The Greeks Have a Word for It

by Barry Unsworth

  Kennedy found the Cultural Centre without any difficulty. It was on the far side of a hot little square with a railed garden in the middle, planted out with large purple pansies. Cars going round it took the corners almost always too fast and their tyres made tearing, ecstatic sounds. Entering, he was immediately grateful for the coolness, the subdued light. The floor of the entrance hall looked like marble, there was a large gleaming reception desk behind which sat a plump, rather pretty girl with glasses. Kennedy advanced on her with respectful eagerness, noticing, however, that her eyes were fixed on his suitcase, which he at once regretted having brought with him: it was not the suitcase of a man to whom interviews are spontaneously accorded.

  ‘I have called,’ he said, ‘to see the Director.’

  ‘Have you an appointment?’ the girl asked.

  Kennedy smiled and leaned towards her, putting both hands on the edge of the desk. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t. I’ve just arrived from England, as a matter of fact. But I’m very anxious to see him …’ He had the gift of enmeshing certain people — and not always the least discerning — instantaneously in his life, his purposes and projects. The girl looked at the curve of his mouth. Her manner lightened perceptibly. Besides, there was nothing here for her to withhold: Mr Jennings would see this man, after the statutory waiting time had elapsed; he always saw them — why, she did not know.

  ‘Mr Jennings is engaged just at present,’ she said, ‘but he will be free in a few minutes if you would like to wait.’ She indicated a row of chairs against the wall.

  Kennedy said, ‘Thank you very much, Miss… ?’

  ‘Diamantopoulou.’

  ‘Miss Diama …’ He made a comical face. ‘How was it again?’

  ‘Dia-manto-poulou.’

  Kennedy continued the comical face. ‘Thanks anyway,’ he said, and the girl laughed a little. He had found without knowing it a way of pleasing Greeks: by stressing the difficulties of their language. He went over and sat down on one of the seats, first placing the suitcase carefully against the wall. When he raised his hands to straighten his tie he saw that his fingernails were rimmed with black, and though this was their usual condition, the sight of them now caused confidence rapidly to leak away. He entered on one of his periodic moods of personal unworthiness, feeling not dishevelled, merely, but unclean. He should first have found a hotel and had a wash and brush-up, applied brisk friction to his dandruffed scalp, scaled the yellow off, untangled his armpits. Knees together on the hard little chair, perspiration cooling on his back, he glanced uneasily round the room and was soon able to blame what he saw for his condition. It was a room that undermined one, as ante-rooms do. The marble floor had a fishy gleam, the mahogany desk was too effulgent. The walls were glazed cream and bore pictures Kennedy had seen before, sailing ships at sunset and dawn, on seas resplendent or leaden. On a stand in one corner was a bowl of white and waxen lilies. The heavy swing doors shut out the noises of the square. The room in its sealed-off, menacing composure was familiar to him; he had waited in such rooms in his institutional childhood, waited for the attempt of authority to effect some inevitably painful dislocation of his personality — for this was always the purpose of such interviews, whether the voices were kindly or severe; held meanwhile in this glazed calm, knowing how far anterior to suffering it was, how impossibly far therefore from healing. … Through his heavy and uncomfortable body stirred some return of the stubborn hatreds of those days, the beginnings of hostility towards the much occupied Mr Jennings. …

  The girl looked up with a vague expression and raised her hands to her hair. The gesture thrust upward her plump breasts. Under her thin black jumper the exact location of the nipples could be easily divined. Kennedy looked at them fixedly as an antidote, an evidence of organic life. She became aware of his gaze and lowered her arms again, leaning forward slightly in self-protection. She was not, however, annoyed.

  ‘You are coming from England?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Perhaps you look for some teaching hours?’

  ‘That’s it exactly,’ Kennedy said. ‘I look for as many teaching hours as possible. How did you know?’

