The element -inth in Greek

by Alison Fell

  She looks again at Sergeant Yiannis, her smile fixed, her hands clapping determinedly. She remembers that, under the disguising flour, his hair is a light brown, flecked with real grey only at the temples. He takes his bow and, with a shy laugh, applauds the audience.

  As he turns to leave the dance-floor his eyes rest briefly on the table where she and the Giffords are sitting, and she wonders if she has imagined his minute, almost crafty nod of recognition.

  Later, in the line of women, she grasps Glenys’ hand, feeling the cool metal of rings. Madame herself has toured the tables, magisterial, scooping the females from their seats, pooh-poohing all demurrals. Three cross-steps to the right, three to the left, then a slow advance followed by a minor retreat, like a lapping of the tide. Ingrid keeps her eyes fixed on the lead dancer, wishing for a dark red dress that floats, and above all not to stumble or fail. The moon is high now, shining its silver on the wet strip of sand beyond the wall.

  Gradually her inhibition fades, and she straightens her back and lets her feet follow the dips and rises, the laws of light and water. Strophe and antistrophe. The tiredness has fallen from her, as if the mind-weight of the logos has been snipped off and cast in pieces on the waves. Without it, her breasts strain against the thin fabric of her vest; her body, effortless, levitates above the foam.

  The men have risen from their seats, intent now, slow-clapping gallantly in unison. Ken catches her eye and gives her a double thumbs-up sign; Manoli the waiter has joined him at the table, and they are smoking, watching but not watching, their heads close together, as if hatching a plot.

  Ingrid doesn’t allow herself a single glance at the Sergeant’s table, but as the night air swirls around her she’s filled with a sensation of being watched properly, of being seen. Absorbed in the fluency of the movements, she doesn’t stop to ask by whom, for in her mind the unattributed gaze – so gratifying – has already transmuted from the individual to the collective, and the visibility it confers on her is archetypal, and takes her beyond herself, and, magically, quells her envy.

  13

  What is invisible to man, Callasso says, is visible to the gods.

  When Greta Laurie née Henderson wakes from her nap she thinks that it was considerate of William to build a ballroom on to the house and keep it a secret, just to surprise her.

  She always thought the stairs on the top landing went up to the loft where he kept his old Army trunk with its ancient tin hat and greatcoat. A cobwebby dark place you’d never bother to go in. She’d told him time and time again he should have a good clear-out up there – but to move the workmen in without telling her, to raise the ceiling high as a kirk’s, to put in the sprung dancefloor and the French polish as well – well, who’d have thought he had it in him? A man who was never one to go spending money, so honestly, you could have knocked her down with a feather. He’d had mirrors installed from floor to ceiling, too, so that she could get her posture perfect, back like a ramrod, up on tiptoe always for the pas-de-basque or the travelling step or the slower stately Strathspey.

  Greta arches her instep, observing it. Good feet, she’s always had. Small and ladylike, but strong, flexible. She thinks of the Hunt balls everyone used to go to, they knew what Community meant in these days. The men in the kilt, the ladies in their white dresses with a tartan sash pinned to the shoulder with the lovely big cairngorm brooch. Even though William didn’t dance himself, it didn’t mean he ever grudged her.

  The Australian nurse huffs in bum first, maneouvering the tray. Her name is Elaine, but the way she says it sounds like Eyeline. On the tray there’s a plastic cup with a nozzle and a straw, which Greta takes as an affront: just because she has the odd dizzy turn doesn’t mean they should treat her like one of the gaga girls in High Care. Once again she considers demanding a proper cup and saucer, not to mention her silver teapot Elsa brought in for her, but once again she thinks better of it. Eyeline is tough as nails, and right now she doesn’t feel up to an argument.

  She eyes the plate, the napkin, the two round white iced biscuits. Eyeline slips the terry-towelling bib over her head.

  ‘There you are, dear.’

  Greta is hungry, her stomach full of war-cries and wind. She picks up a biscuit and bites into it.

  ‘Don’t gobble, Greta, you’ll only give yourself a pain.’

  Greta breaks the biscuit into four pieces and nibbles like a mouse.

