by Polly Samson
She takes another gulp and resumes in her own husky tones. ‘Shalom, shalom for Leonard, or who knows what sort of state the poor girl would be in. And it’s hard yakka up there because the little mite has some sort of gastric thing going on and she’s stuck when the genius of the house wishes to down tools for the night and head out for action. Still, he does seem to have cheered her up and he’s very tender with the boy.’
George isn’t having Bim’s body language exclude him from a toast. ‘To Marianne and Leonard!’ he roars and pushes him aside to clink his glass to Charmian’s.
‘Good on our Viking girl that she has hooked the Canadian. Just in the nick of time,’ he says, throwing back the wine, and through the smoke of a newly lit cigarette blooms a sudden boyish grin, the sort that his grumpy old face is still sometimes transformed by. ‘Oh brother, she must be one hell of a fuck.’
Bim rallies; how easily all is forgiven when there’s mockery in play.
‘Well, she’ll be sucking not fucking …’
Robyn gapes at him, her nose greasy from sliding her glasses up it. ‘Bim, what a thing to say. How would you know?’
‘I’ve read a few pages of his novel, and of course his poetry. Promising stuff … but it’s fellatio all the way.’ Bim is enjoying himself, Patrick Greer also: the turn the conversation has taken promises delicious pickings.
‘She’d better be good at it down on her knees!’ Patrick says, with his mollusc of a mouth wet and shining.
George laughs and says it’s hard to think of many poems that celebrate ‘the art of the gobby’ and everyone tries to come up with something. Catullus? Joyce, surely?
Charmian waits until they’ve run out of steam to trump them. ‘Of course there’s Shelley,’ she says and she starts to recite: ‘“Soft, my dearest angel, stay/Oh! You suck my soul away/Suck on, suck on, I glow, I glow!/Tides of maddening passion roll/And streams of rapture drown my soul.”’
I know she’s drunk but I’m disappointed when she gears the conversation back to Marianne. I wish I’d stayed at home rather than wasting good money up here at Xenomania.
‘Anyway, I’m sure Marianne is perfectly proficient in all the feminine arts,’ she’s saying with a saucy grin. The words dart poisonous, at odds with the beauty of our surroundings, the gentle strains of a saxophone, ‘Petite Fleur’.
Charmian settles her naughty eyes on Robyn. ‘But what an art it is to live in service to a man. Maybe it’s the greatest creative art, and should be accorded respect, like the geishas in Japan—’
‘Maybe you could take lessons from her, Charm,’ George interrupts, still bellowing with laughter over something Bim is saying in his other ear and going one better. ‘Yeah, I bet she bangs like a dunny door in a gale.’
‘Be quiet a moment, all of you, I mean it. Stop sniggering. What do we know of the flower and willow world?’
‘Polishing Axel’s shit until it shines is hardly the same thing,’ George says.
‘Well, you might say that Marianne has been so beautifully trained by Axel in the arts that facilitate good writing, Leonard is getting a ready-made muse. Lucky him, that’s what I thought when I was up there today. She was on her knees, as it happens …’
I don’t need this. The sourness is curdling the night.
‘I saw them this morning on the beach at Kamini with the baby. They seemed very happy,’ I say.
‘So, Marianne was on her knees …?’ Bim is jockeying her on, like a rider into a fence.
Charmian relishes keeping them waiting. How cruel they all look, how ghoulish by lamplight. I think about Marianne with Leonard on the beach, splashing together into the sea. They took it in turns to swim and spin the baby around in a blue rubber ring. On the beach they lay face to face with the baby between them, a tangle of limbs and endearments. I watched Leonard kiss each little piggy to make the baby squeal.
Charmian pours herself another glass of wine and asks George to light her a smoke from his own before continuing.
