A Theatre for Dreamers

by Polly Samson

  Soft glimmers in the gloom. Fleeces on the boards, hangings around the bed, a washstand of elaborate wrought iron with a shining white china bowl; through an archway, a large worktable is scattered with papers.

  ‘I see he took his typewriter,’ Charmian says.

  She sweeps aside bolts of embroideries from around the high bed – a grand Russian affair of carved black wood and brass curlicues – dampens a sponge at the washstand, finds a fresh nappy and pins. I hold up a candle while she cleans and changes the baby who is humming softly as he sucks at the warm goat’s milk.

  ‘I’m guessing she’ll want to sleep with this little fatty tonight.’ Charmian sighs as she settles the baby into a nest at the centre of the bed. ‘Just look how she makes everything beautiful. All these lace pillows. And such terribly pretty flowers on the nightstand.’

  The night has grown deeper and the temperature has dropped. Nancy and Magda come inside to chop tomatoes for sauce. Only the bellowing of a donkey and distant goat bells disturb the silence.

  Marianne remains on the terrace, looking out to space with a woven blanket pulled across her shoulders, singing breathily to herself in Norwegian. Patrick Greer is refilling her glass. The wine glows like rubies in the lamplight.

  ‘Hi there, pretty little girl,’ she says, slurring, patting the wall beside her. ‘Have you come here to taunt me with your youth and beauty and unbroken heart?’

  ‘Sorry, no. I came to ask you about the woman who makes the tea … but it seems like the wrong time.’ I’m as red as the wine, I can feel the blood. Patrick Greer is rude enough to snort. He passes me a glass of the Kokineli and I gulp at it. Charmian joins us with a new bottle and the corkscrew, tells Marianne her baby is settled.

  Marianne seems to be having trouble focusing and it only strikes me later that she’s been given a pill. She’s repeating over and over that she was the one who told him to go.

  ‘Oh what will I do if he does something reckless all alone out at sea?’

  Charmian motions for me to shift along and takes my place beside her. She pulls Marianne close to soothe her, reminds her that Axel’s a fine sailor and far too ambitious to risk drowning himself. Magda cuts in with the news that Nancy’s ready to serve up.

  ‘You have to let this one go, he’s too bonkers. There’ll be no shortage of blokes who will happily take his place, you know that.’

  Marianne closes her eyes and we all fall silent before she leaps to her feet with a cry.

  ‘There is only him, that’s the thing. Him and his golden voice. Just as my grandmother predicted. Momo said my man would have a golden voice and that’s Axel Jensen.’

  Magda shakes her head, mouths, ‘Here we go again,’ and stomps inside to help Nancy.

  Marianne is unsteady and not making much sense. She holds out her hand to Charmian. ‘Come with me, help me write him a letter. I love my husband. There’s nothing I can do about it. If it goes in the mail on tomorrow’s steamer, he’ll get it as soon as he checks in to Athens.’

  I’m left with Patrick Greer who refills my glass before I can make an excuse to leave.

  ‘She really is quite a woman – but you’ll have noticed that for yourself,’ he says, watching them go.

  ‘Marianne?’ I say. ‘Because she wants to put up with whatever rotten thing her husband does?’

  Patrick snorts. ‘Ha, no. I was talking about Charm. Here she is, a ministering angel, while her own husband and kids are God knows where … scrounging dinner from one of the neighbours, no doubt.’ His eyes shine black with malice as he leans towards me, his lips winking wet and pink as a mollusc from within the weedy beard.

  ‘You know things ain’t great at home for her right now? Everyone’s waiting for George’s book; it’s making her paranoid. And with Jean-Claude back here sniffing around. Well, you could say it’s leading to an interesting atmosphere.’

  The greasy, defeated smell of him makes my stomach clench. ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  He’s got his hand on my knee. ‘It’s nasty of George, really, to take his revenge in this way, by so publicly humiliating her.’ Though I’m desperate to get away and know I’ll feel soiled, I find myself keening towards him.

  ‘So?’

  Patrick squeezes my thigh as Magda appears with a stack of willow-pattern plates which she scatters around the table. She clinks her glass to mine.

  ‘I will make special prices for you if you and your beautiful English friends will come to Lagoudera during Yacht Week. We need a few more young bohemians to mix it up a bit.’

  Patrick scowls at her and bends to light his pipe.