  ‘It is generally the reason why you come and look us up,’ the girl said, dwelling on the idiom somewhat proudly. She forbore out of kindness and the linguistic complexities involved to tell him of the long succession of derelict or eccentric Britons she had seen occupying these chairs in the two years she had been working there. She found this one rather attractive, in a dishevelled sort of way, but knew he would not get a job. None of them who came like this ever got jobs because those qualified for jobs never came like this. She did not know why Mr Jennings saw them at all.

  ‘All the posts of the institute are filled now,’ she said. ‘It is late in the year. You should come at the beginning of October. Now we have the diploma examinations only a few weeks away.’ She looked at him with a faint air of interrogation. It was an odd time to come.

  Kennedy, who had never heard of the diploma examinations, maintained his smile with an effort. ‘That’s a facer,’ he said.

  ‘Sometimes I am hearing about works, private teaching.’

  ‘Are you indeed? My name is Bryan, by the way. What’s your first name?’

  The girl’s mouth became somewhat less full at this directness. She replied, however, after a moment, ‘My name, it is Sophy.’

  ‘That is much easier to remember,’ Kennedy said, and the girl laughed again. Rapidly he began a process of calculation. He did not find her very attractive, but she seemed to like him and if what she said was true might prove a useful ally. On the whole she would be worth buying lunch for. He was about to ask her when she picked up the phone and spoke into it about him.

  ‘Mr Jennings will see you now,’ she said, looking up, a certain stateliness descending on her with the official phrasing. ‘You go up the stairs to the next floor. His door is on the right. You will see the name.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Kennedy said. He decided that he had better wait to see what emerged from the interview with Jennings; Jennings might very possibly invite him somewhere; home perhaps or to some good restaurant; a fellow countryman, just off the boat. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he said, giving her his maximum smile.

  He mounted the stairs and proceeded down a red-carpeted passage, past a door which said ‘Administrative Officer’ and another which said ‘Assistant Director’, until he found the one he wanted: ‘H. Jennings, Director’. He tapped discreetly and put his ear close to the door. Listening there he became aware of the beat of his heart. For some reason he felt sure that the ‘H’ was for Herbert.

  ‘Come in! Come in!’ said a voice of such carrying power that Kennedy recoiled a little. After a further pause to pull himself together, he entered, closing the door with some care behind him, and found himself regarding a fattish, white-faced man with prominent ears, tiny eyes behind rimless glasses, and an expression of great blandness, who was sitting at a desk similar to the one below.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ Kennedy said, with the brisk deference he had found best when selling encyclopaedias. He was somewhat disconcerted by the unathletic appearance of Jennings, having expected someone a bit bluffer, after the resonance of the voice. On the desk were papers, a bronze vase containing more of the funereal lilies, and a round papier-mâché tray with tea things and a plate of biscuits on it.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ said Jennings again. ‘Mr Kennedy, isn’t it? I am pleased to make your acquaintance. Do sit down; take a seat here.’ He articulated with a quite extraordinary, a loving, precision. The normal elisions of fluency were abandoned and each word came out separately with a little trimming of silence round it. Words thus treasured could never be lost, as other men’s were; they seemed to fall into a place prepared for them, like smooth round pebbles falling into putty. While Kennedy still hesitated he brought one bloodless hand from below the desk and indicated the chair before him with a courtly gesture.

&nbs
p; Kennedy walked to the proffered chair with a firm tread, the gait of a man who has confidence in his credentials. Looking at Jennings he became aware of a pale inquisitional gleam behind the glasses.

  ‘Now, what can I do for you, Mr Kennedy?’ Jennings said.

  ‘Well, I have just arrived from England, sir,’ Kennedy said, in his best manner. ‘And I was wondering what the opportunities for employment in your institute were.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I see.’ The Director raised his upper lip slightly in a mild snarl. ‘This is rather an unusual juncture in the academic ah, session, to be seeking a teaching post. We conduct our recruiting normally at the beginning of the year. Not the end.’

  ‘Yes, I realise that, sir, and of course I know the diploma examinations are quite close upon us now, but circumstances, family circumstances, made it impossible for me …’

  ‘You are qualified, of course?’