‘I came in from the terrace; they didn’t see me at first. The room was cool, shuttered but for the one window where she knelt at his feet, the polished floor shining around her.’ Charmian’s storytelling voice is low and warm. The others fall silent. ‘There were fresh flowers, a jug of wine and two glasses beside her. The air was still and sweet with the scent of the flowers – something else too, monastery incense perhaps. Leonard was among the cushions on the couch strumming his guitar, the baby sleepily sucking on a bottle of milk tucked beside him, and there she was kneeling in that pool of light, holding up a plate on which she’d arranged wafers of salami sliced so thin they were almost transparent, overlapping and spread out like a Japanese flower. That’s when I thought of the geishas. But it was beautiful, the way she looked at him, the offering; enough that I felt very much an intruder at a private sacrament. He was picking out a tune, a lullaby for the baby; rather lovely, actually.’
Charmian takes a drink. If she thinks that will draw the sting from the evening she’s mistaken. George has been harrumphing the entire time she’s been speaking. Now it’s his turn.
‘She’ll drive him away, just like she has Axel. Eventually a man with more than half a noggin wants to be stimulated in the head as well as the bed and the stomach. Axel’s had her parroting all that Ouspensky and Gurdjieff stuff for years, but I’m not sure Leonard finds it any more convincing than the rest of us. But what else can she do? As the only man here who’s ever met a geisha, I can tell you they have many accomplishments. Calligraphy, conversation, music. I’m not aware I’ve ever seen Marianne getting her mouth around the shakuhachi.’
Even Nancy joins in. ‘It’s not like she doesn’t try, sweetheart that she is. Do you remember when she took up pottery? Bowls in every shade of excrement. I remember Axel found it all very amusing, despite that he was the one having to eat from the dolloping things.’
Patrick Greer can’t resist. ‘And then there was poetry all last summer while she mooned about with the baby in her belly. Luckily none of us was ever asked to read it, though I won’t deny that she did look pretty sitting chewing her pencil.’
The plates of fried spider crabs arrive which gives everyone something else to pick at.
Trudy is the only person other than George not eating. ‘You oldsters are all so nasty about each other,’ she says. ‘That’s why Jean-Claude scarpered; he said he couldn’t stand another minute living among vipers, and the more time I spend listening to you tearing Marianne apart, the more I think I can see his point.’
No one pays her any attention. Patrick is rambling. ‘Of course, our dear Charm was quite a thing when she was big with child … Mmmmm, I remember her down there on the rocks with her swimsuit straining. So ripened was she, I could think only of melons. Honeydews, watermelon, the juiciest of fruits hanging heavy on the vine.’
‘Oh goodness, Patrick dear, have you been taking writing classes with Gordon?’ Charmian says.
Trudy is not to be deterred. George is as alert to Jean-Claude’s name as one might be to a lover’s footstep on the stair. Trudy addresses him over our heads as we scrabble like a flock of gulls over the tin tray that Alexeos has placed between us.
‘Whatever it is you’ve written about him in your book is what drove him away. He started packing straight after you came round and showed him those pages.’
George nods and smiles but says nothing. Trudy almost shouts at him.
‘Gee, even you won’t tell me what it’s all about and you wrote it. I guess I’ll just have to wait, like everyone else, until I can read it for myself. I’ve already written to my London aunt to get a copy sent from Dillons. Not long now …’
George looks at her and grins. Trudy blinks her innocent eyes back at him. Charmian lifts her hand like she wants to slap her but has to settle instead for reaching for a cigarette.
Patrick Greer strikes her a light. He’s having quite the night and now we are on to his favourite subject.
‘You see, George, this is just the
start. I told you not to do it to your wife; people will read it as the truth and you know it.’
‘Thank you, Patrick,’ Charmian says, blowing out the match, while Trudy stares at her with widening eyes behind which the pennies are dropping.
‘Ah, my wife. She can only tell the truth, curse her, so why shouldn’t I for once?’ George bangs the table, making Trudy jump, and waves his glass at Charmian. ‘Just look at her there, preening with her wampum belt of male scalps. Does she look like she cares? I’d have to be a bloody fool to ask where she’s been when she comes in at night so alive. I’m too bloody scared to ask who she’s been with or what she’s been doing. It’s her honesty that scares the bloody pants off me.’
Charmian stubs out her cigarette, throws back her wine. ‘I’m sorry, everyone. I can’t do this tonight.’
‘It’s my bloody birthday. Where do you think you’re off to?’ George says.
