The Firewalkers

by Francis King

  Götz glanced everywhere: ‘I can’t see her,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not yet twelve,’ I encouraged him. ‘Don’t be impatient.’

  ‘I do hope she’ll come.’

  Theo returned to us with a bag of chestnuts in one hand. ‘Look what I’ve found! … Eat!’ He held out the bag.

  Götz shook his head: ‘I don’t feel hungry.’

  Suddenly Kiki had run out from the shadows. In front of all of us, she was, not unnaturally, embarrassed and shy; but when she and Götz wandered off alone together, to examine the tree, they had their arms twined about each other. Theo ate another chestnut: ‘I do hope it’ll all come out all right in the end,’ he said. ‘But from a worldly point of view, Götz has so little to offer.’

  When midnight struck, Theo clapped his hands: ‘Come, we must sing Auld Lang Syne! Götz—Kiki! Come here!’ Peremptorily he gathered together all the driving couples, and making us link hands round the tree, he led us off with the first bars:

  ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot

  And never brought to mind …’

  Slowly we began to circle, Theo’s cracked, yet vigorous, baritone floating up into the clear sky until one by one we had all joined in.

  At the end Götz whispered to us: ‘Kiki says she can come. Is that all right, Theo?’

  ‘All right? Of course!’

  We got into a taxi, Theo sitting in front and the rest of us behind, and I passed the journey staring out of my window while Götz and Kiki surreptitiously pecked at each other and whispered endearments. When we reached home, Theo pushed Götz and Kiki into the sitting-room, with what seemed to me to be an unbecoming haste, and then shut the door. ‘Come with me to the kitchen, Frank. I don’t suppose they’ll stay long there,’ he added. ‘I’m so glad for dear Götz’s sake. And after all she’s not a bad-looking little slut.’

  ‘She’s not a slut, Theo. And she’s really most attractive.’

  I had seldom seen Theo more sprightly and gleeful. He tiptoed, beckoning me after him, down the passage that led to his kitchen and then stamped out wildly at the cockroaches which scuttled away across the stone floor as he turned on the light. Everywhere dirty crockery and cutlery was piled in heaps, and a lean cat was wriggling between mountains of plates which it threatened, at any moment, to send crashing from the table.

  ‘Pssst!’ Theo hissed and the cat bounced to the floor. ‘It’s not always like this. But my old girl is away for Christmas, and Götz has been so distracted these last few days that he has quite neglected the house.’

  He picked up a fork and went over to the vast iron range on which a saucepan was spluttering and sizzling.

  ‘What are you cooking?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s my surprise. Götz knows nothing about it.’

  He took off the lid of the saucepan which was so hot that he dropped it to the floor with a curse and a loud clatter, and then began to fish inside with the fork. Finally he raised a khaki-coloured object.

  ‘There!’ he said. ‘I made it myself.’

  ‘But what is it?’

  ‘A Christmas pudding of course. It’s going to be excellent. It may not look very professional,’ he added, ‘but that’s because I had to wrap it up in one of my handkerchiefs. I can promise you that it’ll taste good. Just unwrap it for me, there’s a good boy, and I’ll go and warn Götz that we shall be interrupting him for five minutes.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he rather be left alone?’

  ‘He’s got the whole night,’ Theo said sharply.

  When he returned he was giggling joyfully: ‘ Would you believe it? Quick work! They’re already in bed.’ He took down a bottle of brandy from a shelf on which there also rested a pair of old shoes, the broken half of a plate, a mug from the Coronation of George VI, and three soiled stiff collars. ‘ Well, I’m very glad for Götz’s sake,’ he repeated. ‘That boy needs a break.’ Liberally, he began to splash the cognac over the pudding. Then he ran out into the hall and broke a sprig of holly off the dusty branch which hung from the electric light.

  ‘I only hope I can find some clean plates … Ah well, we shall have to use these saucers. Now get the bottle of champagne out of the ice-box.… No, that’s not the ice-box—that’s the coal-box. The other one! Good boy!’

  Gradually everything was assembled on the tray.

  ‘Now you go ahead of me and open the door. They’re in Götz’s room. But first put a light to the pudding.’

  Götz and Kiki lay, with an extraordinary smiling unself-consciousness, side by side on the high iron bedstead. The room was in darkness, as Theo and I entered, and we could see each other only by the blue-green flames that lapped round the pudding. Theo was singing: ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen …’ as he marched in ceremoniously and placed the tray on the foot of the bed. Kiki had drawn the sheet up over one shoulder, but the other was bare and glimmered in the reflection of the flames at which we were all staring. Her black hair was loose and fell all about her.

  ‘Put on the lamp,’ Theo said to me, as the flames began to die, ‘but cover it with this scarf of mine.’ He unknotted his scarf.