  ‘Yes, I think I may say that I am qualified.’ Kennedy smiled modestly.

  ‘I mean, to put it in a more precisely delineated fashion, have you a degree?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Kennedy said, without hesitation. The lie agitated him a little, but Jennings paused at this point and lifting from the tray a brown earthenware teapot poured out tea into a blue willow-pattern cup, added milk and tweezered three lumps of sugar into it.

  ‘You will excuse me, I hope,’ he enunciated, stirring. ‘This is all I take for lunch. The worst thing you can do in this country is to have a heavy lunch. It induces a feeling of somnolence, a certain disinclination. …’ He snarled again, rather hideously. His teeth looked very false.

  ‘Quite so,’ Kennedy said, his eyes on the steaming tea. ‘The cup that cheers,’ he said. Jennings made no reply to this, but continued stirring for some moments, his eyes lowered. Kennedy wrenched his gaze from the tea things and looked round the room. On the cream walls were pictures of people with complex abdominal structures inhabiting some sort of inferno, and other pictures of what looked like undergrowth, with tuberous objects tangled up in it. In one corner was a marble bust of some personage with a Balkan moustache. While Kennedy watched, a fly settled on the bald head and began to crawl diagonally across it. From the open window behind Jennings, voices came up from the square, a sudden jangle of music, and more or less continually the urgent clamour of tyres as cars went on swerving round too fast. In a bookcase against the wall were books by people he had never heard of, Eckersley, Hornby, Gaterby, Glover: Essential English for Overseas Students, Basic English for Students from Abroad, Fundamental English for Foreign Students.

  Looking back towards the desk he saw that Jennings had been following his gaze with what might have been an access of interest.

  ‘You are interested in Structures?’ Jennings said.

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘I am writing a book about it. For anyone who considers grammar carefully, Mr Kennedy, there is a way of life to be found in it. A whole philosophy.’

  Kennedy maintained a respectful silence for some moments, then he said, ‘I have some testimonials with me, if you would care to see them.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Jennings said, ‘do you adhere to the direct method in your teaching, or are you of those who believe that a certain knowledge of the students’ mother tongue is necessary?’

  ‘I’m all for the direct method, myself,’ Kennedy said promptly. ‘I think that when you come right down to it, direct methods are always best.’ In saying this he felt at least morally unassailable. They were shortbread biscuits, he noted. Jennings must have been nibbling one before he came in because there were crumbs on the lapels of his dark suit. ‘I’ve only been in the country a couple of hours,’ he said. ‘It’s a tiring journey, rather.’ He attempted a laughing tone. ‘They don’t give you much breakfast on these boats. Well, you know what these wogs are. All I had this morning was one of these cups of Turkish coffee. A couple of mouthfuls. And most of that was sediment.’ Surely now a buzzer would be pressed, an extra cup summoned.

  ‘Everything lies, of course, in the examples you choose,’ Jennings said. ‘If you had to explain the difference, let us say, between the Past Simple and Present Perfect tenses, how would you go about it?’

  You old bastard, Kennedy thought. He had started sweating again. ‘I would need notice of that question,’ he said, aiming at a jocular, parliamentary tone.

  ‘But what examples would you take?’

  Kennedy was unable to reply to this and for some time the two looked fixedly at each other across the desk.

  ‘I lived in Tibet. I have lived in Tibet,’ Jennings intoned at last. ‘The one describing an action completed in the past, the other describing an action in some way related to the present. I don’t think we can offer you a post here, Mr Kennedy.’

  Kennedy made a motion towards his wallet. ‘I have a number of testimonials with me,’ he said, ‘as to my character and so forth, which you might like to see.’ He had provided himself with a set of secondary testimonials, people who had actually known him, to whom written reference could be made, though he had calculated he would be well out of Athens before any of the replies could be received: a ship’s doctor at sea for half the year; an ex-army major now an alcoholic of no fixed address; a retired headmaster who had died of a stroke while gardening; all of them, despite delirium and even death, asserting Kennedy’s brilliant gifts. Much care and concern for the concordance of style with character had gone into these compositions, and to see Jennings greedily reading them would have given him joy.

