‘I have told you,’ George whispered, ‘that I am not from Epirus.’
‘Oh yes, of course. Athens, then, perhaps. Here in Athens.’
‘You were only a child then.’
‘True, but children can be … encountered, surely? And subsequently recognised?’ Mitsos looked down at his glass. His headache had left him now and he felt alert, rather excessively alert, as though he needed to keep his responses in check. ‘You must have to know a good deal about our monuments and antiquities,’ he said, ‘to do your work.’
The other’s lips tightened briefly as though in scorn of this. ‘You learn as you go along,’ he said.
‘But in the winter,’ Mitsos said loudly, irrepressibly, ‘what do you do in the winter? Do you leave Athens in the winter?’
George looked at him curiously. ‘I never leave Athens,’ he whispered.
‘You are not an official guide then?’ Mitsos said, recovering his former conversational tone.
‘No. I have no friends, and those licences are coveted.’
‘That is a pity.’
George met his regard squarely, smiling a little. ‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘as you see, I live.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Mitsos smiled back. He felt a genuine happiness at being able to endorse this.
It was quite gay in the gardens as Kennedy walked towards the neoclassical facade of the Zappeion building to meet Veta. People strolled along the pavements between borders of cannas and dahlias. The orchestra was playing a familiar medley. Waiters passed frequently among the crowded tables, their white jackets gleaming in the sunlight. Altogether, Kennedy thought, a scene of some jollity. He chose a table in the shade quite close to the orchestra, which was running at that moment with spirit through the overture to William Tell, and settled down to wait.
To while away the time he took out the wallet from his inside breast pocket and began reading some of his testimonials. He had not yet been able to persuade anyone else to read them, but age and custom had not staled the pleasure they afforded him. In certain moods he could believe entirely in the Kennedy they depicted, a Kennedy of sterling qualities who could be recommended for any post to which his talents inclined him to aspire. Perhaps his favourite was that purporting to be written by the headmaster of the secondary school that Kennedy had briefly attended while he was living with a sort of uncle. This headmaster, a gaunt man whose lungs had been damaged by gas in the First World War, had caned Kennedy before the assembled school and afterwards expelled him for assaulting the music master. Now, albeit posthumously, he atoned for such barbarous behaviour, rating Kennedy second to none as athlete, scholar and natural leader. ‘He is’, Kennedy read, ‘one of the most remarkable pupils who have ever passed through my hands, equally at home in the study and on the playing-field, a thorough all-rounder.’ That caught the schoolmasterly tone exactly, he thought. God, he had been inspired when he wrote these testominials! Old Robson was dead now, of course, caught short one day while pruning his roses; his death gave an oracular force to the neat typescript; the absence of any possibility of contradiction made it into truth. Similarly with the praises of the ship’s doctor to whom Kennedy had sold a radio set belonging to his landlady, and the forthright military appraisal of the major, now drunken and of no fixed abode, who had assisted at Kennedy’s dishonourable discharge for breaking into a civilian store while absent without leave, and trafficking in stolen cigarettes. All these persons, with whom in fact relations had been less than satisfactory, now spoke for him in their several voices. He was beginning to leaf through the secondary set, testimonials written by persons who had never existed, when he saw Veta approaching. He recognised her immediately while she was still some distance away, even though this was the first time he had seen her in clothes other than her maid’s uniform. It was her walk that made her so easy to recognise, the walk of a girl who had been barefoot and carried loads: head up and shoulders back, hips moving more freely than is usual among town girls, and a kind of thrusting motion of the thighs, very beautiful to Kennedy, as though she were wading against some element slightly resistant. He folded up his testimonials methodically, put them back in the wallet, and was in the act of replacing the wallet in its usual pocket when Veta arrived at the table. Thus she was in time to see him put the wallet away, and her eyes lingered very appreciably at the spot below his tweed where it reposed, so much so in fact that Kennedy had to wait some moments before he could direct his smile at her. She was chewing, with mouth somewhat open and a regular revolving motion of the jaws, some sort of gum. Her large mild eyes moved from the area of Kennedy’s pocket to his face, the chewing stopped briefly while she returned his smile, then commenced again.