  ‘So, a Happy Christmas, children!’ Solemnly he went to the bed and kissed first Kiki and then Götz on the forehead. He came to me: ‘Will you be outraged if I kiss you too?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  He kissed me. ‘I don’t know why, I feel extraordinarily happy.’

  ‘So do we all,’ I said.

  Chapter Eleven

  IT was some consolation that Theo died with so little pain and fuss: between the stroke that, on New Year’s Day, deprived him of the use of his right arm and the second stroke that killed him, less than a week passed. Curiously, even after the first mild stroke, he seemed to guess he would not recover.

  We had wanted to send him to a hospital, but he had protested: ‘No, no, let me stay here! If I’m going to die, it must be in my own bed. And you and Götz look after me so well. I should hate to be pawed about by a lot of strange women. But perhaps I’m being an awful nuisance to you both?’ he asked with the pathetic consideration which from the first moment of his illness he had never ceased to show us. ‘Am I?’

  ‘No, of course not, Theo,’ we both protested.

  Götz, having trained in a hospital, took on himself most of the actual nursing and it was left to me either to sit with Theo and read to him or to go out on errands for medicine and food. Theo’s choice of book was curious: that Victorian classic Misunderstood. I, myself, found it nauseating in its sentimentality, but Theo would sigh and exclaim: ‘Beautiful … beautiful … beautiful … Oh, Frank, if you knew how I wept over those pages when I was thirteen! How I wept!’ And even now the tears would form in the corners of his eyes.

  When I was not reading, he would wish to talk: sometimes about his childhood, sometimes about his exploits in the Air Force, sometimes about Nadia, but most often about poor Götz. What was to become of him? he would ask me. If only he had something to leave the boy! Of course he would get the house and all that was in it, but how would he keep it up? ‘I have no money to leave him … Oh, how terrible it is to think of the thousands that I squandered! Terrible!’ And he would shift restlessly from side to side, dragging the bedclothes with him.

  Perhaps Götz could turn the house into a private hotel, Theo suggested one morning: it was obvious that he had been occupied with this idea for most of a sleepless night, for he now began to go into the most minute of details—what rent he should charge; the sort of clients he should aim to attract (‘nothing smart, of course, but nothing Bohemian’); the alterations that would have to be made. ‘But, Theo, do please stop worrying about all this until you are well. Götz will be all right.’

  ‘I never wanted to leave him high and dry. But what can I do? My pension stops with me.’ On and on he would pursue the same subject until I suggested that I should begin to read again.

  He seemed to be curiously indifferent to dying; he even talked about it with a melancholy resignati
on: ‘I’ve no real regrets at going,’ he murmured with that thickening of his speech that I had found the most upsetting feature of his stroke. ‘ I shall be sorry not to see my friends, and I should like to have gone back to Corfu once more. Yes, I would like to have seen Pelakas—my village—for another spring. Well, dis aliter visum.’ He sighed. ‘I used to fear death so much; even up to six months ago. And now—I couldn’t care less, to use that vulgar modern English phrase.’ He smiled: ‘I think I can say I’ve been happy; yes, I think I can say that. It only needs courage—and faith. Faith, above all. You remember the firewalking—the firewalking, Frank?’ I nodded and said yes. ‘Well, for someone like myself—someone so different—life is like that firewalking. If one has absolute faith in one’s own rightness and the wrongness of the world—as those firewalkers do—then one can get across without being burned. But if one lacks that absolute faith then, like poor Götz that day at Langada, one suffers—one suffers so much! … Well, thank God, I’ve had that faith: I’ve managed to get across with no more than a minor blister or two.’

  After I had read to him the penultimate chapter of Misunderstood, he again began to talk. He was mumbling and I had to stoop down to hear what he was saying. ‘I should like to be remembered for something,’ he was saying. ‘For my dress designing or my music or my fantasiometry or something—anything.’

  ‘Your friends will remember you.’

  ‘Ah, my friends!’ He gave a brief smile which it was impossible to interpret: did it dismiss them, as of really no account, or did it acquiesce in the view that, in the end, one’s friends were all that mattered? ‘ Yes, I suppose you will all remember me. But I should have liked something more permanent—I’m afraid that is vain of me, isn’t it?’

  ‘When we knew that he was dying in a matter of a few hours, Götz refused ever to leave his bedside. Theo would feel for his hand, and sometimes murmur his name, ‘ Götz’emerging as a curious swallowed croak at the back of the old man’s throat. Sometimes Theo would struggle to say something more, but was unable to do so, until, a short time before he passed into unconsciousness, he rallied himself enough to get out: ‘ Götz … this girl … don’t… don’t … be … miserable … about her … Not … worth … it … George … the … pastrycook …’

  They were the last words he spoke.

