Beautiful Animals

by Lawrence Osborne

  Eventually they got up and strolled back down to the cafe under the palapa, where a table had been laid out in the shade with a bottle of Santorini wine and a tomato salad with black olives. The mother had arranged it. The wind, again, made it slightly sinister. Sam, with some fuss, refused the bread that was offered to her. She said she was gluten-intolerant.

  “Eviva,” Amy said, and raised her glass. “I learned it yesterday down in the port. Cheers, right?”

  “Eviva,” Naomi said, and tapped her glass and then Sam’s. “There’s also another one you should know. Na pethanei o charos—may death die. Death to death!”

  They ate some baklava with black coffee and then agreed to walk together back to the port. By now, in fact, the shadows around the cypresses had begun to shift, and when they set out they were content not to say a word until they turned a corner and saw the first houses of Hydra.

  TWO

  “I was never sure about this view,” Jimmie Codrington said to his wife as the maid came out onto the terrace with their gin and tonics and a bowl of Kalamata olives in oil. You never heard her until the very last moment, and then her charm appeared suddenly, as if by accident, and you had to take notice. “Don’t you think it’s gone downhill over the years? The funny thing is, I can’t say why. It just seems to have become smaller and shabbier.”

  “Maybe we’ve grown bigger and more magnificent.”

  Jimmie liked the idea, but it wasn’t true. The port was still there, as in their shared past, the sea still sparkled all the way to Thermisia, the captains’ houses with their palms and toy cannons and painted wardrobes still belonged to socialites, and the bells from the churches high up above the streets sent down their music to disturb the squares where decrepit cats gathered to witness every dusk.

  “Or we’ve become smaller and shabbier as well. But it did occur to me. Funny, it did occur to me. You may have a point there.”

  Phaine spoke to the maid in Greek.

  “Are you making something for tonight or should we eat out?”

  “As you wish, madame. I can make psarosoupa.”

  “Oh, not that again. We’ll eat out, Carissa. You can leave after you’ve cleared up the drinks.”

  “Very well, madame.”

  Phaine turned back to her husband as the girl walked off, her black uniform cutting a sexual dash against the whiteness of the terrace.

  “Shall we go down to the port and eat octopus? I want to.”

  “I got a call from Nobbins.” It was his pet name for his daughter. “She says we should meet some Americans at the Sunset. She’s made a new friend.”

  “Oh?”

  “Some journalist and his family. I’ve never heard of him.”

  “How tedious. Shall we tell them we have heartburn?”

  “No, I think we should go. I’m tired of upsetting Nobbins. I think we should try and be jolly, like a family, don’t you? Besides, it’s good that she’s meeting people.”

  “Well, meeting people was never her problem, Jimmie.”

  “It’s not always a question of problems. Even if she has a few, she’s hardly alone. Everyone has problems.”

  “That’s like saying everyone gets headaches.”

  An old conversation, many times repeated, and it could rile him easily with its obvious futility.

  “Don’t be so hard on her,” he protested. “She’s had some tough times. I don’t suppose anyone takes their mother’s death easily at that age. But enough of that. Let’s go to dinner.”

  She acquiesced but felt intensely annoyed.

  “All right. Can I get drunk?”

  “Not at all, monster. Best behavior, if you don’t mind. When they ask me your name I’m going to say Funny and see what they say. It’ll be very telling.”

  “I really don’t care. I’ll be going to bed early anyway.”

  He snorted and reached for the olives. The former owner of Belle Air airlines had a way of knowing what his tempestuous wife would or would not do at the end of an evening. Sleep was the last thing on that extensive menu, and in that spirit they made a customary toast:

  “Who’s better than us, Funny?”

  “No one!”

  The maid hovered in the center of the vast terrace, listening for a cue, semi-invisible. It was she alone who was aware of the martins whistling as they swooped around the stone posts that marked its outer perimeter. They were almost alone out here in the mountains, the very last villa of the port at the top of its own vertiginous set of steps and walled off from the rest of the species with graceful emphasis by ancient padlocked doors and iron grilles. From there the sea felt closer and more real than the houses below them. The only other villa across from the gully was closed down, the Greek owners bankrupted by the financial crisis. Paid gardeners groomed the cypresses and olive trees in its garden, but otherwise it was a ghost house. On the island it was mostly the foreigners who had remained solvent, who stayed on for their summers and kept their doors freshly painted. Carissa was a native who had watched them evolve all her life. First the poets and writers renting fishermen’s houses for ten dollars a month. Then the prosperous middle-agers from the cities, then the airline entrepreneurs with a taste for art. She regarded them all as barbarian intruders.

  Codrington had even named his house Belle Air, which was rather lame as well as misspelled (Bel Air, however, would not have evoked his airline), and he had filled it with art made by people who had, over the years, become his friends. The maid had no idea why he valued them, these objects that littered every room. There was a ceramic bust of Hitler smoking a cigarette in the front room that always made them laugh. It was famously ironic. But what was the joke? Her father was a Communist who had always told her that the British were not to be trusted.

  “Even so,” Codrington was saying as he held his wife’s hand, “the summer isn’t so bad this year. I only wish Naomi would enjoy it more.”