  ‘That will not be necessary, at this stage,’ Jennings said. ‘There are at the moment, in any case, no vacancies at the institute. None whatever.’

  Kennedy met the pale eyes again. It seemed to him that their gleam had intensified. Jennings had never meant to employ him, then. Not at any time during the interview. Chatting thus with odd visitors was evidently one of his ways of passing the time. ‘I see,’ he said, and stood up.

  ‘Before you leave, call at my assistant’s office, will you?’ said Jennings, without moving. ‘His room is next to mine. He can give you a list of the commercial institutes in the city. In one or other of those you might conceivably find yourself a place.’

  ‘That is very good of you,’ Kennedy said, pausing at the door. His eyebrows felt charged with moisture. The insolence which was never far below the surface rose in him. ‘I want to thank you for your invaluable assistance and advice, old boy,’ he said loudly. ‘To a fellow countryman, just off the boat. To say nothing of the offer of refreshment,’ he added, lowering his head slightly. From this angle Jennings’ glasses reflected the light strongly. Kennedy closed the door rather sharply behind him.

  The name of the assistant director was Robinson. He was a tall, thin man with close-set brown eyes, a boyish hair-do and a watered-silk bow tie of pale blue. He had a rather spurious briskness of manner, and a way of making his face go shrewd from time to time.

  ‘You want the list then?’ he said forcefully, after Kennedy had spent some time explaining that he wanted the list. ‘Well, to put you in the picture, we don’t guarantee the quality of these places. We merely provide the information. You must bear in mind that they are all commercial institutes.’

  Kennedy nodded. He had come to the conclusion that there was nothing much to hope for from the Cultural Centre, and so was not disposed to be deferential. ‘You mean they aim to make a profit?’ he said. ‘Nothing wrong with that, is there? It’s only common sense.’

  ‘That is not how we look at it,’ Robinson said. He tapped his teeth with a pencil. ‘Do you play the English flute, by the way?’ he said.

  ‘The English flute?’

  Robinson narrowed his eyes shrewdly. ‘It is sometimes called the recorder,’ he said.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘We have musical evenings — Wednesday evenings. There is a good deal of musical ability in the British community here. The person who played the English flute has gone to Chile. We were sorry to lose him.’

  ‘Yes,�
� Kennedy said, ‘I can see he must have left a gap.’

  ‘Here you are then,’ Robinson said, handing him a typewritten list.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Have you a degree, by the way?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What class?’

  Kennedy fought briefly with temptation and won. ‘Second,’ he said.

  ‘I’m getting up a series of weekly lectures through the summer, starting next week actually. People talking on their own subjects. Greeks are invited too, anyone can come. That’s the idea really, liaison with the Greeks, cultural liaison. I regard myself as a cultural liaison officer. There is a woman coming to talk about her childhood in British India, her father dispensed justice at the gates of Jawnpore, it should be very good. Then there’s an extremely able man coming to talk about the “Harley Lyrics”. Wetherby Croft, perhaps you’ve heard of him?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We still have some vacant dates. Is there something you know a bit about, in that way?’

  ‘It is paid, I suppose?’

  ‘There is a fee, yes.’

  ‘Never do anything for nothing,’ Kennedy said. ‘I took that in with my mother’s milk.’ He thought for a moment. He could not afford to turn up any prospect of money. ‘My special subject,’ he said, ‘is modern poetry.’

  Robinson’s face went shrewd again. ‘Who would you consider,’ he said, ‘to be the most representative of modern poets?’

  ‘Well, let’s see now,’ Kennedy said, already regretting his rashness. ‘When you say representative …’ During his frequent and prolonged spells of unemployment he had read quite widely and he knew the big names. ‘There’s Auden and Eliot and Dylan Thomas,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, yes, but I was not thinking so much of that generation. Two of them are dead, and the other is an old man now with his main achievements perhaps behind him.’