‘Mr Simpson is an artist,’ Roland said, speaking for the first time. ‘Our rooms are just over the way. We heard you being shown the room. We thought we’d come over and see you had everything you wanted.’ His face creased in an anxious conciliatory smile. ‘Mr Simpson has been drinking a little,’ he said. ‘He has had a certain amount of disappointment.’ He drew confidentially nearer, emanating a faint smell of hair oil. ‘I’ve been here longer than anyone else,’ he said. ‘I’m the oldest resident.’
‘The person who had this room before me …’ Kennedy said. ‘Why was he kicked out?’
‘Nobody knows,’ Roland said, looking uncomfortable.
Simpson sat down heavily on one of the two hard-backed chairs that together with a chest of drawers and the bed was all the furniture there was in the room. He crossed his legs and Kennedy saw that he was wearing the sort of shoes that basket-ball players wear, and no socks. The sole of the right one had a hole right through it and a neat circle of Simpson’s skin was revealed.
‘How did you get on today, Kenneth?’ Roland said suddenly, in a sociable manner, as though encouraging a diffident guest. ‘How did you get on down at Piraeus?’
Simpson adopted a look of sagacity. ‘They all know me,’ he said. ‘All the officials down there. I go every day. You have to keep at them if you want results. I go down there … “My easel, where’s my bloody easel, for Christ’s sake?” “Ah, Ken, hello Ken, ti canis? Have something to drink? Vino, Birra? Cognac. Americano, eh?”’ Simpson paused, waving his arms about to indicate the friendliness of the officials at Piraeus. His face, which was extraordinarily mobile, had veered from his own initial sternness in demanding his easel, to wavering, pleased surprise at such a welcome, and then to the rather frantic Greek bonhomie of the officials themselves. ‘I go down there …’ he said. ‘ “Ah! Artist Americano. No money … do not speak of money, what you take, birra Fixe, ouzo, cognac? Cognac …”’ Simpson stopped talking altogether to mime with a dazed delighted smile the courtly behaviour of the dock officials, pouring out cognac, savouring the drink, setting the glass down. It was as though he had forgotten the verbal equivalents for all these actions. Abruptly his expression changed, became angrier. ‘I have filled in the forms,’ he said. ‘That easel was made for me. I couldn’t put a value on that easel. Ten thousand drachmas.’
‘His easel,’ Roland said, ‘which has special fittings, made to his own specification, and is therefore much more valuable than an ordinary easel, has been mislaid, I trust temporarily, by the railway authorities somewhere in Germany. He has made a claim for compensation from the German authorities through the Greek authorities, but it seems to be taking a long time to come through. Every day he goes down there.’
‘It’s those bastards in Germany,’ Simpson said. They are keeping it on purpose. Someone has seen how much that easel is worth. That’s what they say down at Piraeus. “Americano good. Deutsch …”’ He made a face of disgusted antipathy. ‘ “You have drink with us; down with those fucking Germans! Those fucking Germans have stolen, yes stolen, your easel! Cognac.”’ He went through the mime of pouring out again. ‘By God!’ he said. His eyes had an unusual opacity, a kind of grey film covering a large part of the iris, and the lashes remained quite stiffly apart for long periods.
‘What I am afraid of,’ Roland said to Kennedy in low tones, ‘is that with all this delay Kenneth may lose his sense of purpose, the issues may become obscured.’
‘They sound to me pretty fogged already,’ Kennedy said. ‘I had a nap in the National Park this afternoon and when I woke up I saw hundreds of girls marching down the avenue, all in these white blouses.’
‘Bribes, they take bribes,’ Simpson said. ‘They all know me. “Ah, Americano, what you take? Birrz, ouzo? Cognac.”’ He enacted polite reluctance, shrugging assent. ‘I got a hollow leg for the stuff,’ he said.
‘Think of all the expense,’ Roland said.
‘A sort of parade it must have been,’ Kennedy said. ‘This afternoon about four o’clock. Greek schoolgirls, hundreds of them, marching down that avenue past the park, what do you call it, Amalias? What would it be for?’
