by Polly Samson
‘You will need every blessing if you’re planning to live like peasants,’ she says as we crowd around her in a kitchen with white walls so thick it is cool as a cave. The floor is local Dokos stone, shiny red and marbled like raw steak. There’s a single window, cut deep into the wall above a sink. From a crack between the shutters, dusty light falls to the charcoal range, copper cups, earthenware, wooden shelves. Jimmy’s eyes are shining. ‘It’s like stepping into a Bruegel,’ he says.
A lantern of wood and mesh hangs from the rafters to store food away from flies and vermin. There’s an icebox made of zinc, several ribbed stone Qupi jars for well water and a rainwater cistern to pump.
We have rotas – not that the others are any use at sticking to them. I’m the kid with time on my hands while my housemates hide behind their canvases on the terrace. The light is even more miraculous than they imagined and I’ve become as skinny and fit as a shepherd-boy from running up and down our one hundred and ninety-two steps.
I have an order with the ice man and for sweet water at the wells, a place I buy kerosene, and a man with a donkey who’ll see about our rubbish as well as another who brings sheep’s milk down from the mountain. Our mattresses are less damp now we have charcoal for the braziers and Bobby and I coped with our malfunctioning cesspit without coming to blows. Edie has singed her eyelashes on the unpredictable kerosene stove, Janey has seen a ghost in her room and is sleeping on a mattress with Bobby and Edie, in what is, of course, the best room with a view to the harbour. Jimmy and I are away from it all behind the kitchen in a cool room cut into the rock. We sleep with a sea breeze bringing the heady scent of citrus flowers through a door from the terrace. Much of our time in that rusty-sprung bed isn’t spent sleeping.
It’s Wednesday, my day to cook, and Charmian has already haggled on my behalf at the vegetable boat, picked out every bean and onion with poignant care, putting tomatoes to her face for their scent, accepting quarters of oranges from the boatmen with a childlike pleasure. Nobody speaks English. She teaches me ‘Signomi Kyrié’ and ‘Poso kani afto?’ – excuse me and how much?
In my basket are eight glossy aubergines, a vegetable I’ve never met before. Charmian has promised to teach me to make moussaka. I need to pin her down to a time, preferably when I can get her alone to talk about Mum. People keep getting in the way. When she isn’t slaving with George, or drinking with this crowd, her children devour her.
It’s noon and the foreign community gathers around her and George outside the store awaiting fortune’s sunny smile. The mail arrives on the same boat as visitors and today is just the sort of day that a cheque might choose to sail in on.
The sight of so many writers is not an enticement to join their ranks. Dishevelled and miserable are two words that spring to mind. The American novelist Gordon Merrick has come down from the hills sporting a black eye. ‘He and Chuck have a taste for young sailor boys,’ Charmian whispers. ‘Sometimes things go wrong.’ George has shredded several matchsticks and with nicotined fingers is building a little pyramid out of them on the table; the Norwegian Axel Jensen has sores on his lips and trousers worn so thin they are indecent at his splayed crotch; Patrick Greer is pointing and wagging his schoolmaster’s finger to win some point or other.
‘One of these days that finger will go off bang,’ Charmian mutters and Nancy, Patrick’s wife, a bountiful Mrs Sprat to his Jack, hears her and laughs.
Jean-Claude Maurice sits across the aisle with the sun glinting on his hair, his back to everyone but Trudy, the pretty redhead art student we met in Athens who is ever-hopeful of being reunited with her lost luggage.
Axel Jensen nervously bolts a coffee. The girl in the red shorts leans over her sketchbook, one bare foot crossed to her knee. Her hair falls in a sleek shiny curtain; her arms are slim as flutes. She’s busy ignoring everyone, shading with a pencil, another between her teeth. Axel Jensen watches her. Jimmy does too.
Cats laze on warm rocks; the harbour is flat as a mirror. The Easter bunting has been spirited away, fishing nets are laid out for mending, donkeys carry bales of dried sponges from the factory to the dock, the butcher walks past in his bloody apron. Though it has only been a fortnight since my arrival, this girl with her basket of shiny aubergines feels like she’s part of the island’s welcoming committee as the Canadian poet disembarks.