  Wee sleekit coo’erin timrous beastie, wha’s put a panic in thy breestie?

  Meek as a mouse, she squints at Eyeline. It’s no good telling the daft besom that she doesn’t give herself the pain at all, it gives itself to her, generously, night after night. As soon as she lies down flat it gnaws at her bowels and there’s no stopping it, not with any kind of pill known to man and certainly not to MacLaren, who’s just a doctor, not a proper specialist, although all doctors are a useless bunch as far as she can see. This useless pain has a long concertina’d name MacLaren spelled out for her because the silly bugger couldn’t spell out the cure.

  Di-ver-tic-ul-it-is. I’m afraid it’s very common in the elderly.

  There’s something familiar about the biscuit. The jam in the middle, the red glacé cherry on the top.

  ‘German biscuits,’ she says, remembering.

  ‘Empire, dear. They’re called Empire biscuits now.’

  Greta shakes her head. When did they do that, and why? German biscuits was always the correct name, there’s no need to go chopping and changing it.

  ‘Etscar gispits?’ she says sarcastically.

  ‘No dear, Empire.’

  Isn’t that just what she said? Irritated, suddenly, by the obtuseness of the biscuit, the cherry on the top that looks like a clown’s nose, she repeats it.

  ‘Etscar gisfits!’

  Hands on hips, Eyeline stares at her. Her smile is supposed to be pleasant but her eyes are gimlets behind her glasses. Greta scowls back. With the foreign nurses you had to make allowances – especially the ones from the Far East with their dolls’ faces and little hands so gentle at washing your hair, and the Africans like Belinda with the big behind who has a sort of pidgin as a language, and always makes her think of the baby doll she used to have called Belinda, only that Belinda wasn’t a yard wide and black as the Earl o’ Hell’s waistcoat. But Eyeline’s an Australian, for Pete’s sake: she, at least, ought to understand the Queen’s English.

  14

  Androula eases her legs out of bed and shunts her body across the mattress until the soles of her feet encounter the cool tiles of the floor. Dawn light shows through the slats in the shutters. She hoists herself up on her elbows, easing her toes into the waiting slippers, and sits on the edge of the bed until the floating room solidifies. Then she wraps her shawl around her shoulders and goes into the kitchen, where the coffee things in the sink indicate that her brother is already up and about. She rinses the grounds away, plugs in the new cordless kettle, and proceeds to the shrine in the parlour. Gathering her nightdress between her thighs, she kneels down stiffly on the striped woollen rug, fixes her eyes on the welcoming face of the Panagia, and begins to pray.

  She prays for her brother Asterios, and for their mother and father, who lie five hundred metres higher up the hill in the cypress-shaded cemetery of Agia Stephanou, and for her cousin Angelika, grandmother of Spiraki, who has lain there for as many years, and for Angelika’s daughter Sophia, may the Lord preserve her wits and make her a good mother to the poor mikraki.

  She prays also for her fiancé Vagelis Pappos of Fortetsa village, who fell under the spell of the one-eyed Englishman and died a hero against the great city wall of Heraklion. At 20 Vagelis was assistant to the foreman at sta pitharia, the place of the jars, on the hillside of Kephala they now call Knossos – a good job for one so young, he said, with a good wage and the promise of training. On Sundays when he rode over to visit on his motorcycle, he would tell her excitedly of the digging and the finds, and of the fiestas thrown at the end of the season when the arc
haeologists went back to England and a whole kid was roasted and wine flowed till late into the night; later he talked, too, of their wedding, and how he would build them a house in Fortetsa village when the war ended.

  Vagelis’ family would not let Androula see his body. It wasn’t a sight for a young girl, they said. But his mother gave her the tooled leather boots Vagelis had been so proud of, the boots that still sit in the bottom of her wardrobe, the boots she oils and tends each year on the day of his martyrdom. Good as new, the boots say to her, when she brings them out to stand, knee high and gleaming, on the sunlit terrace.

