The Lizard in the Cup

by Peter Dickinson

  “Great;’ bellowed Mr. Hott. “Hi! Yanni!”

  In fast, horrible Greek he ordered a crate of beer-bottles, paid for them and the drinks, slung the crate on his shoulder and followed Tony up the quay. Even the lip-puckered painters stopped to watch as she went by. She was wearing linen slacks and a plain white blouse, but the moment she had stood up Pibble saw that she was moving not with yesterday’s slouch but with a poised sexuality. It made him uncomfortable; it reminded him of Zoe Palangalos. He wondered what had produced the change—not himself, surely. Not virile Mr. Hott, please God. Perhaps it was the tea.

  “Is he always like this?” he whispered to Nancy who was trotting bright-eyed at his side.

  “Like what? Mark? Oh, yes, only worse. He’s a bit subdued today. I should think he was up all night—did you notice his eyes? He goes out night-fishing, and sometimes they don’t get back till dawn. Yippee! Look at that!”

  The buggy was typical Thanatos, a sawn-off Volkswagen with racing tyres, its bodywork imperial purple picked out here and there with gross gold thetas. It was plushly garish. Nancy nipped into the passenger seat, leaving Pibble and Mr. Hott to cling to the exiguous back seat while Tony took the buggy rollicking over the cobbles. She changed gear as often as possible, roaring the engine as she did so, and as soon as she was out of the town she ignored the road, drummed up a dune and took them slithering down steep sand to the beach, which the set of the tide laid level here for more than a mile.. The further end of this wide sweep had been gobbled up by the speculator who built the South Bay villas, but nearer the town it was open sand. A few boys were bathing, and a group of black-clad women were poking along the water’s edge with strange-shaped sticks. Tony curved round them, then weaved along the lacy fringe of the sea, playing with the lap of the waves so as to send sheets of water fanning from under her offside wheels. If Thanatos had been skiing out there, they could have had a well-matched water-fight. Pibble wondered whether this stink and clamour and show was the normal way to arrive at an expatriates’ party.

  Nancy and Mr. Hott stood up in their seats and began to yell and wave as they reached the first of the villas. Hott gripped Pibble’s shoulder to steady himself and rode the buggy like a charioteer. The villas were all different, though equal in their ugliness and unsuitability, and the fourth was set a little back from the beach so as to allow room for a terrace of brick pillars and vine-shaded walks. The area held a small crowd; as the buggy bellowed nearer head after head turned to watch it. Now they had an audience. Tony stopped the car and switched off, so that Mr. Hott’s crude Canadian shouts of fellowship had the air to themselves. He vaulted out of his seat, heaved the beer on to his shoulder and rushed up the slope like a commando on a battle course. People answered his cries with brief, amiable jeers, but continued to watch the strangers. Nancy and Tony followed them up the slope, walking hand in hand like schoolgirls—as though Nancy felt that somehow she had to protect her new friend from the inquisition of all those eyes—for there was no doubt who the eyes were looking at. Pibble wondered if it was the release from Thanatos’s grinding personality that had allowed Tony to revert—to bounce like a released spring—from the submissive odalisque to the Bomber Queen. Or had yesterday’s melodrama released old impulses from her guerrilla past, stirring her to this potent walk, that wild driving?

  Anyway, with such a distraction a couple of paces in front of him, Pibble was able to slip in to the party as unnoticeably as a waiter. As the mutter of talk rose again to full throttle, he decided that he was unlikely to be introduced to anybody, and would be lucky even to get a drink. He was surprised when Mr. Hott rushed at him to give him a tall glass of beer, all froth after the bumping across the dunes.