‘No idea,’ Roland said. ‘They have parades quite frequently. For birthdays, and Independence Day, and the day they said no to the Italians.’
‘I’d like to think that this was the day all those girls were saying yes to someone. About fifteen they were. Marching along, swinging their arms, carrying all before them, as you might say. I swear to you, I have never seen so many lovely tits assembled together in one place. And they kept on coming. It was torture to watch them. English girls could never have put on a show like that, not at that age.’
Simpson emerged from his preoccupation with the easel. ‘It’s the olive oil,’ he said. ‘It goes to the breasts. They take olive oil with everything. Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? I mean, think of all that oil. Bad for the skin of course, but bloody marvellous for the breasts, nourishing, fills ’em out. See the way their hair shines? Same thing, it’s all the work of the olive.’
‘I wonder if it lubricates their passages,’ Kennedy said, leering at Roland.
‘I don’t know, I’m sure.’ Roland wriggled a little. His face had gone quite red.
‘Well,’ said Kennedy, ‘let’s go out and have a drink. On me.’
When his lessons for the evening were over, Willey decided to take a walk before going to see Olivia at her flat. The meeting with Kennedy, something in the other’s breezy disrespect, had unsettled him. Removing the scraps from his hair, Kennedy had somehow managed to suggest a larger life. Not a trustworthy person, however, he decided.
There was a scent of orange blossom in Kolonaki Square, though the flowers were mostly hidden in their clusters of sharp leaves; and below this immediate sweetness Willey sensed the harsher odour of the city compounded of dust and lime and cooling masonry. He crossed the square and began to walk along Scoufa Street. The buildings became shabbier as Kolonaki was left behind. At the intersection of the street with Hippocratous, in the arcade of some Ministry buildings, a young blind man was sitting on a low stool, singing and accompanying himself on an accordion. Willey stopped to listen. The voice was thin, whining, and somehow cruel too, beneath the complaint. The long quavering cadences were broken by snarling quarter-tones during which the singer raised his head with its fixed cataracted eyes and bared his teeth at the crowd. Willey was impressed by a quality of vulnerable savagery in the performance, like that of a maimed animal, reinforced by the violent but immediately checked movements of the arms expanding or contracting the accordion. It was apparently a love song he was singing. By listening intently Willey was able to make out some of the words.
The bird of love is caged in my heart, I cannot free him. The night, which should bring my joy, takes my love away from me.’
The singer inclined his head, snarling softly. The song came to an end. Several coins clattered into the tin box on the pavement. Willey put in a drachma and began to make his way slowly back towards the square. He had only gone a few yards when the singer commenced again and the song followed him down the street as though there was something still that he had forgotten to do.
Wisteria was out on the walls of the Turkish Embassy, and a little below this, at the side of the steps, a mimosa tree was covered with yellow balls of flower. From the open doors of a taverna further down the street came the smell of lemons and retsina and burning charcoal. Willey went up the steps a little way, past the Embassy. He climbed until he could see over the white blocks of apartment houses to the Acropolis and the pale sea beyond. To the south was the long, intensely human line of Hymettos, violet along the crest; so great was the clarity of the light that the mountain seemed to take its rise from just beyond the square he had left. In his mind he could see its subsequent slow tilt to the sea, the ochreous knuckles of the foothills dipping at last into the glittering waveless water at Kavouri.
