by Polly Samson
He helps himself to the contents of my wine glass. ‘However, it’s not that bloody book that’s chewing at my guts today, it’s my last one.’ He pulls the letter from his pocket. It might be a death warrant, the way he stares at it. ‘Notes back from the editor. Last chance to make any changes before they print.’ He looks at Charmian, and pushes the letter towards her. ‘They’re happy to publish the novel as it is,’ he says and I can’t be certain that he isn’t smirking as he scrapes back his chair.
Charmian’s cheeks redden. She raises and puts down her knife. Her voice trembles. ‘Oh, how I wish Billy Collins had never sent you that five hundred pounds.’
She ignores the letter, seizes George’s barely touched artichoke and tears away the leaves.
‘We’d have sunk without it,’ George mutters and, pretending to bow to me, stumbles back to work, taking the wine jug and all of the joy of the day with him.
Charmian snatches up the letter, ‘George is pissed off because he drank too much booze last night,’ and puts it unread into her pocket. ‘And he’s in a strop because of all the people coming for dinner. He’s becoming a very unsociable version of himself.’ She sweeps crumbs from the table into the cup of her hand. ‘I keep telling myself it’s his illness.’
I stand at the sink rinsing plates. ‘What is the book you were talking about?’ I just can’t seem to stop poking around in her anguish.
She sighs deeply. ‘It’s a novel called Closer to the Sun.’ Her voice is dull, monotone. ‘It’s a sort of morality tale about rich people on yachts and a bunch of creative bods who arrive on Hydra and the impact they have on the locals.’
She’s fumbling for a cigarette but I can’t let her be. I’m surprised to find myself baiting her. A mosquito after all. ‘Is it based on something that really happened?’
She lights her cigarette and takes it to the courtyard door. ‘Oh Erica, why do you have to ask so many questions?’ she says and stands smoking and looking out like she’s seeking an antidote. Her eyes fall on some jasmine and she buries her face in it, pinches off a sprig and puts it through the buttonhole of her shirt. A bird in a cage on her neighbour’s balcony is singing its heart out. Gulls glint in the sky. She’s much calmer when she turns back to me.
‘Buried within this novel of his is a rather humiliating story based around a version of something that happened here. Something that makes me want to die with regret. The trouble is the publisher has already paid for it and we’ve no hope of paying him back because every penny of it went on life-saving treatment in the hospital for George. So there it is. I’ll tell you more about it another time, if you insist. But don’t you think it’s a rather gloomy thing to discuss on this beautiful day?’
I feel guilty for goading her throughout the long silence that follows. I try to make it better by chirping about Axel putting very intimate things about Marianne in his novel. ‘She seems fine with it, to be honest,’ I say, partly because I can’t imagine myself not being thrilled if Jimmy wrote about me.
At the mention of Marianne, Charmian stubs out her cigarette, and I follow her upstairs to Booli’s room, stand in the doorway while she ransacks some baskets for baby clothes. The sight of Booli’s old things softens her until she has to use a romper suit to wipe her eyes.
We kneel together to sort through them. ‘For reasons we don’t need to expand on here, I’m dreading an enormous fuss on the island when certain people get their hands on George’s novel, and that could be so terribly embarrassing for the kids,’ she says with the rompers pressed to her cheek. ‘If we weren’t so broke maybe we could spare the time to rewrite it in some way. It’s the first time George has put a version of us into something. By which I mean that we’re recognisably us but twisted to fit his narrative and that is a tremendous problem for me. And for the children …’
I wish I had a way to comfort her. She gets back to the smoothing and folding, gives herself a shake. ‘He wasn’t very well when he wrote it. Tortured, really. But who knows? All that pain and injured manhood on the page. Maybe it’s the best thing he’s ever written.’ And she looks up and gives me her saddest smile.
We tie the softly worn baby things into bundles with some ribbons she finds in her workbasket. She fastens a blue bow around a pile of nappies that are so thin they’re threadbare in places. I curse myself for being an annoying mosquito, uncertain she really wants me to accompany her to Marianne’s.
We have the clothes in two baskets and while we climb Kala Pigadia Charmian talks about her irritation with drifters and I can’t help wondering if she’s having a dig at me. As though reading my mind she turns and shakes her head.