  “Come and meet your host,” he shouted. “Nan’s got other things on her mind. Randy’s a great guy—he’d better be, because he’s my neighbour—but if he goes blank and rushes off to look in a mirror, pay no attention. He’s got this satyriasis problem, and he controls it by self-hypnotism … Hi, Randy, I want you to meet an ex-cop called Jimmy Pibble …”

  During the next hour Pibble was also introduced to Signora Lucci, who hated Greece but was living on Hyos because she’d had the misfortune to be pronounced dead in a Roman hospital, and by the time she had recovered, her death certificate was already passing through the entrails of the Italian bureaucratic system, which meant that she dared not set foot in her homeland for fear that some official would insist on burying her; he met John Bonce of Sheffield, who had suddenly been taken ill in Hong Kong and now continued to exist thanks to a single Chinese kidney; Mrs. Bonce, the surviving member of a pair of Siamese twins, who knew at any instant what her sister was up to in the Great Beyond; Mr. Dokker, a Norwegian, who was engaged in litigation to have his disease, hitherto unknown to medical dictionaries, named after himself and not after the doctor who had diagnosed it; Mlle. Guillerand, a novelist allergic to paper, who wrote on silk; old Mrs. McCallender from Wellington, New Zealand, whose companion warned Pibble in a whisper not to mention the name of Sigmund Freud because that would send the old lady into a three-day coma—a neurosis dating back to 1921, when she’d made the journey to Vienna only to be told by Freud that she was not in need of analysis (Mrs. McCallender then talked to Pibble in a manner provocatively designed to bring the conversation round to the potent name); the companion, of course, who had webbed fingers; and a few others whose names and diagnostics didn’t register.

  He found himself a surprising success with these people, only partly because he was a new face, or rather a new ear. It was when they discovered he was staying at Porphyrocolpos that they became animated. Their dislike and distrust of Thanatos was extraordinary—far more than mere jealousy. He was a newcomer, whereas many of the villa people had lived on Hyos for nearly ten years. He would spoil the island by making it famous. He would bring tourists—he might even build an hotel, and then there would be too much money about and the Hyotes would be spoilt.

  “It’s happening all over the world,” said Mr. Bonce, puffing out his furry cheeks. “I knocked about a bit before I took ill, and I’ve seen it again and again. Money’s all right in the right hands, but you’ve got to be careful who gets it or you’ll knock the bottom out of a lot of traditions what have kept these people going for generations; you’ve seen ’em, ways of working the fields, or keeping theirselves amused for an evening. Take fishing—not that I can touch fish these days, more’s the pity—you still get bloody good fish on Hyos, fresh every morning from the night-fishing boats—Mark goes out with them—he’ll tell you—and they chill what they don’t sell here and ship it to the mainland. Any day now they’ll find they get a better price there, and you won’t be able to buy any fish on Hyos what hasn’t been shipped to the mainland and then brought back. And it’ll taste like a bloody loofah, too.”

  “And the beeootiful little donkeys,” said Signora Lucci. “When your Thanatos make all the peasants rich, they buy cars, and where then are the donkeys?”

  “Has he decided to build a hotel?” said Pibble, treading carefully round an actual lie about his own knowledge. “Where will he put it?”

  “That’s what we’re waiting for,” said Mr. Bonce. “We’ll fight it, eh, Mark?”

  “Fight what?” said Mr. Hott, bringing Pibble another bottle of beer.

  “Thanatos building a bloody great hotel behind the beach.”

  “He can’t do that,” said Mr. Hott. “That’s where they’re going to put the aerodrome. Only flat bit of island.”

  “What aerodrome?” said Mr. Bonce. Pibble could hear, in those four syllables, property values falling at a thousand drachs a second.

  “Over our dead bodies,” hissed Signora Lucci.

  “It’s all right for you,” said Mr. Hott. “You can get up and walk about when something has happened over your dead body.”

  Signora Lucci laughed, but Pibble thought there was something brutal about Mr. Hott’s gross healt
h in this parade of clinical cases. Perhaps his poor eyesight qualified him.

  “Hi, Randy,” called Mr. Bonce. “Mark’s got a story about building an aerodrome behind the beach.”

  Their host turned, holding a bottle whose label was a maroon and yellow tartan. He was a lean, stooped, likeable-looking man, tanned as brown as the beach.

  “It comes every four years,” he said. “I think I’ve heard it five times. They won’t cut the first sod till 2025.”

  He turned away.

  “Is he the oldest inhabitant?” asked Pibble.

  “I’m the youngest,” said Mr. Bonce, looking half-relieved. “I bought my house in ’68, but they didn’t say anything about plans for an aerodrome. These Greeks are all bloody sharks, and the lawyers are the worst.”

  “But even the lawyers are being very good under this government,” said Signora Lucci.

