‘You’re not exactly selling the place to me.’
‘It’s remote. Let’s face it, bloody remote. And you’d find the people in the villas pretty damn dull, anyway. There’s one that you might say isn’t, but I don’t suppose you’ll meet him.’
‘Oh?’
‘Actually, we had a row and I told him pretty effing quick what I thought of him.’
‘What was it all about?’
‘Bastard collaborated during the war. That was really at the root of it.’ He exhaled smoke. ‘No – you’ll have to put up with the other beaks if you want chat.’
‘They speak English?’
‘Most of ‘em speak Frog. There’s the Greek chap who teaches English with you. Cocky little bastard. Gave him a black eye one day.’
‘You’ve really prepared the ground for me.’
He laughed. ‘Got to keep ‘em down, you know.’ He felt his mask had slipped a little. ‘Your peasant, especially your Cretan peasant, salt of the earth. Wonderful chaps. Believe me. I know.’
I asked him why he’d left.
‘Writing a book actually. Wartime experiences and all that. See my publisher.’
There was something forlorn about him; I could imagine him briskly dashing about like a destructive Boy Scout, blowing up bridges and wearing picturesque off-beat uniforms; but he had to live in this dull new welfare world, like a stranded archosaur. He went hurriedly on.
‘You’ll piss blood for England. Be worse for you, with no Greek. And you’ll drink. Everyone does. Have to.’ He talked about retsina and aretsinato, reiki and ouzo – and then about women. ‘The girls in Athens are strictly O.O.B. Unless you want the pox.’
‘No talent on the island?’
‘Nix, old boy. Women are about the ugliest in the Aegean. And anyway – village honour. Makes that caper highly dangerous. Shouldn’t advise it. Discovered that somewhere else once.’ He gave me a curt grin, with the appropriate hooded look in his eyes.
I drove him back towards his club. It was a bronchial mid-afternoon, already darkening, the people, the traffic, everything fish-grey. I asked him why he hadn’t stayed in the Army.
‘Too damn orthodox, old boy. Specially in peacetime.’
I guessed that he had been rejected for a permanent commission; there was something obscurely wild and unstable about him, under the mess mannerisms.
We came to where he wanted to be dropped off.
‘Think I’ll do?’
His look was doubtful. ‘Treat ‘em tough. It’s the only way. Never let ‘em get you down. They did the chap before me, you know. Never met him, but apparently he went bonkers. Couldn’t control the boys.’
He got out of the car.
‘Well, all the best, old man.’ He grinned. ‘And listen.’ He had his hand on the door-handle. ‘Beware of the waiting-room.’
He closed the door at once, as if he had rehearsed that moment. I opened it quickly and leant out to call after him. ‘The what?
He turned, but only to give a sharp wave. The Trafalgar Square crowd swallowed him up. I couldn’t get the smile on his face out of my mind. It secreted an omission; something he’d saved up, a mysterious last word. Waiting-room, waiting-room, waiting-room; it went round in my head all that evening.
6
I picked up Alison and we went to the garage that was going to sell the car for me. I’d offered it to her some time before, but she had refused.
‘If I had it I’d always think of you.’
‘Then have it.’
‘I don’t want to think of you. And I couldn’t stand anyone else sitting where you are.’
‘Will you take whatever I get for it? It won’t be much.’
‘My wages?’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘I don’t want anything.’
But I knew she wanted a scooter. I could leave a cheque with ‘Towards a scooter’ on a card, and I thought she would take that, when I had gone.
It was curious how quiet that last evening was; as if I had already left, and we were two ghosts talking to each other. We arranged what we should do in the morning. She didn’t want to come and see me off– I was going by train – at Victoria; we would have breakfast as usual, she would go, it was cleanest and simplest that way. We arranged our future. As soon as she could she would try to get herself to Athens. If that was impossible, I might fly back to England at Christmas. We might meet halfway somewhere – Rome, Switzerland.
‘Alice Springs,’ she said.
In the night we lay awake, knowing each other awake, yet afraid to talk. I felt her hand feel out for mine. We lay for a while without talking. Then she spoke.
‘If I said I’d wait?’ I was silent. ‘I think I could wait. That’s what I mean.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re always saying “I know”. But it doesn’t answer anything.’
‘I know.’ She pinched my hand. ‘Suppose I say, yes, wait, in a year’s time I shall know. All the time you’ll be waiting, waiting.’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’
‘But it’s mad. It’s like putting a girl in a convent till you’re ready to marry her. And then deciding you don’t want to marry her. We have to be free. We haven’t got a choice.’