‘For a swim,’ she replies, gathering her things.
‘But, Charm, you’ve had far too much grog.’ Nancy is begging her to sit down.
‘Alone,’ Charmian says, with a final glare at George.
‘Here’s rue for you,’ George barks at her, shaking his fist as she flees down the path. ‘Plenty of it. Go drown yourself!’
Twenty-Two
The best time for a night swim at the rocks is when the moon is full. I’ll never forget my first phosphorescence: Jimmy coming up the ladder, streaming with stars, one caught on an eyelash still blinking away as he reached and pulled me in, our limbs moon-silvered, our fingers trailing through constellations.
This night the sea has no use for such frippery, the moon but a toenail clipping over Dokos island, the water obsidian-dark in the deep plunging shelf where we swim.
Though I scamper as fast as my flip-flops will allow down the craggy track from Xenomania, I can’t catch her. A wind has come in from the east. The waves slap at the rocks. Past the fig tree at the turn, I follow a trail of her discarded clothing down the steps and find her already at the lip of the cave. The waves battering the rocks silence my shout. Her hands reach skywards and with one spring she’s free, flying, arced, and gone to the seething water twenty feet below.
She surfaces, gasping, just clear of the jutting finger of rocks that ruptures the dark skin of the sea. I watch her break through the waves with her powerful crawl and turn on her back, a floating crucifix with her face to the stars, and I feel like an idiot for pursuing her but Nancy said, For Christ’s sake, somebody go.
It’s too late to skulk away, she’s already swimming back. I call out to let her know it’s me gathering up her limp and patched clothing. I put her things at the top of the ladder and sit in the hollows where the Hottentots grow. She floats on the heft of the waves for a while. When she powers back to the rocks she lets one throw her halfway up the ladder, exhilarated and whooping.
‘Isn’t it marvellous being able to wash away the taint of an evening like that!’ she calls as she steps into her skirt. She comes buttoning her shirt, shaking water from her hair.
‘A swim at night is never a mistake. How lucky for us it’s always available. Just a hop from bad temper and here it is, this mysterious other dimension that buoys you up until you can slip through and accept the night’s mood. I feel marvellously new again.’ She’s convincingly cheerful as she sits down beside me in the hollow with her hair dripping.
‘Oh, Erica, there really was no need to panic. I’ve been doing this my whole life. I grew up on Bombo Bay, a mile-long beach I had all to myself. Can you imagine? Every night I lay naked, star-baking on the rocks, believing I would turn silver if I stayed out long enough. I rather fancied myself going back to school with an astral tan.’ She pulls up the hem of her skirt to use it to give her hair a rub.
I’m keen to shift the blame for my intrusion. ‘Nancy thought it wasn’t safe because of the booze. She told me to come,’ I say, and she smiles at me and reaches for her basket, takes out a bottle. ‘Talking of booze …’
It’s French brandy. ‘It was supposed to be for George’s birthday but he doesn’t deserve it.’ She pulls out the cork with her teeth and takes a swig, offers it to me. Her eyes are dark and glassy as the sea.
I tell her I don’t know how she tolerates George’s drunken rages and she shuffles closer, uses my shoulder as a pillow and puts her arms around my waist until, unexpectedly, I’m taking the full damp weight of her.
‘It wasn’t always like this, you know. When George and I were first married and I was expecting Martin, he came to Bombo Bay and slept under the stars with me every night. He said he didn’t mind if our baby was born silver. He was up for anything then, the cleverest man in the world and the wittiest. Unbroken …’ She sighs the first in a series of long smoke-and-brandy sighs. The fumes on her breath mean I could be just about anyone. At some point I think she even gets my name wrong, calls me ‘Jennifer’, but I pretend not to notice. Much of what she’s saying she’s told me before.
‘Those were some of our happiest times, in the garden of my mother’s house writing that first novel, bashing away with our typewriters on our knees. The great published writer and me, his keen apprentice. Oh, I was tremendously in awe of how easy he made it seem and we were magnificently in love. Our first collaboration and we won a big prize for it, it seemed we were really flying …’
‘I suppose that’s what Jimmy was trying to point out to him up there: all those books he’s had published, living in the sun; it’s the dream, isn’t it? It’s what the rest of us all aspire to,’ I say.