  “No politics,” said Mr. Hott. “Come and meet our authoress, Jimmy. Hi, Diane, I want you to meet Jimmy Pibble. This is Diane Guillerand, who has the dirtiest mind between Venice and Beirut.”

  “I expect that’s where the real competition begins,” said Pibble.

  Mr. Hott bellowed meaninglessly, but Mlle Guillerand looked at them with peasant’s eyes. She was only in her early twenties, but already as dumpy and sallow as a Normandy matriarch. She was alone when they found her, staring at the beach-buggy standing strident on the classic sands.

  “It’s more practical than it looks,” said Pibble, wondering whether her gaze meant disgust or envy.

  “Je l’ai déjà vu,” she said, turning sluggishly towards him. At first her method of conversation was contradiction, but after batting half a dozen of his serves firmly into the net, she introduced a new ploy, a rapid muttered monologue in French, which stopped and waited for an answer at a point which Pibble hadn’t even realised was a question. Five minutes’ talk with her was a long time, and Mr. Hott left before that. Pibble could usually speak adequate French after a few hours’ practice; now it was like walking through deep mud in gumboots, each phrase a squelching effort that threatened to leave all meaning behind in the morass of grammar; he was telling her his adventure in the olive tree when she suddenly shrugged and walked off, leaving him to mouth an unnecessary subjunctive at one of the vine-covered pillars.

  He stayed with his back to the party and gazed out over the sea, bored and ashamed. After all, it was his own fault; he had insinuated himself into this farcical community in order to spy on them, to search for assassins and drug-pedlars. There were no assassins here—Mr. Bonce was the latest comer, four years ago. There very well might be addicts in a crowd such as this—Mile Guillerand had the look and the manners of one—you are always likely to find a bunch of soaks and a few dope-takers in any bored and affluent backwater—but what business was it of his? Yes, yes, the drug trade is an evil thing, and you have a duty to damage it if the chance comes your way. But that was only an excuse—really he was acting for Thanassi.

  He looked at the garish vehicle on the sand and thought about his master—there was no other word for the mysterious relationship that Thanatos exacted. He was being asked to behave in a certain way out of loyalty. This had happened before: for all his working life he had been loyal to the police force, not merely working intolerable hours but, for instance, several times helping to conceal damaging truths about his colleagues. They would no doubt have done the same for him. Now, ejected from that world, he was ashamed—not for having done what he did, but for having accepted that it was a virtue, unpleasant but admirable, instead of a practical and psychological necessity. Everybody is loyal to something. Take old Butler—his apparent cynicism about his job (supposing he was telling the truth in the cemetery) isn’t a failure of loyalty, but a manifestation of loyalty to an idea—arguably, because the idea is abstract, more admirable—or at least more civilised—than a bread-and-butter job-loyalty. What the hell does it matter that the abstract idea is the imagined spirit of King Willow? Or obnoxious Mr. Hott, to judge by his brief outburst over the stolen pictures, was strongly loyal to his art, and so were the charter artists and doddering Father Polydore—and that’s only a straight extension of selfishness. In a way, somehow, the loyalty of the courtiers of the Sun King to the monstrous egotist at Porphyrocolpos was more admirable—though, as Thanatos had said, they had nothing to lose by it. There was the same attractive community of people working together for an end as Pibble had known in the police, but far more focussed and comprehensible —he was here because Thanatos needed him here, and that was enough? No. It was just a self-comforting notion. Supposing, by some impossible fluke in the warm wind of love he were able to steal the millionaire’s girl from him … Yesterday’s girl, that is. He was frightened of today’s. Now that the wish had become the desire, the impossible the improbable—he smiled sourly at the fancy that it could be his own senescent charms that had caused the change in her; the smile stayed on his face, meaningless as the rictus of some archaic Apollo, as he realised that he had preferred the longing in its wish-form. In its desire-form it shrivelled him with alarm.

  “What’s so funny?” shouted Mr. Hott in his ear. “Frightened Diane off, did you? You dirty old man.”

  “Bored her off, I’m afraid. Where can I have a pee?”

  “Come over to my pad.”

  “I ought to be taking Tony home.”

  “She ought to be taking you home, you mean. She’s lost herself somewhere, man. You’ve time to come with me and piss some of that beer out. I want to show you my pictures.”