‘So there you are,’ Kennedy said, getting to his feet.
She was wearing a dress with a flowered pattern, square-cut at the neck and tight across her magnificent bosom: a dress that did not look as if it had cost much, but he knew it would be her best. He was not at all idealistic about women, or anything else; but as he stood there he was taken unawares by a confused but potent sense of her evolution, the ages and coincidences that had gone to fashion her, bestow on her that way of walking and standing, rounded breast and buttock, imparted that texture to her hair, that particular configuration of bone beneath the flesh of her face. The sense of this showed momentarily in his expression — a quality of wonder transcending admiration — for the girl herself lowered her eyes, not in coquetry but in what seemed a temporary bafflement, still, however, chewing steadily.
‘Please sit down,’ he said, recovering somewhat.
Veta did so, remarking a moment later, ‘Qu’il fait chaud,’ and agitating the front of her dress to ventilate herself, in peasant fashion.
Kennedy smiled at the gesture. He was by now in a frame of mind in which he would have accorded approval to anything she did. ‘But you must be used to the heat,’ he said.
‘In Tinos,’ she said, speaking the French very hesitantly in her deep voice, ‘We lived close to the sea. It was fresh. Here is like a furnos.’
‘We will go to the sea one of these days, shall we not?’ he said, and again he experienced that look of hers, the large eyes direct and somehow appraising, as though she was trying to gauge some meaning not immediately apparent in his words.
‘What would we do there?’ she said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we could bathe, have a picnic.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I would like … Can I have an ice-cream?’
‘Of course.’
‘A Special?’
‘Anything you want,’ Kennedy said. ‘You can have anything you want.’
She laughed a little. It was as though the inclusiveness of the promise reassured her in some way; of his eccentricity perhaps. ‘You are rich, then,’ she said. ‘A rich English.’
‘I am the sort of man,’ Kennedy said boastfully, ‘who, if he likes somebody, spares no expense.’
‘Plaît-il?’
‘I can be generous,’ Kennedy said. He raised his hand and patted the right side of his chest, where his wallet was. Generosity was specified there, of course, among his other virtues. It was a pity, he thought, that she didn’t know any English; he could have showed her his testimonials. Her eyes were regarding intently the area he had patted, only leaving it in fact when the Special arrived, a great mound of vanilla, veined with strawberry juice, bordered with marzipan, studded with pistachio and walnuts, winged with wafers.
‘My! my!’ Kennedy said, eyeing it. He looked at Veta. Her eyes were shining, as she considered the ice-cream, with a frank and childish pleasure. He had never seen her so animated. ‘Are you sure you can eat it all?’ he asked gravely.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, with complete seriousness. ‘I had one before, when I first came to Athens, and I was able to eat it all.’
‘Well, that’s a comfort,’ Kennedy said. ‘How much do they pay you at that house?’
‘They pay me three hundred drachmas,’ she said, nibbling one of her wa
fers before taking the plunge with the spoon.
‘A week?’
Again she laughed a little, at this further evidence of Kennedy’s princely scale of living. ‘A month,’ she said, rather indistinctly — she had begun now on the ice-cream.
‘Three hundred drachmas a month? But that is absolutely fantastic,’ Kennedy said. ‘It’s slavery.’
‘I have my food and bed there. I can save nearly all my money.’
‘But you must never have any fun at all,’ he said.
‘I save, every month, two hundred drachmas. With the money I buy gold pounds. Soon,’ she told him proudly, ‘I will have fifty gold pounds.’