Willey stood looking. He loved this time of evening in
Athens, the spent, faintly luminous pallor of buildings and pavements, the purity of the sky, the pause before night came. Below him the thin leaves of the mimosa stirred briefly. Suddenly he was filled by a feeling of loneliness and deprivation and by a sort of aching, objectless tenderness. Margaret’s face came quite unexpectedly into his mind, her face framed by the school hat, sullen, not fully awake, as she said the rehearsed things: the facts arrayed exactly in narrative form, so that no real truth could strain through them, the terrible instilled resentment. Yes, on the evening of June the 8th it began, at his lodgings, I went there to get help with a lesson. … Those June evenings were cool, showering, sharp with the smell of privet and lawn from the little garden below his room, shrill with the voices of disputing children. And she had been different, in a way her flat young voice could not indicate, a different person, away from her companions; not school uniform now but in a tightly fitting skirt and a blouse partially transparent so that the skin of her shoulders glowed beneath it. Why she should have decided to come to his lodging in this way he did not know — she had never shown much interest or attention during his lessons. She was wearing nylon stockings and he remembered the faint rasp of the nylon caused by the friction of the insides of her thighs as she shifted on the sofa beside him. She had shifted continually all the time he was attempting to explain the lesson. This in fact was what he chiefly remembered of that evening, the terrible restlessness of her body which no résumé of the facts could reveal; the carelessness of her legs which he had known at last was deliberate. Only when, hardly able to see, the blood beating in his temples, he had reached and laid his hand on her, only then had her body become still, stilled instantly as though by a blow. … Yes, always during the summer term, on several occasions, I can’t remember exactly, ten or twelve times … A pupil of yours too, fifteen years of age, no isolated instance but what I can only call … No alternative but to … No possibility of a testimonial, of course, lucky to have escaped a prosecution. If you will take my advice … No thank you.
He walked slowly back down the steps. He had not thought of Margaret for quite a long time. One day he would forget her completely. … This prefigured forgetfulness appalled him suddenly as he went on, like an intimation of his death — only the dead do not bleed any more. … He emerged finally on Queen Sofia Avenue, quite close to Constitution Square. He crossed the avenue and walked past the row of little flower stalls that lie side by side against the outside wall of the Old Palace. Acting on impulse he stopped before one of these, still without definite intention, and the proprietor rose from his chair on the pavement and approached him, smiling, establishing already a shared admiration for the flowers. He was an old man and looked ill. ‘Oriste,’ he said, and Willey’s heart contracted at the brave attempt at blandishment, the word of welcome from the lined, pale face, pale with an indoors pallor, the pallor of hours spent behind the glass of greenhouses, coaxing blooms out of season, in foetid atmospheres. Great trays of gardenias were displayed on the stall, the blanched flowers closed for evening, and a bank of sharply budded roses, and sprays of mimosa. He stood before the flowers bewildered, helpless, caught in odours and colours as in a net. ‘Oriste,’ the old man said again. He must buy some flowers, of course; that, surely, was why he had stopped here. Too expensive, the gardenias and roses. Easter lilies stood in vases, but these were too ceremonial, too austere. His mind flinched from the delicate mimosa. He chose finally tulips, a dozen yellow tulips. The old man nodded, approving his choice. ‘Malista, malista,’ he said, the flowers vivid beneath his seamed face.
‘How much?’ said Willey, resigning himself to the haggling that must take place in Athens before any purchase could be made. For such beautiful flowers, personally grown, and as he could see quite fresh, sixteen drachmas. Twelve they agreed on finally, and the old man tied the stalks with twine and wrapped the bunch in silver paper.
Holding the flowers loosely, Willey went back along the avenue towards Kolonaki. Olivia lived just beyond the square on the ground floor of a three-storey family house. In the small garden of the house opposite there was a fig-tree in leaf now, the bright green buds unfurling into fans, the unripe fruit much darker, dusty-looking. He rang the bell and almost immediately Olivia opened the door, swinging it wide open with a gesture of exuberant welcome he knew so well.
‘You wretch, you said you’d be here at half past seven and it’s nearly …’ Her eyes widened when she saw the flowers. Backing into the room she slithered a little on the mat. Oops!’ she said.
‘I have brought you some tulips,’ Willey said. In the living-room he began to untie them, clumsily. He handled the twine too roughly, cutting some of the stems, and sap came out on his hands.
‘I’ll find a vase for them,’ Olivia said, disappearing into the kitchen.