  It’s the English Androula blames for fomenting the rebellion. The English with their War Office and their shipments of rifles, and particularly the one-eyed Plebbery, archigos at the Villa, who spoke Cretan Greek, and dressed like a Cretan, and, according to Vagelis, also drank like one. Without Plebbery’s instigation the menfolk might have kept their noses clean and waited under the protection of Our Lady for the war to blow over, as it would have done, for what had Crete known in its whole history but wars, invasions, occupations?

  And I wouldn’t have been left with only kisses and promises, thinks Androula, fixing her gaze on the Panagia, whose moist eyes glisten with tears for the misfortunes of all women.

  None of this can she can confide in her brother Asterios, for whom the subject of timi is salt in an unhealed wound. She remembers the day, not long after Vagelis’ death, when Asterios announced that he was going to the mountains to join the andartes. She can still hear her mother’s shrieks, her wheedlings, and the curses hurled at her only son, who had betrayed her. Until Asterios ran weeping from the house, and was not seen for three days and a half. Later Androula learned that he had spent those nights on Mount Yuchtas, sleepless in a goatherd’s bothy where wind hustled in at the empty windows and stirred the straw on the floor. This, her cousin Angelika had told her, Angelika whom everyone thought Asterios would marry.

  He had stumbled back to the house that day, unshaven and smelling of raki. As soon as Androula saw the look in his eye she knew that he had changed. Then he fell on his knees in front of Mama, that greatest of arm-twisters, swearing that he would stay at home and do his duty, and he kept kneeling there until, relenting, she kissed his cheeks and gave him her blessing.

  As the years passed, though, Androula saw that for her brother the sacrifice had been great. Asterios didn’t marry Angelika; in fact he didn’t marry anyone, even though Mama begged him to find a bride. She made sure there was no lack of candidates, too: a parade of dark-browed, capable girls who came with their parents to sit shyly in the parlour over coffee and cherry-cake. But although Asterios appeared compliant, his gruff monosyllables were enough to frighten any girl off, and no marriage contracts were forthcoming. It was as if, having submitted to his mother’s wishes on that one critical occasion, he could never again allow his wishes and her own to coincide. Silently, stubbornly, Asterios resisted, until it was clear that, even at the cost of his own happiness, he would cut the tongue from his mouth rather than say yes to her.

  Androula’s happiness, in the meantime, was a subject entirely overlooked. Her parents – may they be forgiven – had little sympathy to spare for her lost prospects, and no energy left for canvassing the parents of marriageable sons so that their only daughter could have a choice of suitors. Cousin Angelika had married, though, and well, but not happily, and on Sophia’s tenth birthday the heart that misery had weakened had finally failed her.

  Androula’s knees are beginning to ache, but because the living need her prayers as much as the dead, she makes a special plea for Sophia, who has managed to do just the opposite of her mother by marrying badly, but for love. Not that Andonis hasn’t been good to her, but he is no businessman, and when his garage failed he took to driving container-trucks to the far corners of Europe. Postcards would arrive, and telephone calls, from Ancona or Trieste or Rotterdam. Poor Spiraki, who more than anything needed a father’s hand, was left well-nigh fatherless, and Sophia, husbandless, had to knuckle down and work for her living by cleaning the apartments dirtied by the English.

  Androula worries about the strange absent-mindedness that has overtaken Sophia. It’s as if the effort of remembering which country Andonis is in has overloaded her mind’s capacity, so that Androula feels she must call in every day to check that the poor girl hasn’t lapsed into one of her dazes and forgotten which apartments to clean, or what the mikraki will and will not eat for breakfast.

  Crossing herself three times, Androula rises unsteadily to her feet, pays her morning visit to the toilet, and washes her face and hands. In the kitchen she crumbles cake into a saucer of milk and sets it down by the hole under the sink, for the house-snake. Although she can’t swear that she ‘s actually seen this protective animus, she has heard its cool rustle at siesta-time, and sees no reason not to believe, as her mother believed, that its presence has the power to prevent earthquakes, or at the very least to divert them, so that they wreak their vengeance on other houses, other orchards. If Asterios scoffs at the old wife’s tale Androula simply points to the empty saucer, although she doesn’t add what he of all people ought to know – that good luck is hard to come by, so it does no harm to court it a little. As she straightens up, steadying herself against the sink, she feels that the house, at least, is grateful for her concern, and sits more solidly on its foundations, and breathes more easily.