Little by little, as the ice-cream diminished, a certain amount of information about herself was somehow conveyed, with Kennedy first prompting, then guessing in the long pauses between monosyllables. He had to work hard at it, but discovered that she was twenty years old, and had been in Athens three years now, always at the same house. She had left Tinos because her mother had died and there was nothing for her to do there, no work at least that was not rough and ultimately brutalising. Tinos was beautiful, but in Athens, as she had heard of it, there were opportunities for improvement, domestic service offered softer influences. So she had come with the grief of her mother fresh, and a very small number of possessions, and delivered herself over to the Logothetis family, who had thus secured, for something less than a pound a week, someone to fetch and carry, wait at table, do laundry and shopping. She knew no one in Athens except a few of her fellow domestics, and had no relative nearer than Tinos. She was completely alone, saving steadily at the rate of twelve shillings a week. …
‘Well,’ said Kennedy, ‘from now on you’re going to have a bit of fun.’
The orchestra was battling now with Strauss. Veta’s gum must have been stowed away in some recess while she was busy with the ice-cream, because now she recommenced chewing, with the ruminative motion, which, in conjunction with the mild steadiness of her gaze, Kennedy found quite captivating.
‘Now that you’ve met me,’ he said, ‘things are going to get a bit brighter.’ There was a little pause. ‘I am a man,’ Kennedy said, ‘who likes to spread sweetness and light.’
‘Plaît-il?’ She had not been really listening, however, he could tell. Expressions did not flit across Veta’s face, they settled and basked a while. Now there was one there he later came to know quite well, a sort of faintly luminous calculation. He gave her his broadest smile and waited.
‘Can I have another Special?’ she said.
7
On the following Tuesday, Willey and Olivia were able to meet and go out to Pendelis in the morning, to look at building sites. This was made possible because it was half-term at the Embassy School, where Olivia worked, and because Willey discovered when he went to the university to give his weekly lecture on the Victorian novelists that the students were on strike again. They went on strike every summer term, sometimes for a few days only, sometimes for the best part of the term. It was the heat, coupled with various political and economic discontents. Willey went to his usual classroom to find only two students there, playing chess. So he phoned Olivia and they met at a point near Canning Square, where the Pendelis buses left from.
Olivia was waiting for him at the bus-stop. She was dressed in a pink gingham blouse and a peasant-style skirt, black, very full, with a broad folksy pattern stitched in gold round the hem. She also carried a craft-shop bag with further Greek motifs. This was better by far than the knapsack she would sometimes bring, with the thermos-flask of tea — she was a great girl for thermos-flasks. Olivia frequently affected home-woven things, she even sometimes wore wooden beads that clicked together, and what she called chunky ear-rings. Willey suffered with her in this matter of dress, suffered with her lapses of taste and her basic, ineradicable assumption of defeat in advance. He had always thought that for Olivia dressing up to go out was less an act of vanity to ensnare the travelling eye than an act of courage to endure it. Lately, it was true, perhaps emboldened by his love, she had gone in for more sophisticated adornment, bought variously coloured headbands, grown her hair longer. Once, staggeringly, she had met him with a huge mauve artificial rose pinned to her blouse. He had complimented her quickly on this, but something must have been wrong with his tone or his glance, for she had never worn it again. In fact he was helplessly opposed to these experiments. Olivia represented for him not abundance, but a due recognition of inherent limitation. He did not want the sort of love that breeds anguish and the expectation of marvels. Olivia and he, he told himself frequently, with mingled tenderness and pain, had settled for each other; any longings on the part of either that could not be met within their relationship — and some of his own were totally inadmissible — had had to be put beyond hope. Thus he was distressed by any tendency towards expansiveness that Olivia showed, any vagaries, anything unexpected, even if this promised to prove an enrichment. He wanted her as she was, unable or unwilling to realise that she, after so many years of deprivation, of being the unattached girl, did not need commending for the qualities — camaraderie, kindness, social availability — that she had developed in self-defence, but for those more specifically feminine traits for which in the past she had had small encouragement.
Today she greeted him easily and naturally, without that strained sense of occasion that sometimes afflicted her. ‘Just in time,’ she said. ‘This bus leaves in about three minutes. Let’s get in.’