‘Darling, please believe it’s his illness that makes him so cantankerous. It’s what I have to believe myself.’ She reaches for the bottle. ‘His jealousy will be the death of him,’ she says, and she shivers. ‘And of me.’
She pats our stone and concrete cradle. ‘Even this. The very ground I sit on. These rocks. That sea. Those mountains behind us. He’s jealous that I love this island with a passion I might once have had for him. He was the golden boy, remember; adoration is his oxygen. It’s hard to believe he’s the same man I married. I still swoon to think of him in Melbourne, striding in, the way his shirtsleeves were rolled, the cigarette stuck to that sexy under-hung lip, the great hero war reporter returned to the newsroom from the Orient and there wasn’t a girl in the whole Argus building wasn’t checking herself in her compact.’
She takes another alarmingly thirsty slug, hugs her knees through her skirt.
‘I’m so sorry you have to see us at our worst,’ she says. ‘Over the years we’ve both done things that have tainted the clear spring at our source. And now we’re so stony broke this island has become like a prison to him. In some ways to me too, though you’d have to bash me from it with a hammer to get me to leave. So, here I am, stuck like a limpet to a bad-tempered booze-artist who excuses his impotence spouting some convenient mumbo-jumbo theory about how ejaculation takes away from creativity. And me only thirty-six years old, for Christ’s sake!’
She looks at me and chuckles. ‘Thirty-six: I know that sounds ancient to a girl like you, and maybe it’s a disgusting thought that people of my age do have sex; at least judging by your face it is.’
I object but she silences me. ‘It has a role to play for the elderly too, you know, even if only as liniment for our poor aching souls. We always fought, George and I, even in the more glorious, romantic days, but the difference was that we had bed every night to nurse all the wounds we’d inflicted on each other. The George you see now resents my good health, wants every scar to be Promethean. Every happy sigh makes him imagine such terrible things about me. His spirit is shrivelled to nothing but suspicious hard bone.’
She’s crying steadily while she talks. I uselessly pat her. She scrunches her skirt up to her eyes and blows her nose in its hem, takes yet another large pull on the brandy and, though her hands are shaking, manages to put a match to a cigarette.
‘Maybe I should walk you home?’ I’m alarmed at how rapidly the bottle’s emptying. ‘Where
are your sandals?’
‘I was always barefoot. I think if I have one campaigning bone in my body it’s for the freedom not to wear shoes. Growing up on the beach, I don’t think I even owned a pair. I’ve always needed something to curl my toes around and I’ve found it here.’
‘I feel the same way …’ I start to say.
‘Everything comes at a cost. There are snakes in every paradise, and here always there’s this antagonism around the foreign colony that grows out of boredom, like a sore tooth that one must prod with one’s tongue. There is only one waterfront; scenes like tonight’s are the sole form of entertainment and, believe me, it gets wearing. I could have slapped your silly American friend for bringing up Jean-Claude and George’s wretched novel. It really wasn’t the night for it.’
I reach for the bottle, take a burning swig and hand it back. ‘Oh, everybody’s talking about the book, I’m afraid. They’re all going to read it as soon as it’s published. It’s Patrick stirs them up. Is he in love with you or something?’
She shakes her head. ‘As far as George is concerned, everyone I’ve ever smiled at is in love with me. It used to give him pleasure – you know, if I dressed à la mode and he could present me like his prize filly at the Savoy or the Press Club – but not now. It’s the tyranny in his lungs makes him resent my vigorous good health. I walk in the hills, I swim here at night, all of these things make him angry.’
I grab the moment. ‘Isn’t it rather masochistic of him to have written about your love affair with Jean-Claude Maurice?’
‘Love affair?’ Charmian snorts. She curls herself into the rock and holds out her arm, ushers me in, cradling the bottle between us. ‘Shall I tell you something about that?’ I nod and take up my position beneath her wing, snug as a little girl waiting for her bedtime story.