‘I’m talking about all the poste-restante drongos who drop in and move on, people like Charlie who pretends to be an African chief and wears that silly loincloth over his jeans, or that wretched Patricia drifting through Europe, sitting on the kerb looking so very appealing with her paints in her lap and causing bloody havoc.’ The marble slabs are warm beneath our bare feet, worn smooth by the winter rains. ‘They keep coming,’ she says. ‘All with their pocketbooks of names who might be relied on for a meal or a bed in Ibiza, Paris, Venice, Tangier, Corsica or Casablanca. Passed from one to another. Star-rated, can you believe? Charlie wasn’t even shame-faced showing me. I was mortified to see that we only merited four bloody stars.’
Close to the sweet wells, the foliage becomes richer, the trees big enough to spread shade and share fruit, noisy with birds. The stray cats look less mangy than on other parts of the island. Charmian points out the mayor’s walled gardens. The last part of the climb is almost sheer on steps cut straight into the rock. Marianne and Axel’s house seems to grow out of the ridge, an eagle’s nest carved into the hill from which to look out for pirates. It’s hard to imagine how she manages with the baby carriage. Charmian and I are both sweating and out of breath.
Marianne is stirring a pot; the air is fragrant with steam. She seems as delighted by the bundles of clothes as she would be by a Bond Street trousseau. The room is whitewashed; the windows frame the sea. Painted bookcases are orderly with books. Straw mats and knick-knacks hang from the walls and the simple furniture and shutters are painted a delicate pale green, the colour of new leaves. She’s barefoot and pretty in a clean white shirt, the baby at her hip. Charmian holds out her arms, takes him, cradles and croons while Marianne unties her apron and repins her hair.
Charmian lifts the lid of the pot with an appreciative sniff.
‘Fårikål, Axel’s favourite,’ Marianne says, inviting us to sit at the table, and I wince to remember Axel telling Patricia that he would hold his nose. The tablecloth is edged with lace, at its centre a Japanese bowl with floating pink blossom.
The baby gurgles and giggles. Axel Joachim is the chubbiest, sweetest little chap I’ve ever met, the sort of baby you see in an advert. His eyes are blue and enormous as pansies. His smile could be used to sell anything. Marianne brings us water on a tray with a posy of daisies.
She shows off a mobile that Axel has made from wire and stones. She lays the fat baby on a folded mat beneath it and he goes googly-eyed and kicks his legs around and she lifts his vest to blow raspberries on his tummy and they both explode with giggles. A small white dog is sleeping on a rag cushion beside a wooden rocking crib in which a black cat is curled. Marianne lifts out the cat and begs it not to be jealous.
If I hadn’t witnessed what I had with Axel and Patricia, she would have had me fooled with her carefully choreographed happiness. ‘Baby-bun-cheeks will be content there for a while just cooing at his clever pappa’s mobile. Will you take a little wine with me? I have a jug right here.’
We drink our wine on the terrace where yellow marguerites run crazy between the stones. She has a large ornate rocking chair with a rope that runs through the door of the house and she shows us how clever Axel has tied the other end to the crib.
‘I can sit here at night with my glass of wine and look at the stars and just rock, rock, rock our baby to sleep.’
She is smiling, closing her eyes, as one overcome with ecstasy. Charmian shoots me an anguished look.
We sip our wine. We look down over the harbour, at the colourful boats and the sugar-cube houses spilling up the hills, the windmill at the crest of the cliff, the domes and spires of the many churches, the crosses on the peaks. Marianne scoops up the cat and nuzzles it as though she can’t bear not to be cuddling something. She nods towards the house.
‘As you can see, Axel’s not here. He’s once again at the boatyard. Yet another thing he needs to do for his beloved boat instead of getting on with writing his book.’
This time Marianne catches what is passing between Charmian’s eyes and mine. ‘Pfft,’ she says, waving a hand. ‘That Patricia is leaving the island tomorrow. Going back to the States.’