‘Don’t get upset. Please don’t get upset.’
‘We’ve got to see how things go.’
There was a silence.
‘I was thinking of coming back here tomorrow night. That’s all.’
‘I’ll write. Every day.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s a sort of test, really. We’ll see how much we miss each other.’
‘I know what it’s like when people go away. It’s agony for a week, then painful for a week, then you begin to forget, and then it seems as if it never happened, it happened to someone else, and you start shrugging. You say, dingo, it’s life, that’s the way things are. Stupid things like that. As if you haven’t really lost something for ever.’
‘I shan’t forget. I shan’t ever forget.’
‘You will. And I will.’
‘We’ve got to go on living. However sad it is.’
After a long time she said, ‘I don’t think you know what sadness is.’
We overslept in the morning. I had deliberately set the alarm late, to make a rush, not to leave time for tears. Alison ate her breakfast standing up. We talked about absurd things; cutting the milk order, where a library ticket I had lost might be. And then she put down her coffee-cup and we were standing at the door. I saw her face, as if it was still not too late, all a bad dream, her grey eyes searching mine, her small puffy cheeks. There were tears forming in her eyes, and she opened her mouth to say something. But then she leant forward, desperately, clumsily, kissed me so swiftly that I hardly felt her mouth; and was gone. Her camel-hair coat disappeared down the stairs. She didn’t look back. I went to the window, and saw her walking fast across the street, the pale coat, the straw-coloured hair almost the same colour as the coat, a movement of her hand to her handbag, her blowing her nose; not once did she look back. She broke into a run. I opened the window and leant out and watched until she disappeared round the corner at the end of the street into Marylebone Road. And not even then, at the very end, did she look back.
I turned to the room, washed up the breakfast things, made the bed; then I sat at the table and wrote out a cheque for fifty pounds, and a little note.
Alison darling, please believe that if it was to be anyone, it would have been you; that I’ve really been far sadder than I could show, if we were not both to go mad. Please wear the earrings. Please take this money and buy a scooter and go where we used to go – or do what you want with it. Please look after yourself. Oh God, if only I was worth waiting for… NICHOLAS
It was supposed to sound spontaneous, but I had been composing it on and off for days. I put the cheque and the note in an envelope, and set it on the mantelpiece with the little box containing the pair of jet earrings we had seen in a closed antique
-shop one day. Then I shaved and went out to get a taxi.
The thing I felt most clearly, when the first corner was turned, was that I had escaped; and hardly less clearly, but much more odiously, that she loved me more than I loved her, and that consequently I had in some indefinable way won. So on top of the excitement of the voyage into the unknown, the taking wing again, I had an agreeable feeling of emotional triumph. A dry feeling; but I liked things dry. I went towards Victoria as a hungry man goes towards a good dinner after a couple of glasses of Mananzilla. I began to hum, and it was not a brave attempt to hide my grief, but a revoltingly unclouded desire to celebrate my release.
7
Four days later I was standing on Hymettus, looking down over the great complex of Athens-Piraeus, cities and suburbs, houses split like a million dice over the Attic plain. South stretched the pure blue late-summer sea, pale pumice-coloured islands, and beyond them the serene mountains of the Peloponnesus stood away over the horizon
in a magnificent arrested flow of land and water. Serene, superb, majestic: I tried for adjectives less used, but anything else seemed underweight. I could see for eighty miles, and all pure, all noble, luminous, immense, all as it always had been.
It was like a journey into space. I was standing on Mars, knee-deep in thyme, under a sky that seemed never to have known dust or cloud. I looked down at my pale London hands. Even they seemed changed, nauseatingly alien, things I should long ago have disowned.
When that ultimate Mediterranean light fell on the world around me, I could see it was supremely beautiful; but when it touched me, I felt it was hostile. It seemed to corrode, not cleanse. It was like being at the beginning of an interrogation under arc-lights; already I could see the table with straps through the open doorway, already my old self began to know that it wouldn’t be able to hold out. It was partly the terror, the stripping-to-essentials, of love; because I fell totally and for ever in love with the Greek landscape from the moment I arrived. But with the love came a contradictory, almost irritating, feeling of impotence and inferiority, as if Greece were a woman so sensually provocative that I must fall physically and desperately in love with her, and at the same time so calmly aristocratic that I should never be able to approach her.
