by Alison Fell
Ingrid swivelled her chair seawards so that she could put her feet up on the low perimeter wall. ‘I guess so, yes. The evidence is pretty strong.’
He watched her smooth her skirt down over her knees. He knew he was talking too fast, too nervously. She rummaged in a large raffia bag and brought out a glasses case, a hardback book stamped ‘Institute of Archaeology’ and a handful of pens accompanied by a small shower of sand. Finally she retrieved a packet of cigarettes and slid one out. When he leaned over to light it for her he smelled a jasminey perfume mixed with the lemon-butter scent of some unguent on her skin. He picked up the menu, although he didn’t feel in the least bit hungry. ‘So what do you fancy? The food here is, you know, so-so.’
‘Etsi-ketsi,’ she agreed. ‘Maybe I’ll just have souvlaki.’
A flyer on the table caught his eye. We regret that the Hatzidakis are unable to perform tonight due to a family bereavement. They will be replaced by the wonderful local group, ‘Exadelphi’. This wasn’t part of the plan at all. Cousins, indeed, he thought. More likely the kitchen staff decked out in cummerbunds. He threw down the flyer with a sigh of disappointment.
‘They’re not so good?’ Ingrid was watching him anxiouly.
‘There’s no comparison! The Hatzidakis are very authentic, very Cretan.’
The ouzos came, with mezedes. He poured water into Ingrid’s glass and watched the viscous liquid turn as white as milk. He couldn’t help noticing that her short hair was no longer straight and spiky, but curled softly above her brow in a style that reminded him of the young Mercouri as Stella, the wild bouzouki singer, for whom love and freedom went hand in hand. An iconic film of the fifties: obligatory viewing, he’d told Karen, if you really wanted to understand the Greeks.
Determined to force Stella into marriage, the domineering Miltos had wooed her not with roses, but with a lit stick of dynamite. Karen had loved the film; she’d even allowed that it was feminist before its time. But she’d been reared on Hollywood happy endings, and couldn’t condone Stella’s final defiant walk towards Miltos and his knife.
Love is a switchknife, as the song went, with a double blade of joy and pain.
There was an 80s compilation on the PA system, in deference, presumably, to the demographic of the audience. The Heavenly Twins had taken to the floor, and were innocently jigging about to the camp and flippant strains of the YMCA. He wondered what age Ingrid was – in her mid-thirties, maybe? Older by a decade, certainly, than Mercouri in Stella. He must have noted down her birthdate with the other passport details, but in his funk had simply forgotten it.
‘I tried that once.’ Ingrid pointed the tip of her cigarette at a small boat that was puttering across the bay, a storm-lantern mounted in its prow; smiling wryly, she bent her arm back and swung it in an arc, as if operating a tiller. ‘It’s not as easy as it looks. I’ve never said sorry in so many languages!’
Yiannis laughed. ‘It takes practice, I agree. Of course in Greece we more or less grow up on the sea. I still have my father’s boat, as a matter of fact, down at the quay. Perhaps you’d like to try it again?’
‘Are you kidding?’
Her face was so wide open and unwary that for a second he stared at her, transfixed by her excitement. Almost immediately a thought struck him, one that could only embarrass them both. He pressed on, hoping she hadn’t noticed.
‘So you’re here for how long?’ For once he’d come dangerously close to blushing.
‘Another week. I wish it could be more.’
‘A week!’ he exclaimed. ‘But you need a month, two months. No one can know Crete in less.’
Ingrid spread her hands and shrugged regretfully. ‘Of course, but.’
He saw he had been too stern. Buffeted by obscure currents of distress, he frowned at the Dimeros boy, who had arrived with bread and wine. Dynamite, roses, whatever; he’d definitely forgotten the art of flirting. Already she was slipping through his fingers, getting ready to morph herself into a laurel tree and make her escape like some Daphne or Thetis.
There was an elemental quality in the impatience that flared in him. His hands frisked about the table, looking for something to pick up.
‘Davidoffs,’ he observed casually, his hand alighting on her cigarette packet. Some default mode his mind had slipped into had already set the trap. He picked up a pen, wrote on the packet, and slid it across the tablecloth.