  “Where does she go every morning? She gets up at dawn and disappears. I asked Carissa, but she said she didn’t know.”

  She turned a second time to the maid and spoke again in Greek.

  “Where does Naomi go in the morning? Do you make her coffee?”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “She doesn’t say?”

  “No, madame.”

  Phaine returned to English.

  “She’s only here for the free rent anyway. What happened in London?”

  Jimmie confessed that he was not entirely sure.

  “She left Fletcher and Harris, and she’s only said something about a disagreement. She doesn’t tell me anything. Hasn’t since she was fifteen.”

  It was the hour of the swallows. Codrington always fell into melancholy when he thought of his daughter. Perhaps it was because in her there remained some beautiful trace of his first wife. While Naomi was still alive, Helen was not yet dead. There was the lingering vestige of the mother in the daughter. But a broken home disrupts the continuities, in ways that he had not foreseen, that no one ever foresees. Naomi, he thought, being a teenager at the time of Helen’s death from cancer, had never recovered. The broken teenager never mends. The law, in any case, had been a bad choice for her; it didn’t suit her temperament. He suspected that being in litigation for a large firm had been playacting for her, a form of impersonation. But can you make your own children authentic against their will? It was never clear, after all, why the young adopted liberal or leftist positions that clearly had nothing to do with their own material conditions and in fact undermined and contradicted them entirely. At first you could put it down to youth itself. If you weren’t a socialist at twenty you had no heart—and so on. But what if they now had a generation that sailed into their thirties without this deranged view of the world being challenged by anyone they could respect? Not because such people didn’t exist—they were easy to find—but because they were effectively screened out of the person’s consciousness by peer pressure and conformism. It was, he had decided, because they were a spoiled, soft
generation who had never experienced anything in the real world. Indeed, they didn’t really believe in a real world in the first place. Their consciousness had been created by the media, not by life.

  The Codringtons made their way down the steep steps to the port. Dusk enthralled Jimmie. The houses had high walls, relics of a time when feuds and vendettas raged, and even at high noon the calcimine squares could be empty and guarded, as if they remembered the plague. The fuchsias and cicadas and blinding whitewash, the donkeys toiling up the stone steps with their bells, felt removed from the modern world by the simple application of nostalgic stubbornness.

  The Codringtons moved slowly because of Jimmie’s age—he was almost seventy and not as stable as he had once been—and on the way down they met another exile, an old American struggling upward in the opposite direction.

  “Look,” Phaine whispered, “it’s the Ancient Beatnik!”

  “Evening, Jeremy,” Codrington called out to him as they crossed a white square at the same time. The American raised a hand and there were no other words necessary. So it was after a few years. You simply raised a hand and that was enough. The semaphore of the tamed.

  They came down into the port just as the last ferry back to the mainland was leaving. A few soldiers stood around the harbor with slung weapons, inactive and mute, staring at the Hellenic ship as it pulled out with its lights ablaze and the tourist music animating the decks. Up the little hill to the left of the harbor, Jimmie’s walking stick tapping the cobbles, they came to the first bend where cliffs plunged down to the water, young people clinging to the slabs of rock below like prehistoric animals. There were terraces with tables of dark blue cloth, bronzed Slavic women with oiled hair laid out on sofas with their drinks. Above the restaurant’s terrace stood one of the old island windmills, aloofly superior to the frustrated and harassed waiters in aprons. Sloping pines like giant bonsai would have shaded the terrace in sunlight. By the outer wall with its row of cannons, the Haldanes were already seated with Naomi within a glow of pleasurable energy and they had a startling arrangement of shellfish laid on ice between them. Jimmie’s rapid eye spotted the young girl seated next to his daughter at once: the friend, the Huckleberry friend, he thought at once with a quick approval and a nod to himself.

  The tables around them were filled with British and French families. Here and there were wealthy Athenians escaping from their national tragedy, and perhaps relieved to be back among their true peers. The couples who came every summer, the men with the yachts who docked for a month and then disappeared again. Sam caught Jimmie’s eye and she wondered about him. He looked like a decaying nightclub singer. Naomi’s stepmother was an appalling snob, you could tell at once. The kind of couple who would vet their daughter’s prospective friends, even if it was just with a glance. But things soon settled down and flowed on, because it was the law of summers among the rich that the season of leisure should flow like a large and charming river. The imperative was to have a good time and float along on the luminescent surface. You couldn’t back down or show weakness. It was not that different from the horror of the Hamptons, except this was less pretentious and slightly less soulless. She was beginning to like these people. At least they were curious about strangers; they asked her questions, they pestered her for insights into her baffling generation. Here being young had a value that wasn’t just physical or sexual. Youth became the fount of other people’s curiosity—what did she think, what did she want to do in the future, how did she feel about the old? It amused them. It amused them because it mattered.

  Sam didn’t exactly tell the truth in answer to such questions. As she ventured into a few glasses of wine under the watchful eye of her mother, less comfortable thoughts invaded her head. Even though she was still young, it had occurred to her that if she could relive any moment in the past she would refuse. But why was that so? A thousand summers could be like this, each one as beautiful as the last, and still nothing worth reliving a second time. It was an amazing idea.