Good riddance! I want to cry but Marianne lowers her eyes and turns to Charmian. ‘I went to see her at Fidel’s place this morning.’ Her voice is barely more than a whisper. ‘I don’t know why she would choose to live in that stinking tip anyway; everything’s falling down, rotting food, Fidel’s horrible paintings propped up everywhere you look, and all the island’s sickest cats going there to breed. Patricia is covered in flea bites.’ Marianne lifts a leg as though checking she isn’t similarly afflicted. Her tan is uniform and golden, her legs smooth and hairless.
‘I didn’t see her room; Patricia and Fidel were wild not to let me up there. But I’d come all that way over the rocks with the baby carriage so, anyway …’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘The cup she gave me was all caked and cracked around the rim. All the time I was there she did her best not to look at my son. Fidel wouldn’t leave us alone, put his dirty finger in the baby’s mouth. No matter. I didn’t know how brave I’d be face to face so I’d brought a letter and I left it in an envelope on the table. She came running after me, caught up at the windmill. She had my letter, unopened, and when I wouldn’t take it back she started to cry. That’s when she told me she was leaving. She has an arts scholarship at Chicago to get back for.’ Marianne buries her face in the cat’s fur. Charmian grimaces at me as baby Axel’s cries summon his mother indoors with the cat in her arms.
Thirteen
The studio dances with shadows as Charmian puts a match to a lamp and leads me to the bookcase. Beside George’s dusty globe, a dog-eared paperback lies waiting, tan with black lettering. The Second Sex in curly type that makes the S’s look like serpents.
‘One is not born but is made a woman and it is high time that we break those bonds and learn to soar, to create for ourselves a world of free choices, and though a wide-open vista can be terrifying it is also more thrilling than plodding on along the worn tracks in a man’s world.’ Charmian is lecturing me as she hands me the book but adds with a snort, ‘Which is, I suppose, all very well if you’re de Beauvoir and Sartre and don’t have children’s feelings to consider.’
She’s led me up here just for this book. It’s vital reading, she says, though I suspect she mostly wanted to get away from George who has started ranting below.
I’m still here, long after the final farewells of the other dinner guests, helping to put a dent in the clearing-up. Shane, Martin and Booli all scarpered to their rooms when the night was still young and not yet slurring, and around two in the morning the others staggered out, with the exception of Jimmy who is still busy baiting George. A brandied disagreement about Kafka escalated to include Dostoevsky, Rilke and Robbe-Grillet. ‘Pissants!’ George was spluttering as Charmian pulled me away.
I recognise the book she’s handing me. It’s the one she hurled at me before. There’s a wobble to her voice as I take it. ‘If I had an eighteen-year-old daughter I would want her to read this,’ she says. ‘Your generation has many more choices than mine. I feel certain that Connie would have wanted her daughter to flourish in a system that doesn’t assume that female “otherness” makes her only of use in service to the real deal that is a bloody man. I’m pretty sure she read it, actually.’
The book is dismayingly fat. I’m still waiting to be seduced by Henry Miller within the forbidden green covers of Jimmy’s treasured Olympia editions. I’m shamefully only on the first volume and Jimmy is insisting I read all three.
Charmian can sense my resistance and changes tack. ‘George hates it. He thinks de Beauvoir’s a prophet of a change in values that is bogus and can therefore only be destructive. But it seems utopian to me. Shared ideas and history and commitment with the added spice of lovers …’
The flame of the lamp dances in her eyes. ‘Oh dear, too much vino. I don’t know why I’m rambling on, and hell it’s all very well for Simone and Jean-Paul to let it all hang out and spill the beans with no children left crying.’
As though on cue we hear a baby in the street. Someone’s banging on the door; the baby’s got a good pair of lungs. Charmian snatches up the lamp and we fly down to the hall to find George taking Axel Joachim while Marianne looks up at us, ashen-faced and smeary with mascara. The white blouse she was wearing earlier is now spattered and stained. She speaks in gasping sobs.
‘My husband’s gone mad. He threw this.’ She points to her shirt. ‘It’s the dinner I cooked for him.’
‘Oh Marianne, it can’t go on like this,’ Charmian says, thrusting the lamp at me.
Marianne is shaking. ‘I told him to leave me alone and be with his American brainbox and that made him go mad.’ There’s blood on her feet. ‘He found out about the letter I wrote to Patricia and now he’s smashing the house up, all the windows, everything. I had to get away. I thought he might hurt the baby. I have to get back before he hurts himself.’