‘What’s this?’ She held it away from her, squinting at the inscription. He watched her retrieve her glasses from their leather case and put them on. She hadn’t turned a hair, which made him feel not only relieved, but also uncomfortably conscious of the way his mind was serving up all the wrong questions, while the right ones remained unasked.
‘Now that is wierd. The thing is, it’s all one word.’ Taking the pen from him, she wrote quickly. ‘Like this. Akakallis. Actually Hutchinson has her as a Cretan candidate for the Great Goddess.’ She tapped her book, which indeed bore the name Hutchinson. ‘She was Minos’s daughter, supposedly- so, Ariadne’s sister, half-sister of Asterios the Minotaur.’ She had slipped so effortlessly into scholarly mode that Yiannis felt rather as if he was back at school, and no star pupil at that. ‘Seemingly she had several sons by Apollo, who were suckled by wolves, or goats. Phylakis and Philander – they were twins – and there was Kydon – as in Kydonia?’
Yiannis nodded. Kydonia, now Chania, had been the ancient capital: that much he did know.
‘Kydon was suckled by a bitch, I think.’ Pausing mid-lecture, she gave him a look which was nothing short of imperious. ‘This is to do with your case, is it?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Which you can’t talk about?’
‘Which I can’t talk about.’ The reading glasses magnified her remarkably pale eyes. For a moment Yiannis, dazed, felt as if he was falling into the moon.
‘If it’s any use to you, Akakallis is also a name for the narcissus.’
His memory flagged up Theo’s tox report. Narkiso, he thought, startled. To grow numb. He saw Manoli Dimeros advancing with a tray, and a sea bass swam into view and settled on the table in front of him, garnished with singed branches of thyme and chunks of lemon. ‘Is it, indeed?’
Ingrid was watching him with a pursed, challenging expression. She had moved her chair back into place, so that they were now sitting side by side, with hardly a hand’s breadth between them.
‘So did I pass the test?’
‘With flying colours,’ said Yiannis.
And is there someone in London? he thought, but the question refused to ask itself. He imagined her in lamp-black London clothes, on the arm of a large and professorial Englishman. A woman with her looks – not to mention her brains – surely wouldn’t lack admirers.
He stripped the spine cleanly from his fish and laid it on a side-plate. ‘So how is your work?’ he asked, vaguely recalling their conversation at the Museum. Had she said that she was writing a book?
Ingrid laughed. ‘Off the record?’
‘Sorry about that! Goes with the territory, I’m afraid.’
He touched her left wrist an inch above the silver links of her watchstrap, shaking a penitent head at himself. His fingers tingled with some kind of static charge that brought a film of sweat to his forehead. When he took a forkful of bass the forgotten flavour of the sea flooded into his mouth.
He ate steadily and tried to listen. He learned that her scholar, Alice Kober – he’d heard ‘Cobber’ until she spelled it out for him – had died two years before the Linear B script was finally deciphered, and had therefore failed to reap the reward for her superhuman efforts.
An English architect called Michael Ventris appeared to be the villain of the piece: announcing his decipherment on the BBC, he hadn’t even bothered to mention her name. A very bad show indeed, Yiannis agreed, nodding dutifully. Of course he knew about Sir Arthur Evans, all Cretans did, since the tourist trade more or less depended on him, but he wasn’t entirely sure that he’d heard of
Michael Ventris.
In the kitchen a quarrel erupted and died.
‘The utter determination of the woman.’ Ingrid continued, spreading her hands helplessly, as if words were about to fail her. The reading glasses, forgotten, were perched on top of her head. A ripple of smoke from her cigarette curled back into her face, and she coughed abruptly, her eyes watering. ‘… it just beggars belief.’
The expression that passed across her face was so furtive and haggard that Yiannis sensed he was being asked to endorse not only the unsung struggles of her American, but also something more personal, some proud and effortful aloneness that was all her own.
On the PA system the 80s hits had given way to a Greek selection, although there was still no sign of the so-called Cousins. He recognised the irresistible tune of Dimitroula-mou, and in his mind’s eye his mother threw her sewing aside, her arms slithering up above her head. Fingers clicking, she rose as if spellbound from the sofa, her apron falling from her, to dance in front of the radio.
