better go and fry the Keftedes,’ he said peremptorily.
She rose to her feet, and casting a number of backward glances at Cecil and Lady Aaronson, drifted from the room.
Lady Aaronson leant forward to whisper to me: ‘Was that has wife?’
‘No, not his wife. She lives here.’
‘You mean that she’s his …?’
‘No, not even that. She’s merely helping with the waiting.’
‘How odd!’
Other guests had now begun to arrive. First there were two Australian girls about whom Theo, who always liked to spin myths about his friends, used to say that one painted with ‘an El Greco-like intensity’ and the other had ‘all the qualities of a Virginia Woolf heroine’. They were jolly, large girls who were prepared to find anything in the old world amusing or interesting, and on this occasion they were wearing gym-shoes, slacks and sweaters. ‘Quite Bohemian!’ I heard Mabel Aaronson murmur to Cecil. There followed a small, bald American who, each time he shook hands round the room, said: ‘Jake McClushen Junior of the United States Information Service. Pleased to meet you, sir’; Nadia Grecou who declared with great emphasis, ‘I know it will be a success’, as she picked out a few random chords at the piano and then seated herself in the most comfortable of the chairs where she began artfully to arrange her draperies; and a number of Embassy and British Council officials and their wives, Greek writers and painters, and members of the American Mission. Not a single composer or musician was present.
Theo, who was rapidly losing his head, all at once realised that no one had been given a drink. He rushed to Götz, and then to Cecil, and finally to me, hissing: ‘Don’t just sit there, for heaven’s sake! Do be of use!’
‘Certainly. What do you want me to do?’
But he had already shot off.
‘Frank!’ A moment later he was shouting to me across the room, an enormous earthenware pitcher held in both hands. ‘ Do come and help me! What’s the matter with you? And where’s my old girl?’
I began to take round glasses, most of which were examined dubiously by those to whom I gave them. Lady Aaronson sniffed at hers and asked: ‘What’s in here?’
‘It’s quite harmless—just a Cup,’ I said.
‘Ah, a Cup.’ She sipped. ‘H’m, it doesn’t taste too bad. Quite refreshing.… Do open a window and let out some of this disgusting cigarette smoke.’
‘I see that, like me, you don’t believe in the use of stimulants, Lady Aaronson,’ Nadia put in. ‘Just some iced water for me, Mr Cauldwell.’
The small, bald American raised his glass and said in a voice that crackled like cellophane: ‘Well, I’m sure we’d all like to drink to the success of our very good friend the Colonel’s Concer
to. When a man of over sixty—I think I am giving away no secrets there, indeed I hope I am not—can settle down to produce his first major musical work, then I think it says a lot both for his own vitality, and the vitality of his country, and indeed the vitality of the …’
His words were lost in the increasing uproar of conversation, but his mouth continued to open and shut.
After a few minutes, Theo came over: his face was red in patches, and his long, battered nose was sinning with sweat. ‘Where is your friend?’ he demanded.
‘Which friend?’
‘Madame—Madame—Whatever-she-is.’
‘How am I to know?’
‘Shall I begin?’
‘Give her five minutes.’
‘Didn’t you tell her what time she was expected?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘You ought to have told her that you’d fetch her.’
When Theo finally decided to begin the performance without Sophie Landerlöst, we had considerable difficulty in persuading the guests to sit down and stop chattering. Götz would shout ‘Silence—silence—silence, please!’; Theo would clap his large, bony hands together and thunder out chords at the piano; I myself would wander round saying apologetically: ‘I wonder if you’d mind sitting down now.’ Until, at last, only Lady Aaronson could be heard whispering to Cecil: ‘… and, do you know, until I took charge, the heads of thirty-three and a half per cent of those unfortunate children were infested with lice …’
‘The Athens Concerto,’ Theo announced. He took a handkerchief and wiped the palms of his hands; then he fiddled with the piano stool, struck a chord, and once again fiddled. ‘First Movement. Marcia alia burlesca. Constitution Square.’ Suddenly he got up, took down his beret which was hanging over a glass lustre on the mantelpiece, and put it on his head. He blew his nose noisily into a khaki handkerchief. Then he resettled himself: ‘Marcia alia burlesca,’ he said.
The door opened.
‘Are we terribly late? Goodness, how solemn we all look! … Hello, Mr Cauldwell! … You must be Colonel Grecos, aren’t you? … Why, there’s Mr McClushen—I never expected to see you here. And Dora Stratou … you must tell me all about your visit to Istanbul …’ Behind Sophie there were four pink young men, in dark blue suits and blue-and-white striped shirts, who shifted in embarrassment from one leg to another, as she ran from guest to guest. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Colonel Grecos, but I brought some friends with me. This is Mr Annestedt who is from our own Embassy—’ she pointed to one of the young men—‘and this is Bobby, who is with the Americans—and Pierre, with the French—and this—this …’—she laughed. ‘ Well, I can’t remember who and what this is. He’s English, I think.’