He arrives in the port unhurried in soft soles, looking around and smiling at everything he sees like someone returning home from a long journey. He looks easy in his clothes, wears a cap and sunglasses, carries a green typewriter and a smart leather suitcase, a guitar strapped to his back. Janey and Edie skip beside him, in tight pedal pushers and striped sailor shirts, clearly ecstatic to have met such an interesting new friend on the boat back from Athens.
I narrow my eyes as they dance attendance on the approaching stranger. I’ve grown possessive of the island, as bad as the oldsters out here on the cobbles, with our judgement as bitter as Nikos Katsikas’s coffee beneath its sugar.
George is pretending to take an interest in my plans, ribbing me. ‘So, what does a little Ricky of blessed Bayswater find to write about? What’s your plot?’
‘I’m thinking of a mystery story about my mother,’ I say, making sure Charmian hears.
She flashes a distracted smile my way. ‘Sounds like a winner,’ she says.
‘I mean, did she ever drive you any place in her open-top car?’
‘Shhh,’ she says, diverting our gaze with a bossy tilt of her head.
Janey and Edie lead the newcomer to our table like sirens overjoyed by a lucky catch.
Leonard is courteous, pulls off his cap. His hair is thick and wavy, his brow dark and serious. His grin is lopsided, there’s something charming in the stoop of his shoulders, a carapace of shyness perhaps, but as he says his hellos, his voice is as deep and confident as that of a village elder. Charmian welcomes him with the full force of her smile, sends Patrick scurrying to find him a chair.
Axel Jensen is standing to leave and the dark-haired girl is folding her sketchbook. Jimmy is staring so hard at her I want to kick him.
It isn’t only the newcomer’s voice that commands attention. Dark stubble and good manners make him seem older than his twenty-five years. He lights a cigarette and hands it to Charmian as you might to a long-acquainted friend, lights another for himself. He leans back and runs his hand back and forth along his chin and jaw, says his last shave had been at his digs in Hampstead. The writers pull their chairs closer when they hear that he’s a published poet. They are devils at a feast, tightening the circle as he talks of a little room where he might finish blackening the pages of a novel. ‘The materials are very beautiful, everywhere you look. Nothing insults you,’ he’s saying as Edie and Janey snake around.
‘Well, we’re not short of young writers here. This one’s little Ricky all the way from Blighty, not long out of the pram,’ George says, taking it upon himself to do the introductions, and guffawing until, judging by the look on her face, Charmian wants to kick him just as badly as I do. Leonard holds my hand as I struggle to get my voice to behave.
Edie is twined around one of the awning poles, dramatically beautiful, her singed eyelashes hidden by Jackie Kennedy-style sunglasses she went all the way to Athens to buy. I wonder why Bobby hasn’t come down from our house to meet her from the boat. It seems he’s getting moodier by the day.
Leonard keeps hold of my hand. When I meet his gaze there’s warm humour beneath those serious brows. He tells me I look like a cool kid. Janey tugs his arm.
‘Erica’s our runaway teenager, the one I was telling you about on the boat. You know, with the mysterious bequest from her mother …’ she says and Leonard nods at me and gives my hand a squeeze before returning to Charmian.
Janey looks quickly from me to Edie and Edie nods at her in vigorous assent to a question I haven’t yet understood.
‘There’s a bed at ours if you need it,’ Janey tells him and I see the swell of his Adam’s apple a
s he gulps.
Charmian flies to his rescue, batting Janey away. ‘It’s like a lunatic asylum up there, all those English kids shouting and paint everywhere. No one could possibly get anything written.’ Her chair is pulled in so close to Leonard’s that they touch.
‘You’re welcome to a very comfy divan at the top of our house,’ she says. ‘It’s just up from here, beside the Church of Saint Constantinos by the town well. Everyone knows us. Just ask for Australia House and they’ll direct you, and the weather’s warm from now on so you’ll be able to write on the terrace until we find you something of your own.’