‘If you ask me, she simply worked herself to death,’ Ingrid said.
He sipped his wine and nodded sympathetically. It was very sad, he agreed, that Alice Kober had never made it to Crete. Already his fingertips were drumming on the table, his hips beginning to pitch and toss to the beat.
‘An old favourite of my mother’s,’ he explained. ‘Dimitroula is her name – short for Dimitria.’ He caught sight of Aglaia in the doorway, rose-petals at the ready; she was turning to exhort the Cousins within, urging them to sally forth and, he suspected, massacre the Wedding Dance.
‘I suppose I came here, in a way, because she couldn’t,’ said Ingrid, as if to herself.
Yiannis’ patience was wearing thin. He turned and looked her squarely in the face.
‘Well I’m very glad you did. Whatever the reason.’
There was a silence in which Ingrid tidied grizzled green pepper slices to the side of her plate. A pelican flew low across the shallows, encumbered by its heavy, burdened beak, and a memory of Karen shivered and settled for a moment in the pit of his stomach.
Yiannis felt angry with himself. Why couldn’t he just accept the evidence that they weren’t on the same wave-length, and could not, despite his best efforts, arrive there?
‘You know what I think?’ he declared. ‘I think she’s haunting you, this Alice!’
He saw with relief that the dancers were filing out: three boys and three girls, not one of them a day over eighteen. One of the girls had a wall eye; the other he recognised as one of the sales assistants from Evnochides’ dress shop. He and Ingrid clapped energetically.
‘Tavrokatharpsia,’ she said suddenly, darting a glance at him.
‘Excuse me?’ The word meant the bull-jumping games of Minoan times, but beyond that he didn’t know what she was getting at.
‘Is my accent that bad?’
Katharpazo, he remembered, literally meant to take the bull by the horns. The understanding dawned in his knees, rose up warmly through his chest, and broke out in a beam on his face. He leaned across and clinked his glass against hers.
‘Yamas!’
‘Yamas!’ she echoed, grinning at him.
In the centre of the floor the dancers were doing their best, skipping stiffly about and side-stepping for all they were worth. Ingrid watched raptly, swaying along with the music, craning to check out the footwork. She turned to him with that wide-eyed, winning look.
‘You can always tell, can’t you? Which ones really have to dance.’ She pointed to a stocky girl with black bouncing curls. ‘That wee one there – you’d think she’d just got on a direct line to God!’
Yiannis studied the eloquent limbs, the joy barely contained on the round young face. He nodded, his heart thumping against his ribs: that was it exactly; he couldn’t have put it better himself. He put his hand over Ingrid’s and left it there.
Afterwards Yiannis had no idea how long they had sat there. What he could remember was a series of discrete ritual actions: things said or seen, or danced, or merely imagined. The spine of the sea bass on his plate, as neat and clean as though Terpsikore herself had eaten it; the dancers guzzling Cokes at the table by the door, tapping onanistically at their mobiles.
Children were taken home, the oil lamps on the tables burned low. Jaap and his paramour, not quite touching, strolled casually away along the skinny shore that led round the headland to Panomeli.
‘You said your wife was Australian?’
‘Yes. She died ten years ago.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ingrid murmured. ‘She must have been so young.’
‘Thirty-three.’ And then he’d added, truthfully, ‘I’m still adjusting.’
The relief of the admission had washed through him like a tide. They’d been dancing by then, in the formal way of schoolkids at a ballroom class, keeping a decent distance between them; underfoot, the stone floor was sticky with crushed rose-petals.
None of these elements linked together into a narrative, for in his euphoria narratives belonged not to the past but to a future which contained the story-to-be: of the bed, his father’s boat, the picnic, and thereafter the many introductions that would need to be made, as well as the doubts and protestations that would have to be overcome, or simply swept aside.
His hand on the nape of her neck. In the greenish light from the dashboard, a vertiginous kiss. Afterwards she drew away and laid her hand against his cheek.