  The stem makes an unpleasantly juicy sound. ‘George is a victim of his own jealousy. I’ve read the manuscript and he’s ruined a perfectly good novel by including a totally gratuitous sex scene. It’s only there to humiliate Charm and Jean-Claude.’

  ‘Oh, do stop going on about it,’ Magda snaps. ‘It’s no one’s business but theirs.’

  ‘Excuse me, but it’s George who makes it everyone’s business by writing so luridly about his wife,’ Patrick scoffs. ‘A self-proclaimed once-a-year man sticking the knife in because that’s all he’s got left that he can stick in.’

  ‘Ugh, you’re drunk,’ Magda says, but Patrick is back to wagging his finger.

  ‘He’s never believed his luck would hold, having a woman like that. She’s too red-blooded to lead the life of a nun, and he knows it.’

  Magda gives him a shove that almost topples him. ‘Oh you are enjoying it, aren’t you? Is it because Charm went with Jean-Claude when you made it so obvious she could have picked you?’

  Patrick glares at her. ‘I make no secret of my admiration for the woman,’ he says.

  Charmian reappears with the cutlery. In the Sartre story we’d all read, Lulu, the wife who chose to stay with her impotent husband, was, rather conveniently, medically unable to enjoy sex. I can’t bear the thought that Charmian’s marriage to George might be doomed. They’re the closest thing I have to a family. I love them all: their banter and moods and tears and wild laughter, all of it, every chaotic bit of it.

  Patrick and Magda are still sniping at each other as Marianne strides across the terrace, the cat at her heels. She kneels down with an envelope in her hand and starts filling it with yellow flowers from between the stones. ‘There we are,’ she says to the cat. ‘He’ll see the daisies from our own little terrace when he reads my letter.’ She looks up and nods when I pass on my way out, laying my present beside her. ‘It’s just a little nothing I made for Axel Joachim,’ I say and leave them all to it with a lump in my throat and a babyish need to cry.

  Fifteen

  Jimmy pokes me in the ribs as I pay for our tickets at the ferry picket. ‘Looks like somebody’s scarpering,’ he says. The gangplank is down, people are swarming with cameras and beach bags and spear guns and masks, boys jostling and touting for business. I’m amused to see Martin running with the other harbour rats, charming the day-trippers who, for a few drachmas, might want directions to the best swimming spots or tavernas. Jimmy nudges me again and points.

  Jean-Claude is shuffling to the front of the embarkation line, naked to the waist and strung with bags, a bulging portfolio, a large rolled-up canvas under one arm. A steward is pushing his ticket back at him, beckoning for others to pass. There’s an explosion of shouting in Greek and French until Jean-Claude, still cursing, wrestles his scarlet rag of a shirt from a bag and puts it on.

  Trudy ambles by in a floppy blue sun hat with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth. Her red hair hangs in a plait over one shoulder, fuzzy and thick as a bell-pull. We chat over the picket while Jimmy comes strolling back from Costas’s ice-cream cart in a clean linen shirt with his precious typewriter in one hand and two cones in the other.

  ‘Ahhhh, but you’re a lucky girl …’ Trudy says, giving me a pinch. ‘And I don’t mean the cornets, honey.’ I ask about Jean-Claude but she bats his name away.

  ‘He’s heading fo
r Berlin, as far as I know, meeting his dealer,’ she says, with a dismissive shrug. Her face has a greenish tinge and she says she’s been feeling bad ever since she got out of bed and that the meatballs at Stephanos’s taverna must have been off. Among the confusion of people, the men have come with a consignment of evil-smelling black sponges which they are piling at the dockside.

  Jimmy hands me the ice cream, wipes a drip from the case of his precious typewriter. ‘All the way to Athens to get this baby fixed,’ he says.

  ‘Ah yes, but a night in a hotel,’ Trudy sighs.

  ‘And a hot bath,’ I say, giving myself the biggest hug at the prospect.

  There’s a hold-up in front of us. Two of the stewards are helping a one-legged man up the ramp. The man is old and wears his patched fisherman’s trousers with the empty leg dangling in a knot that swings as he spins around and spits at the port so savagely he makes me jump. Two old women dressed in black start to wail. The Nereida lets out a series of impatient bellows and everyone shouts to make themselves heard.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe the list of things we’re to bring back,’ I tell Trudy. ‘Contraceptives for everyone, and nail varnish and Ponds Cold Cream and Paris Match. And we have to go and start up Bobby’s car, which is a bit of a nuisance. I don’t know why he doesn’t just let the battery run flat.’