  Chapter Twelve

  I HAVE just been staying with Götz and Kiki in the flat which the Americans have put at their disposal while the excavations are completed and the museum is built. Götz only disposed of the site on the condition that he should be made curator in perpetuity.

  Physically, he has changed little, in spite of his marriage: he still gnaws his fingers, his shirt still tends to hang out behind, and his hair still falls in a tangled, platinum fringe across his wide forehead. Kiki herself is already fattening and coarsening. She has lost that pertness which was once her chief attraction, and now seems to face life with a ruminative somnolence which might seem to justify Cecil in always referring to her as ‘ the Cow’. There were few of Theo’s possessions that she wanted for their home and most of them have now passed into the more appreciative hands of his friends (at the back of my kitchen cupboard in Kensington the phallus rests under an upturned paper bag, and the front door of Cecil’s Settignano villa is guarded by a Greek military policeman on whose bare thighs the hairs are like the prickles on a cactus).

  Götz himself is, I think, sometimes troubled in his conscience. Last night, after Kiki had gone to bed, we found ourselves talking about Theo, and suddenly he asked me: ‘ Tell me, Frank, do you think it was very wrong of me to agree to having the house pulled down?’

  ‘If it hadn’t been pulled down, this temple of Hera would never have been discovered.’

  ‘But that’s not the point,’ he said; and I, of course, had known that it was not the point. ‘You see, I didn’t know about the temple, did I? When I agreed, it was in order that Dino’s brother could put up a block of flats.… And after all,’ he added, ‘Theo had struggled along all those years on nothing but his pension in order to prevent just that happening.’

  ‘Well, it’s turned out all right,’ I tried to soothe him.

  ‘But what could I do? I had nothing to offer Kiki, and quite rightly her father wouldn’t hear of her marrying me until I was financially secure.… And she, of course, couldn’t understand why, if I had the house, I wouldn’t agree to sell it.…’ He sighed. ‘It was very difficult.’

  ‘A pity that the temple had to be to Hera,’ I remarked flippantly. ‘Not a goddess with whom Theo would have had much sympathy, I feel.’

  Götz shook his head moodily: ‘I feel I’ve done wrong. I ought never to have done it.’

  ‘But think of the discovery! There’s been nothing like it in Greece since the time of Schliemann.’

  But I had said this only to encourage him, and at heart I knew, as he did, that Theo would never have approved. I was remembering our old friend’s contemptuous fury against the American excavations when we had taken Mabel Aaronson on a tour of the Agora: ‘Philistines!’ he had hissed. ‘If you knew what beautiful old houses had covered this whole slope. All pulled down for the sake of a few battered columns and a potsherd or two!’

  Was it possible to conceive that he would have considered the destruction of his own house any more justified?

  ‘I’m insisting, of course, that the Museum should be called ‘‘The Grecos Museum’’. He’d like that, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he’d like to be remembered—he always wanted that.’

  There was a sad irony, I thought, in Theo’s name being perpetuated in this posthumous fashion, after all his abortive strivings after fame—as a dress designer, as a composer, as the only fantasiometrist in the world—while he still lived.

  Suddenly I looked across at Götz, slumped conscience-stricken and moody in the hideous chair opposite me.

  ‘Götz, you are happy?’ I asked on an impulse.

  ‘Very, very happy.’ He said the words with an emphasis that left not a vestige of

  doubt.

  ‘Then that seems to me to be a complete justification. Theo

  would never want more.’

  Götz hesitated, gnawing at a knuckle, until: ‘He was fond of me,

  I think—don’t you?’ he at last got out, slowly and tentatively.

  ‘Yes, he was fond of you.’

  That it should be necessary for him to seek this confirmation

  seemed to me the saddest irony of all.

  Copyright

  First published in 1956 by John Murray

  This edition published 2013 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.co.uk/bello

  ISBN 978-1-4472-5838-4 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-5837-7 POD

  Copyright © Francis King, 1956

  The right of Francis King to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material

  reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher

  will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

  make available this publication ( or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

  (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

  without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does

  any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to

  criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The Macmillan Group has no responsibi
lity for the information provided by

  any author websites whose address you obtain from this book (‘author websites’).

  The inclusion of author website addresses in this book does not constitute

  an endorsement by or association with us of such sites or the content,

  products, advertising or other materials presented on such sites.

  This book remains true to the original in every way. Some aspects may appear

  out-of-date to modern-day readers. Bello makes no apology for this, as to retrospectively

  change any content would be anachronistic and undermine the authenticity of the original.

  Bello has no responsibility for the content of the material in this book. The opinions

  expressed are those of the author and do not constitute an endorsement by,

  or association with, us of the characterization and content.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books

  and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and

  news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters

  so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.