  “I won’t know anything about them,” said Pibble as they left the alcohol cackle behind and crossed a sad lawn, brown as fudge.

  “Sure, sure. But you tell your boss about them and perhaps he’ll buy a few to hang in this hotel. They’d look fine up there.”

  “Up where?”

  “Oh. Any high building. You get a different kind of light once you’re properly above ground level. That’s why I like selling in Manhattan. Cast your bread upon the waters, that’s my motto. I take you round at a party, and you get Thanatos to buy my stuff.”

  Mysteriously Pibble found Mr. Hott faintly more likeable for this frank admission that his attentiveness hadn’t been friendliness. There are times when one doesn’t feel like being claimed as a friend by anyone, let alone a brawling bear from Canada.

  The studio was a surprise. Pibble had expected that Mr. Hott’s unnecessary energies would release themselves into flying paint, littered like pigeon-droppings on to every surface. Instead the big shed might have been a laboratory, with a polished cork floor and finically arranged shelves and work-areas. The windows were all thickly shuttered, as though the diurnal motion of the sun had to be kept out, as a disorderly element. Even the necessary shambles of crating up a series of paintings to be shipped off to America had been managed in a tidy fashion, with the off-cuts of timber piled neatly in one corner and all the sawdust and shavings swept up.

  As if in defiance of this neat, cool, rational room Mr. Hott lit three joss-sticks and fitted them into holders on the workbench, before picking out the few uncrated paintings and showing them, without comment, to his visitor. There seemed to be two kinds: the white-on-whites which Pibble remembered from the magazine feature, and a series of gaudy constructions, random bric-a-brac cemented into position on hardboard and then blobbed with smoky stars of yellow sealing-wax. Pibble didn’t care for these at all, but he got much more out of the white on whites than he had when he’d read the magazine, partly because he was now able to see how three-dimensional they were, and partly because he was allowed to study the process by which they’d achieved their final, vestal ambiguity. Under the blue lights he traced with fascination the development from a brisk, brilliant sketch of two foreshore cottages; it went through five stages and finished as a six-foot abstract of staring whites. The final stage was more of sculpture than a painting, so deep was its one careful oval incised into
the surface and so far did the one balancing rectangle project.

  Mr. Hott pressed a switch behind the easel, and an artificial sun rose, an Anglepoise lamp fixed somehow to an electric motor which drove it in a creeping arc along the upper edge of the painting, so that a bluish shadow appeared inside the circle and another below the rectangle; the shadows began to shift imperceptibly across the plaster surface, just as the natural shadows must have shifted round the cottages of the original sketch as the afternoon leaned towards sunset.

  “You ought to supply a little aerosol with it,” said Pibble. “So that people can make their own clouds.”

  Mr. Hott took the idea seriously. He grunted and considered it while he rolled a cigarette with short, efficient fingers, producing a tube almost as smooth and compact as a factory-made article.

  “It’s an idea,” he said. “People enjoy a stunt—something they can do themselves. But you have to watch it in case you become too stunty, and then it’s just a slice of fashion—this week’s trendiest—and next week you’re forgotten. I rigged my baby sun as a joke, and then I liked it. Twenty-three minutes after you’ve set it going, for about eight minutes more—when it’s just up here—it throws its light flush with this plane, which looks as fiat as a wall before and after. But for those eight minutes you see every freckle of the texturing picked out like the craters on the moon. And then it’s flat again. But it’s still a stunt—I don’t reckon I’ll show it. Clouds—no. Oh, hell, I’ll play around perhaps.”

  “Do you sell all the sketches, or do you keep them?”

  “I burn them,” said Mr. Hott slowly, passing the tips of his fingers over the surface of one of the intermediate stages. “They’re the sacrifice—I burn ’em, every one. The better I like them, the more important it is to be shot of ’em. You got in keep your weight hard up against the collar of your technique, shoving it all the time as far as it will go. I work in a world where there are bums with money who will swallow anything, just anything, and I know it. I don’t give a damn what else I do for money, so long as I can sell my stuff to buyers who know what they’re getting and know why it’s worth it. Your Thanatos isn’t a bum, I’ve heard. He’s bought good stuff, screwing the man down to a fair price, and he’s refused to buy big-name rubbish. He’s my kind of buyer. I’d like to get him interested.”