On the bus he told her about the strike. Of course,’ he said, ‘they will be used by the Opposition as evidence of popular unrest. There is no popular unrest. There are simply numerous local discontents which never combine.’
‘Why is it,’ she said, ‘that one only hears of students striking and demonstrating, never these poor labourers and people?’
He could tell by her tone that she had slipped into the rôle of female seeking guidance from male in public affairs. He said, ‘They are the only ones with the necessary irresponsibility, I suppose. Everyone else has too much to lose. The unions have no power except in collaboration with the Government.’
The bus had passed now through the nearer suburbs of Athens, and the green foothills of Pendelis were quite close, gashed white higher up with the marble quarries. In the flat land before the hills were groves of olives, small orchards of apricot and peach. The bus turned down a long straight avenue planted on either side with eucalyptus, from which other, narrower roads branched off at regular intervals. They got off at the terminus, a little square with a trellised taverna, and walked slowly up the ascending street beyond it, which at a certain distance developed into a loose-surfaced track. After some minutes they came to a narrower track, branching away from this, and they followed it, since they had not been this way before, continuing to walk towards the hills as the track narrowed into little more than a footpath, rose, then dipped abruptly, so that suddenly they were out of sight of all habitation, among pine and scrub with huge poppies flaring everywhere. Now the characteristic colours of Athens were all around them: sage and speckled grey and terracotta. Wherever the land was cut it bled sandstone red. Here and there high above them they saw through the pines more quarries, neat white scallops in the hillsides. All the land in their immediate vicinity was scheduled for building development.
‘That would be an interesting site,’ Willey said, pointing a little up the hillside at a sharply sloping area of ground flanked by large rocks. ‘You could have a splendid rock garden at the front there.’
‘Yes, John, but it doesn’t face south, I don’t think, does it?’ Olivia had two fixed ideas about the house they would have: that it should face south, and have an internal courtyard with a tiled floor, and a fountain. Willey, on the other hand, thought largely in terms of rock gardens. They both thoroughly enjoyed these inspections of the terrain, which they conducted on an average twice a month.
‘Water, that is the important thing,’ said Willey, nodding his head sagely. ‘We mustn’t forget
about the water.’
‘I can just see you,’ Olivia said, ‘in your old things, watering the garden. In your old hat.’
He glanced at her smiling, then looked away again, disturbed by the depth of love in her eyes. He knew of old this way of hers of isolating him in particular images, to stay her love on: watering the garden, marking papers by the fire, playing with the children. There was something curiously youthful, immature really, about these projections, but they served her need — since she lacked skill at expressing love directly — and she held to them with a tenacity that Willey found both moving and amusing. It occurred to him that this might be an appropriate time to tell her about Kennedy’s phone call. ‘By the way,’ he said casually, ‘you remember that fellow they sent to me a few weeks ago, Kennedy his name is, they sent him to me to be fixed up… ?’
‘Yes, I remember. They have a cheek …’
‘Yes, well, he rang me up last night at the institute. Wanted to know if I was free tomorrow evening to meet Eleni Polimenou.’
‘The actress? But I didn’t know she ever came to Greece. She lives in America.’
‘She’s in Athens now, it seems. Kennedy said on the phone that he had spoken to her about me, and she would like to meet me. I can’t imagine why. It seems he’s been helping her with some play that she’s appearing in.’
‘Goodness,’ Olivia said, ‘you are going up in the world.’
He knew, before he turned his head, what he would see on her face, that look of assumed indifference. Nevertheless his spirits sank at the sight of it.
‘You said you’d go, I suppose,’ she said.
‘Yes, I did.’ Willey tried hard to keep his voice free from asperity. This immediate unreasoning hostility to any move on his part not including her was something he found difficult to endure in Olivia. It meant, he always thought, that she must be unhappy.
‘It ought to be interesting,’ he said. ‘And, after all, it is not often one has a chance of meeting a celebrity.’
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