  Naomi and Sam connected silently through their eyes. The older girl reeled her in in this way, and Sam felt for a moment that she was the kite this time. Jimmie was being a raconteur, that most terrible of things. Naomi half turned to her and there was disdain in her frozen smile. Isn’t it awful? the look said to her new friend. Isn’t he? The two of them enjoyed a moment of contempt, but Sam was not as disdainful. She found the old man rather jolly and gimcrack.

  So, she thought, Naomi’s like me. She’s tormented.

  Naomi leaned over and said to her ear, “He goes on like this for hours. Who knows who’ll be mown down. It’s like a snowplow without gears. Should I say something? Your poor parents.”

  But Amy was not suffering at all. Fascinating, she was thinking to herself. A man with some force!

  After dinner Naomi left her father and Phaine at Sunset and walked the Haldanes home to Vlychos. Just before Kamini the path rose to a series of platforms and steps and a restaurant called Kodylenia’s where the terrace was still open and a few old men sat with their shot glasses of ouzo in an aura of timeless patience. Oil lamps hung from the trellis rocked back and forth to the sound of old Tsitsanis songs piped through speakers. During the day, Naomi recalled, it was usually Mahler and sundry hits of Rossini. The Greeks didn’t look up. A well-heeled French family did. They came down into Kamini, boats hauled up on the sand. On the far side of the beach stood a ruined cafe, blood red, with shattered windows and an old sign that read Mouragio Cafe-Bar in Greek. A half-moon had risen above the dry mountain, and by its light the forms of horses gradually became visible in the fields. They stood perfectly still, attuned to the smell of humans.

  The house lay above the path to the left—somewhat before Vlychos—and the fields below it tilted away toward treacherous cliffs and the sea. But even there, on perilous pastures, horses stood quietly attacking the wet grass. It was the usual white house with Aegean-blue frames and pillars, and there were lemon trees outside it. The bloated and neglected fruit lay all over the grass.

  “Do you want to come up for some tea?” Amy asked as they came to the villa’s wall and the iron gate swung open.

  They went up to their own terrace and they saw Jeffrey standing there with his pipe and a box of matches. There was a look of surprise that didn’t quite seem to be directed only at them. Perhaps, Naomi thought, that was his default expression all the time. Surprise at life itself, or else an endearing incompetence. He was lighting oil lamps but he also turned on the more efficient orange glass electric lamps as well. There were two rocking chairs and two rattan sofas, and between them a glass table covered with desiccated ornamental sponges. The island had once been the center of the Greek sponge trade. They sprawled into the cushions and it occurred to Naomi that the evening was ending much better than it had begun. The Haldanes were more relaxed when in their own company and away from the intimidating headlights of her father and his overbearing confidence, which had crushed them in subtle and intangible ways of which they were only partially conscious.

  Sam sat curled up by the edge of the porch with the wind whipping her hair. Her eyes were slow and absorbent while her father talked.

  “Is it true,” he said, blowing smoke, “that your father offered a ride on his yacht? I won’t go, but Sam and Chris would love it.”

  “Yes,” Naomi said, “he offered. We can sail right around the island. We do it a lot. Good swimming.”

  “I’d love to,” Sam said, but without any drama.

  “Will you go, Amy?”

  “Sure. I want to see the wild side of the island.”

  “You can’t walk to the wild side, can you?”

  Naomi shook her head. “Not really.”

  “I’m not really into the wild sides of islands,” Jeffrey said. “Though I like to walk on the wild side from time to time. I’m happy to stay here and wallow with my crippled leg, but everyone else—”

  “Then I’ll arrange everything,” Naomi said.

  “Can we go s
pearfishing?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t see why not.”

  But Sam didn’t want to go spearfishing, she just wanted to know if it was possible in that unknown sea.

  “You’ll only see dolphins,” her mother put in majestically. “And you can’t spear those.”

  “Why don’t you stay the night, Naomi?” Amy finally suggested. “We have two extra rooms, all made up. It’s a long walk to your house. Just call your dad and let him know.”

  “That’s a fine idea,” Sam said quietly. “Will you?”

  Naomi weighed it up for a moment, then let herself slide.

  “All right, I will.”

  Sam took her up to one of the spare rooms. It was on the east side looking over the sloping fields, with the dark blue Greek shutters pinned back against the walls and dried herbs in glasses set on the tables. The owner’s books were here: Seferiades and Kazantzakis, in aging English editions. Thistles lay scattered over the ship-timber floors. The bed was iron, creaky and high as in the old days when people died in them with gravitas and in confident expectation of an afterlife. There was a white table with a washbasin and jug, some lemons in the first days of decay. It was a room where Sam sometimes read alone.

  They sat on the bed for a while, with their knees curled up beneath them, and gossiped about the evening. Naomi wanted to know about Sam’s petulant brother, Christopher, who was in his room. He was entering the moody phase of adolescence and often retreated into his computers and online games. Naomi had always wondered about having a brother. It must be exhilarating occasionally, just because of the competitive hostility.