Her knees are starting to buckle and Charmian guides her to the couch. George walks back and forth shushing Axel Joachim as his mother struggles to calm down. ‘It should be simple. A man lives with his wife and together they make a good life for their baby.’
Charmian brings a bowl of water with rags and disinfectant, squats at her feet.
‘Axel says I think like a farmer,’ Marianne wails, and fresh tears run down her face as Charmian tweezes splinters of glass from her feet.
Jimmy takes my arm, steers me away. ‘Time to be going,’ he says.
As we are released into the night Charmian is persuading Marianne to let her make up the divan and silencing her protests that Axel might kill himself. Jimmy puts his arms around me, holds me tight. I rest my head on his chest as we stand catching our breath, in the dark shadows beneath Charmian’s bougainvillea.
Max’s barking alerts us; a figure is lurching our way. Jimmy holds me tighter when we see it’s Axel and he might be an ogre for how we shrink against the wall as he hammers his fists on the door. George stands above him, the lamp swinging, making a monster of his shadow.
George blocks the way. ‘Go home, Axel. You’ve terrorised your wife and child enough already tonight. And for God’s sake, man, your hands are bleeding.’
Axel lunges, tries to barge past, but George shoulders him so hard he half-falls and half-stumbles down the stone steps. ‘Go home, you great galah, and put some disinfectant on your cuts and think about your bloody idiocy while you do it. I hope it bloody stings.’ Upstairs the baby is awake and crying again.
I met Dinos for the first time that night. Charmian had told me about him while we made the dolmades. In fact it was Saint Constantinos’s name day and the dinner was in his honour. Constantinos: Dinos. Handsome, she said. The scion of a sponge-merchant family, he brings a bag of good Aegina clay and takes it to his kiln high up on Episkopi and barely comes down to the port all summer. She says his pots are good and that she likes him very much.
As well as Dinos, who was indeed handsome, Patrick and Nancy, Chuck and Gordon, a playwright called Kenneth, his wife Janis and sleepy child, pregnant Angela and her husband David, who was some sort of aristocrat but looked like a bum, a Californian couple called Demetri and Carolyn, a bumptious New Zealander called Bim who was writing a novel, and Robyn his pallid wife. There was plenty of wine, Jimmy and I made to feel l
ike honorary members of the true foreign colony when we declared that we intended to stay on. ‘Oh, I don’t like that word “colony”,’ Charmian said. ‘But I don’t know what else to call it.’
‘Ah, when you’ve lived on Hydra you can’t live anywhere else …’ Kenneth said.
‘Yeah. Including Hydra,’ George and he chorused. George had left his bad mood upstairs with his typewriter. He was loquacious, spoke more than anyone.
I find I can write very little about any of it in my notebook. Any pleasures of the evening have been blotched by Marianne’s tears. The morning comes too soon, poisoned by my hangover. Maybe it’s true, what Charmian says about me so easily accepting the role of drudge, serving the talents of others. I am Cinderella-ed in soot from the charcoal range, ragged from lugging stuff up and down the steps. The lavatory is stinking because no one else has bought the right chemical, no one but me ever seems to remember to refill the slosh buckets or deal with the malodorous bin. It’s overflowing as usual. We’re almost out of kerosene, the Buta needs changing over. Jimmy is going out fishing again tonight and needs to sleep in.
I stomp upstairs and, though I know he’ll give me hell for it, throw open the door to Bobby’s room with a great rattle and immediately regret it. The shutters are closed but there’s no mistaking Janey and Edie on the bed platform. They are naked, facing each other even in sleep, entwined. Bobby is alone on a narrow mattress by the window, his hands folded behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Canvases are propped along the walls; there’s the stench of unwashed clothes, stale smoke, turpentine. Bobby turns to look at me from the bare ticking. Says nothing as I back away.
The ice is already sweating at the foot of the steps. I tie our bit of sacking and rope it into position. The wet hessian is unpleasant on my back and I haul it up the hill with every cock on the island crowing, every builder’s hammer hammering and the cicadas singing only ugly songs, like they’re frying in hot fat.