Janey looks at him through her lashes and pouts. ‘Or you could, you know, just bunk with us …’
Janey’s little mewl is lost on Leonard. Having thanked Charmian for the lifeline, he’s asking George for directions to the house of the painter Nikos Ghikas, where he has an invitation, his only one on Hydra. Patrick summons a donkey and George walks the first few paces with him along the agora on his way to the hills above Kamini. Leonard strolls beside the donkey, does a few jaunty dance steps for those of us watching him go, a man free of a heavy load.
Charmian sighs. ‘Well, lucky him if he does get Ghikas’s house, which is quite obviously his intention,’ she says. ‘Forty rooms. The most beautiful house on the island, would you agree, George?’
George has returned to the table deep into a hangnail and doesn’t respond.
‘I’ve been as far as the door.’ Jimmy is still watching the girl in the red shorts. ‘I went up there to check out where Henry Miller wrote The Colossus of Maroussi,’ he says and I feel piqued that he’s been exploring without me.
‘Ah yes, many good writers,’ Charmian says. ‘Larry Durrell, George Seferis, Paddy Leigh Fermor, Cyril Connolly – oh, and so many painters have produced great work there too. Our good mate Sidney Nolan stayed a couple of years ago and there were many memorable gatherings. It’s a climb but so tremendously romantic.’ She gazes towards the hills. ‘The land is more fertile on that side of the island, the barley so very lovely. George and I used to go for sunset before his breathing got bad.’
Patrick pulls miserably at his beard. ‘Well, Mr Ghikas has been a little keener on aristocratic English types recently. Our Canadian friend must be well connected,’ he says.
George takes a break from gnawing at his nails. ‘We’re getting overrun with people writing bloody novels here.’
‘Yes, well, that includes us, darling.’ Charmian mimes cracking a whip at him. ‘Come on, George, back to the workstation.’
‘About the moussaka …’ I say, my hand on her arm.
‘Maybe Jimmy should learn to cook too,’ Charmian says, but Jimmy is watching something and frowning. We follow his gaze along the waterfront to the disappearing form of the girl with the red shorts as she catches up with a slow-striding Axel Jensen on the road to Mandraki.
Axel grabs the girl’s arm; she shrugs him off, turns and pushes him away. This happens again and again. By the time they round the corner he’s worn down her resistance and his hand is stuffed in the back pocket of her shorts. Charmian rolls her eyes at the others. ‘Axel’s obsessed with that girl. He’s making no secret of it.’
Nancy has her hand to her bosom. ‘Poor Marianne, I don’t know what’s going to happen when she gets back here with the baby.’
Six
I’m sure Charmian knows I have a crush on her but she always seems pleased to see me. I make myself useful with her children, set them a good example by clearing my plate or laying the table, encourage little Booli to speak a few words of English. George is occasionally less grumpy now he’s used to my face; in fact he seems to relish a new and willing ear for his stories. I have become almost as drawn to him as I am to Charmian and find myself acting a little more sparkly around him in my desperation to make him like me. His outbursts sometimes frighten me and sometimes make me laugh.
He’s at his workstation upstairs; he’s on a bit of a roll, Charmian says. She cocks her ear to the rattle and ting of his typewriter, gives a thumbs-up as I unload my basket. I’m still a bit love-struck and woozy in the afterglow of my siesta with Jimmy, my legs shaky from our exertions. I’ve left him sleeping and naked, tangled in the rags of our sheets.
Charmian takes the greasy package containing the unthinkable scrag-end of lamb she chose for me at the butcher’s, unwraps it, briskly chops it to pieces and shows me how to mince it in a machine that is bracketed to the worktop.
I turn the red wooden handle while she pours us each a glass of retsina though it isn’t much past four o’clock.
‘Oh good, I’m glad we’re alone,’ she says, propping herself at the door to the courtyard with her drink. ‘These last few nights I’ve been racked with thoughts of your lovely mum – you know when things went badly between George and me in London, Connie was always so kind … and I’ve been thinking about that friendship and her being gone and you turning up here. I mean, she wanted the world for you. There are things I should say …’ I force myself to keep turning the handle while she pauses and fiddles with her hair, twisting it and retying it with the shoelace. ‘I have to say, from what I’ve observed, that big brother of yours isn’t taking very good care of you. Do tell me not to sticky-beak, if you like …’
Come on, I think. Never mind all this, talk to me about Joel.