  Through the kitchen window she glimpses Asterios by the beehives at the bottom of the field. A car she recognises as the Dimeros boy’s is parked where the track terminates in a dusty turning circle.

  Filling a plastic container with seed, she goes out to feed the chickens and collect the eggs. From the terrace she can clearly see the yellow banner of Manoli’s shirt. There is someone with him; even at this distance she can make out the ruddy skin of a foreigner. All three men are gazing up the hill towards the house. Asterios has stretched his arms wide, as if to indicate its width. His hands cut the air in slices, boxing in the field, the grey stumps of old vinestocks, the thistled ruts where maize once grew.

  What on earth is Asterios up to? Manoli Dimeros is as sly as his father before him, and always has his beady eye on the money, but if Manoli thinks he can turn her brother into a tourist guide, to show off her own house as if it was history.

  Androula’s stick strikes sounds of protest from the flagstones as she marches round the corner of the building. When she unlatches the wire-netting gate of the chicken run the birds scuttle at her, the cockerels bullying their way to the front as usual. The boss one, a greedy hectoring fellow, pecks savagely at one of the youngest hens and draws blood. Androula swipes at him but fails to make contact. Suddenly incensed, she up-ends her stick and hooks his neck in with the handle. She has been patient for far too long, and now the wretch will get what’s coming to him. Quick as a flash, she hoists him up by the legs and shakes him out like a wet lettuce.

  Upside down he is almost as tall as she, a heavy ungrateful bird she has fattened on her good seed, her apples and worms. She shakes him once more for good measure, laughing at the gaping affronted beak, the shit-spray of fear on the iridescent feathers.

  ‘You’re for the pot, my lad!’ she cries, dragging him across the terrace. ‘I’ve had just about enough of your shenanigans!’

  15

  Light fills the white room. The doors to the balcony are open, the muslin curtains billowing on the wind; outside Ingrid can see a blue rink of sky with hasty scudding clouds.

  In her dream her amiable ex-husband Tim had announced that what she needed was a companion. Which is all very well for Tim, now smugly remarried to Amanda the original earth-mother. Not that she grudges him whatever happiness he enjoys with her, for Tim is not a bad man and, unlike Ingrid, Amanda is a born provider, a presider over Agas and board-games, playgroups and supper-parties; unlike Ingrid, Amanda is hard-wired for wifehood.

  What does rankle, though, is the neutering word companion, which implies that he’s cons
igning her to a dreary Jane Austenish spinsterhood. In the dream she’d objected – ‘I might like a companion,’ she told him, ‘but I don’t need one!’ Even so, it was a concession she’d never have made when awake.

  Sometimes she thinks the trouble with Tim was that there was nothing, really, to find fault with.

  Tim was a considerate lover, trimming his fingernails regularly, always taking his watch off before he came to bed. Approaching her tender parts with scrupulous, spidery hands.

  You’re a lucky girl, her mother had said, finding a man like Tim to look after you.

  The implication being that gratitude was definitely in order. But Ingrid didn’t like having to be grateful, nor, it seemed, was she cut out for the symbiotic glue of marriage. She didn’t like being soft, penetrable, like the jellyfish she used to scoop out of the Firth and hurl against the rocks. They’d lie there helpless and upended, their bluish phosphorescence fading, their long stings shrivelling to sticky ribbons in the sun.

  She thinks of the marital bed, with its aura of duty, its shudderingly cold sheets. Sometimes she thinks Tim has a lot to thank her for. Long before he retrained as a therapist, he’d learned his craft the hard, hands-on way, just from being married to someone like her.

  When she props herself up against the pillows her head throbs. On the way back from the Medusa they’d stopped off at the Totem Bar, where she’d downed a bright blue cocktail which translated as a Poseidon’s Kiss. Evidently it hadn’t mixed too well with the dopio krasi.

  They could have asked Madame Aglaia to call them a taxi, but instead they’d walked home through the darkness, Glenys staggering along on her wedgies, giggling at glowworms: the cheery chappies, she’d called them.