‘Not yet,’ she said, and he could feel her trembling, and hear the leafy rustle of her skirt. He took her hand and kissed it. He hadn’t bargained on such restraint, (but what did he expect? That she’d fall into bed at the first opportunity?) ‘You don’t mind?’ she’d asked, and he’d laughed, exhilarated, for how could he mind a constraint that delivered him, in ways he couldn’t have explained, from his own impediments?
And after she got out of the car he watched her run up the alley and turn up the spiral stairs, letting her go with the sudden certainty that he and Fate were in accord, for once. He would do the loving, would be the adorant, not the adored, and this was not only how it would be, this was how he wanted it to be.
With this thought in his mind he’d driven off with both hands on the wheel, singing at the top of his voice, ‘My heart and I agree, She’s everything on earth to me.’ – ‘Stella by Starlight’, the 1947 Frank Sinatra version – knowing he was probably going to make himself ridiculous, but not giving a shit. Caution had been his bedfellow for too long, and he was more than glad to see the back of it. He took the bends on the back road at a lick, feeling the car whipped by bamboo fronds and trailing briars, and when he passed the Katomeli signpost he felt like shooting the thing up, just for the hell of it.
36
The day is windless, the sea in the bay flat calm. From this distance the beach is a featureless strip dotted with identical blue sun umbrellas, although Ingrid’s own umbrella is distinguishable by the red sarong dangling limply from the spokes. A marker flag, on days of powerful currents, to show her how far downshore she has drifted.
One hundred metres out she turns on her back and floats, shutting her eyes and letting the sun beat down on her eyelids.The sea limns her sweetly, seals her in a bubble of skin. High overhead a plane shines like a needle, stitching its way towards Africa. Blue above, and blue below.
When she’d arrived at the beach it was almost lunchtime, and the Giffords were already ensconced. Ken pushed up his sunglasses, sardonic.
‘Been hard at it, eh?’
Glenys was washing two peaches, dousing them with a bottle of mineral water. She handed one to Ken and dried her hands on a Kleenex. ‘We called by last night to see if you wanted a bite or something?’
This was the moment she’d been hoping to avoid, when she’d have to admit where she’d been. Sweat oozed from her pores, the oily sweat of indoors. She made light of it, stirring the sand with her toe, glad of the sunglasses that concealed her eyes.
Ken greeted the news with a grin and a ‘Good o
n you, girl.’
Glenys blew on her fingers and flapped them, as if the thought was too hot to handle. ‘Well, I don’t mind saying, love, I wouldn’t mind being in your dancing-shoes!’ Wide-eyed, avid for gossip, she swung her feet off the sunbed to make room for Ingrid, swishing the sand away hospitably with the flat of her hand.
There was no sign of the Gifford parents, and the sunbeds on either side had been claimed by the new Dutch families, the men smoking silently behind thrillers, the women – cropped-blonde, bare-breasted – digging three naked infants into a foot-deep hole in the sand. She’d found a spare sunbed nearby and claimed it quickly. Putting a safe distance between herself and the Giffords, noticing with a shock of dismay that one of the Dutchwomen had had a mastectomy.
It was the left breast, she remembers now, that had been removed. The surgery had left very little scarring: what was disturbing was that from one side she looked female, and from the other, entirely boyish. Also that she didn’t seem to care whose eyes were irresistibly drawn by the missing symmetry. She thinks of the tanned flatness of the torso, the visible configuration of ribs. Half-boy, half-woman.Wavelets of unease lap at her stomach, taking her back to the adolescent country of the in-between.
She remembers running the gauntlet, the boys calling out from their huddle outside the chip shop, spitting the words angrily out of the corners of their mouths.
Hey blondie! Hey brainbox! The same boys she’d played with only the year before, hut-building innocently in the reed-beds, picking mussels on the cold seaweedy shore. She’d known how to trade insults then, how to face them down. But these new games had a new sting of humiliation. For the first time she was conscious of a handicap – something that wasn’t quite right in her, even a part that was missing.
Yes she had a clever tongue in her head to brush them off like burrs, but how was she supposed to know – as the other girls, in some deep ingrained way, seemed to know – what the jeers really meant, how they were supposed to be taken as tribute?