She shakes a cigarette from her pack, fumbles with matches. The pink worms of meat squiggle to the bowl.
She takes a deep drag and blows out the match. ‘And what about your Jimmy? Why is it always left to you to cook?’
‘Jimmy does his best work while everyone else sleeps. He’ll need more than bread and cheese—’
She interrupts me with a furious burst. ‘All I’ve seen so far is you doing all the running around while everyone else bludges,’ she says. ‘Don’t you have better things to do with your life? Look how your mother was bound and constrained. Two children, plus your dad, and that flat was more than a full-time job. And you’ve seen what it’s like for me here; I’m lucky if I make a page of my own in a week with all the things that need to be made clean before getting dirty again …’
Max the dog is on his feet, wagging his tail and scratching at the door from the street. Her tone becomes urgent.
‘Now, Erica, listen to me. What I’m trying to tell you is that if you’ve got things to do it’s better to get on with them, it’s not enough to simply enable some bloke to do his thing. Don’t let the buggers clip your wings just as you’re learning to fly.’
But now Max is leaping full pirouettes and Nancy comes charging towards us like a one-woman harvest festival, floral dress and market baskets overflowing.
Charmian grasps my arm. ‘You know, that nice young Canadian poet earlier, when he asked me if I knew of a room, a nice simple room, he said, with maybe a bed and a desk and a chair? I was jealous, so jealous that for a moment I actually hated him. Imagine what I would get done, I thought, at a table in that little white room with nothing but my typewriter for company.’
‘Imagine what you’d get done if you had a nice wife rather than that needy old bugger up there,’ says Nancy, who is wheezing and out of breath.
‘I hope you have safety pins.’ Nancy is so bursting with news her dress has come apart at the seams. ‘Oh dear Charm, I have to talk to you. I’ve just seen them ‒ Axel and that girl. Someone must write to Marianne to stop her coming back to this …’
‘Idiotic Axel.’ Charmian is pointing Nancy in the direction of the mending basket while Max rolls on his back, begging a tickle. She turns to finish making her point. ‘Erica, think. What would Connie want for you?’ She touches my cheek, makes me look at her. ‘You’re so very young to be roaming around …’
I’m overcome with that feeling again, I can smell her scent, the warmth of it, have to fight not to fall for it. I stick out my chin, point to the Rembrandt etching. ‘Is there a Joel?’
Charmian puts her palm to her forehead.
‘I’m not sure what it
is you want me to say, Erica; I mean, I have no idea.’ She changes the subject. ‘Though, you know, it would be irresponsible as Connie’s friend not to talk to you about birth control.’ A burn comes to my cheeks as across the room Nancy pulls a lobster from her basket and Charmian grabs a tin bucket and runs to the well.
Nancy follows her, the lobster held before her at arm’s length, clacking like a clockwork toy.
‘Axel says the baby’s over his croup and Marianne will be here in time for her birthday. Oh, that poor lovely girl,’ Nancy is saying as they plunge the lobster into the bucket.
‘Have you been introduced to Axel Jensen yet, Erica? You know which one he is, yes? The young Norwegian writer who lives up beyond the wells?’
I shrug. ‘I know who he is.’ If Charmian and Nancy want to gossip, I might as well hurry up with the moussaka and get back to Jimmy.
‘Axel can be very charming,’ Charmian says. ‘He’s doing well …’
‘Yes, he told me his last novel is being made into a film now,’ Nancy interrupts. Charmian nods at Nancy and continues.
‘He’s dangerous with ideas, which can make him thrilling company. But any time over the years that I’ve found myself warming to him I see these little scars he has on the back of his hand and those scars tell me more about Axel than any of the fine words coming out of his mouth. He’s lucky he didn’t sever the tendons. Mucking about with a knife like that, you know at a bar, stabberscotching it between his fingers the way tough bastards do. He was drunk and raging at poor Marianne and drove the blade clean through to the table.’ Charmian plunges an imaginary knife at her own hand. ‘Appears like he went through more than once,’ she says.
Nancy looks up with a shudder from pinning her dress back together. ‘And this thing of him buying a boat as a present to himself to celebrate the birth of his son, that tells you quite a bit about him too. What a cad.’