The flowers had an intense, an almost incandescent, yellowness in the dim, cluttered room. Fumbling with them, standing there on the figured carpet, among the carefully arranged objects, he thought how strange it was he should be doing this, standing here, making this particular series of gestures. The flowers would provide Olivia with an image of herself that had nothing, perhaps, to do with his intention, and that was already beyond his power to amend. There was nothing, therefore, but to accept it as true. Ceaseless, he thought, the human need to shape experience, render motives acceptable. We are all artists in this respect, chipping away at life with our furtive little chisels. Why he had bought the flowers, for whom he had bought them, would never now be established. He had brought them, however, to Olivia. They were a correlative to his pain on the steps just now, with which she had really nothing to do; bridging, then, past and present, flowers for the dead and for the living.
‘I don’t think you’ve ever bought flowers for me before,’ she said, returning with a glass jug. She turned on him a face bright with pleasure, and he was bewildered again by the enormous difference between the complexity of his purchase and the simplicity for her of the token. He smiled, nevertheless, affectionately at her.
‘I think tulips are your sort of flower,’ he said, and realised that this was true in a way; they were orderly flowers, not fussed with leaves, having deep colours without much gradation.
Olivia put the flowers into the jug and set it in the middle of the living-room table. ‘They look nice there,’ she said. She came to him awkwardly and kissed him on the mouth. He put his arms around her, feeling comforted by the familiar angularity of her body. She was a little taller than he was, and seemed always to bestow, in their embraces, more assurance than she received. After some moments she drew away and he saw that she had made a sort of recovery.
‘Absolutely divine,’ she said, in her rapid, rather gobbling voice. ‘Where did you get them? I haven’t seen any tulips about, have you your own sources of supply? Speak, unfold your secret.’
‘Aha!’ Willey said. He gave a twist to an imaginary moustache. ‘Question me not, proud beauty,’ he said.
They smiled at each other, both grateful that the situation had become thus facetious and manageable. Later she brought out the supper that had been waiting for him, and they ate it together: chicken and rice with cabbage salad, followed by American coffee, an extravagance this last.
Willey took off his jacket and lit a cigarette. ‘Another homeless Briton dumped on me this evening,’ he said.
‘Oh Gawd,’ Olivia said. ‘Not another.’ She was engaged in knitting him, very slowly, a canary-yellow pullover.
‘I rather liked this one, though.’ He told her about Kennedy. ‘Not a usual type,’ he said. ‘Not a professional teacher at all, by the look of him. There’s a sort of unauthentic heartiness about him, rather untrustworthy, really. I couldn’t quite make him out.’
‘It’s all very well,’ Olivia said. ‘But you are always being used in one way or another by these people. It’s a case of the willing donkey. I think you ought to protest.’
‘I can’t protest too much, you know that.’ He had told Olivia early in their acqua
intance about the circumstances in which he had left England. She had never directly referred to it since.
She said, ‘I just hate to see you being used like this, you are so much better than any of them. Look at that appalling book of Jennings that you had to wade through.’
‘Yes,’ Willey said. ‘Yes, I know.’ He was silent for some moments. ‘If only they would offer me a permanent post,’ he said. ‘A proper contract. I’ve been on the locally employed staff now for four years, longer than anyone else. My results in the examinations are always good.’
‘They will, this year,’ Olivia said. ‘They’re bound to. You are miles better than any of the other teachers there, and they must know it. They’re not such fools as that.’
He looked at her in silence. Her loyalty touched him as always, but it was too constant a response to be in the present circumstances very reassuring. They were not such fools, it was true; but, of course, he was useful to them as he was. He had been for ten years at that one school in England, almost his whole teaching career. Ten years unaccounted for would have been far too suspicious a circumstance, so he had had to give the name of the school to Jennings, who offered him after some days the temporary post. But he must have referred to the school. A special knowledge informed every glance Jennings gave him, every bit of hack work he was asked so politely to do.
‘If only they would,’ he said. There was a vacancy, he knew, to be filled from the locally employed staff. What a difference it would make. It would mean that he could no longer be dismissed in any arbitrary, local fashion, for a start; no more scrambling for teaching hours, courting the secretaries to put in a good word for him; no more worries in the long summer holiday. It would be a salary they both could live on. There was not much time. Olivia was thirty-six and she wanted children.
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