  I am looking forward to a night at the Lyria, however. It’s worth the extra money, Charmian said, for the big old bath down the hall on the second floor. ‘An ocean of hot water,’ she sighed, her eyes shining their greenest envy. She told me to buy the best cake of soap I could afford, to make the most of it, so that’s top of my list, and I long to find some embroideries like Marianne’s to hang around my marital bed. I take a lick of my dripping ice cream.

  ‘Will you go to the record store?’ Trudy says. ‘If they’ve got it will you get the Ray Charles LP and I’ll pay you back? And three tubes of Burnt Umber and two of Sienna if you’re going that way.’ She scribbles a list of an astonishing number of items and shoots off saying that the smell of the drying sponges is making her think she might well throw up.

  The Nereida’s horn is deafening. We stand on the sun deck, watching the island recede and trying to spot our house among the tiers of white cubes. The ferry dips and breasts and as we lean over the rail I have to cling on to my hat as I watch the waves dash spume against the hull.

  Demetri Gassoumis is on board, his Rolleiflex slung around his neck, and New Zealand Bim has a notebook protruding from the pocket of his safari jacket. He points to Demetri’s camera. ‘We’re going in for a few days to do a magazine story about the meat market at Piraeus,’ he says, but it turns out they don’t actually have a commission. The quay is not yet out of sight; Robyn and Carolyn are still waving as they turn their attention to a pair of Dutch girls, helping to steady them as they stow their backpacks.

  Downstairs Demetri buys lottery tickets for the Dutch girls as well as himself when the man comes around with his tray. The four of them settle at a bench, Bim lowering his sunglasses and leaning over his knee to narrow his focus on the prettier of the two.

  I am relieved that Jimmy doesn’t want to sit with them; both Bim and Demetri have a way of looking at me as though they can see through my clothes. I am sad for Robyn and Carolyn who always seem to stay at home while their husbands carouse at the port. I wonder if it’s because Demetri is half-Greek that Carolyn is prepared to live like an island woman, but that doesn’t explain Robyn. In my secret heart I hope they are lesbians and wild about each other.

  Jimmy ducks down the iron stairs and I follow him into the saloon where Jean-Claude is untying his bags.

  ‘Look. We’ll be able to ask him about Charmian. Find out what he knows about George’s novel,’ Jimmy says.

  ‘Don’t you jolly well dare!’

  Jean-Claude settles himself in his seat, one leg swinging over its arm. His shirt has remained unbuttoned, his tan testifies to the months he’s spent working on it, his chest hair glints gold and curly as a poodle. He has stowed his luggage with the exception of the canvas. He pulls at its bindings. His faded jeans are so tight he must’ve put them on wet; at some point he’s burst the fly which is held together with two straining safety pins.

  ‘The paint is still mouillé,’ he tells us, unrolling the canvas and angling it to the porthole light. ‘Sleeping Aphrodite.’

  The paint is dauby but this sleeping goddess is unmistakably Trudy. She lies on rumpled white sheets by a window, her nipples shiny and orange as kumquats.

  He smiles at it, and licks his lips as one might at a well-remembered meal. ‘Si belle, yes? Your American friend. It is one of my best. I will be sad to sell it.’

  He lays it flat on a seat and reaches around his feet for his knapsack. ‘Vous voulez partager?’ A bag of oranges. He takes the largest for himself, stabs a hole in the peel and releases the juice by poking his thumb around in its flesh. No doubt Jean-Claude believes he’s being sensuous as he lifts it and suckles the juice, all the time gazing up at me through his tawny lashes.

  ‘Stop it, Jacques!’ Squirming, I blurt out the name Charmian gave him in her book.

  Jimmy almost bursts. ‘Jacques! Sleeps on a goatskin rug and lives on raw eggs.’

  ‘C’est vrai. These things I do,’ Jean-Claude says, licking his fingers. ‘I eat my eggs from a cup; my goatskin is rolled up over there, if you look. And, yes, I’ave read Charmian’s book.’ He pauses to yawn and twiddle his earring. ‘I don’t know why she wants me to look ridicule but she’s free to choose what she writes about. Pooft. To be free, it is all there is.’ He scrabbles again in his bag and extracts a paperback. He doesn’t open it immediately. Instead he gazes towards the porthole and smiles to himself. ‘It’s years since I ’elp Charmian out, but I don’t forget.’

  He flicks through the pages of his book for his place, and raises slow eyelids, his eyes yellow as a goat’s. He has a powerful smell, which I can’t help thinking emanates from his jeans. ‘You know I like to ’elp out where I can. You know what I’m talking about, yes?’

  I gulp and nod and gesture towards his heap of luggage. ‘Is this it? Have you had enough of Hydra?’ I want confirmation that this serpent is to be gone, and especially before George’s troublesome novel arrives.

  Jean-Claude nods. ‘It’s the ’usband who makes problems. Sets Police Chief Manolis on to me, report to the station for this and that. Pooft, no island is so special that it’s worth putting up with George Johnston …’ He stops for a moment to pick something from between his bright porcelain teeth.

  ‘Last night, he was so drunk I feared for my life. Came to read me what he’s written about me and his wife. Tant pis, except with George I can never be sure I won’t be physically attacked and that gets expensive at the dentist.’ Jean-Claude leans back, scratches lazily at his chest. ‘I tell you one thing. I won’t be ’elping ’er out again,’ he says.

  ‘I’ll be ’elping you out tonight at the Lyria, my girl,’ Jimmy snorts in my ear and Jean-Claude rolls his eyes and returns to his book.

  Oh, the deep joy of a bath! I take Charmian’s advice and splurge on a cake of ivory soap that smells of almonds, and a new elephant’s-ear sponge that is smooth and slippery as silk when it’s wet. I’m enjoying it so much that I almost don’t want Jimmy to get in with me; at least, that’s true until he starts soaping my back.

  The mirror at the basin is misted over, the hot-water tap chugs, the soap gives a creamy lather.

  After our day in the city we feel grimier than at any time on the island. It really hit us when we got off the ferry: the smell of the streets, the thundering lorries. For a moment it was like arriving on an alien planet and I was quite dizzied by the fumes and the speed and the noise and the honking. So many buses, dirty yellow and dirty blue, and builders’ dust and cement mixers, and people stopping to sell you things, stalls and baskets. It was lovely to have Jimmy there, holding my elbow, guiding me through the traffic and the gritty streets. He is my gypsy-haired ge
ntleman. He bought me a ring from a stall, just silver but with a pretty Greek key pattern. He says it’s only until he sells his book and can buy me a proper one.

  I return to the island with Jimmy’s ring on my finger, yards of fine embroidered linen, some antique brass bowls, my first proper bikini, a red silk kimono that I intend to wear as a dress. Jimmy pretends to stagger under the weight of the parcels he’s saddled with. As well as his newly mended typewriter and our market finds, we have everyone’s books and records and newspapers, paints, canvases, typewriter ribbons, guitar strings, lotions, potions, johnnies, a wheel of Athens bread.

  They’re all here at Katsikas, waiting for treasure. Jimmy moves among them like a merchant prince. Trudy lurks in the shadow of the wall, still a little green to my eyes, and without, as it turns out, the cash to pay us back for her LP and oil paints. Jimmy chucks Bobby his keys, fills him in on the state of his car. ‘… Eventually Erica managed to flag down a lorry driver with jump leads,’ he says. Bobby looks a little more cheerful today; he’s changed his clothes, had a shave. Edie is sitting across his knees in a wide-brimmed hat so he has to push her to one side while I describe how the lorry driver became grumpy when we got to the car park and Jimmy was there. I want to tell him that, after all this time sitting in the shade of a bitter orange tree in Piraeus, Mum’s little green Morris has started to smell once again of her scent. Bobby grins and thanks me, calls to Andonis to bring us retsina.

  There’s been a postal strike in Athens for the last few days and a whoop goes up when the mail sacks are carted by. There’s the chatter of hasty arrangements in several languages, coins clattering across tables, chairs scraping as notes are wedged under cups.

  Marianne remains drinking orangeade at Charmian’s table, the pram pushed against the store.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Charmian is saying. ‘George will check if there’s a letter for you.’ Marianne chews her lip. There’s a line between her eyes that’s not just from squinting at the sun. Her shirt is the twin of the one Axel was wearing yesterday in Athens, a fine blue line running through the linen.