None of the books I had read explained this sinister-fascinating, this Circe-like quality of Greece; the quality that makes it unique. In England we live in a very muted, calm, domesticated relationship with what remains of our natural landscape and its soft northern light; in Greece landscape and light are so beautiful, so all-present, so intense, so wild, that the relationship is immediately love-hatred, one of passion. It took me many months to understand this, and many years to accept it.
Later that day I was standing at the window of a room in the hotel to which the bored young man who received me at the British Council had directed me. I had just written a letter to Alison, but already she seemed far away, not in distance, not in time, but in some dimension for which there is no name. Reality, perhaps. I looked down over Constitution Square, the central meeting-place of Athens, over knots of strolling people, white shirts, dark glasses, bare brown arms. A sibilant murmur rose from the crowds sitting at the cafe tables. It was as hot as a hot English July day, and the sky was still perfectly clear. By craning out and looking east I could see Hymettus, where I had stood that morning, its sunset-facing slope an intense soft violet-pink, like a cyclamen. In the other direction, over the clutter of roofs, lay the massive black silhouette of the Acropolis. It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.
Phraxos lay eight dazzling hours in a small steamer south of Athens, about six miles off the mainland of the Peloponnesus and in the centre of a landscape as memorable as itself: to the north and west, a great fixed arm of mountains, in whose crook the island stood; to the east a distant gently-peaked archipelago; to the south the soft blue desert of the Aegean stretching away to Crete. Phraxos was beautiful. There was no other adjective; it was not just pretty, picturesque, charming – it was simply and effortlessly beautiful. It took my breath away when I first saw it, floating under Venus like a majestic black whale in an amethyst evening sea, and it still takes my breath away when I shut my eyes now and remember it. Its beauty was rare even in the Aegean, because its hills were covered with pine trees, Mediterranean pines as light as greenfinch feathers. Nine-tenths of the island was uninhabited and uncultivated: nothing but pines, coves, silence, sea. Herded into one corner, the north-west, lay a spectacular agglomeration of snow-white houses round a couple of small harbours.
But there were two eyesores, visible long before we landed. One was an obese Greek-Edwardian hotel near the larger of the two harbours, as at home on Phraxos as a hansom cab in a Doric temple. The other, equally at odds with the landscape, stood on the outskirts of the village and dwarfed the cottages around it: a dauntingly long building several storeys high and reminiscent, in spite of its ornate Corinthian facade, of a factory – a likeness more than just visually apt, as I was to discover.
But the Lord Byron School, the Hotel Philadelphia, and the village apart, the body of the island, all thirty square miles of it, was virgin. There were some silvery olive-orchards and a few patches of terrace cultivation on the steep slopes of the north coast, but the rest was primeval pine-forest. There were no antiquities. The ancient Greeks never much liked the taste of cistern-water.
This lack of open water meant also that there were no wild animals and few birds on the island. Its distinguishing characteristic, away from the village, was silence. Out on the hills one might pass a goatherd and his winter flock (in summer there was no grazing) of bronze-belled goats, or a bowed peasant-woman carrying a huge faggot, or a resin-gatherer; but one very rarely did. It was the world before the machine, almost before man, and what small events happened – the passage of a shrike, the discovery of a new path, a glimpse of a distant caique far below – took on an unaccountable significance, as if they were isolated, framed, magnified by solitude. It was the least eerie, the most un-Nordic solitude in the world. Fear had never touched the island. If it was haunted, it was by nymphs, not monsters.
I was forced to go frequently for walks to escape the claustrophobic ambience of the Lord Byron School. To begin with there was something pleasantly absurd about teaching in a boarding school (run on supposedly Eton-Harrow lines) only a look north from where Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon. Certainly the masters, victims of a country with only two universities, were academically of a far higher standard than Mitford had suggested, and in themselves the boys were no better and no worse than boys the world over. But they were ruthlessly pragmatic about English. They cared nothing for literature, and everything for science. If I tried to read the school eponym’s poetry with them, they yawned; if I taught the English names for the parts of a car, I had trouble getting them out of the class at lesson’s end; and often they would bring me American scientific textbooks full of terms that were just as much Greek to me as the expectant faces waiting for a simple paraphrase.
Both boys and masters loathed the island, and regarded it as a sort of self-imposed penal settlement where one came to work, work, work. I had imagined something far sleepier than an English school, and instead it was far tougher. The crowning irony was that this obsessive industry, this mole-like blindness to their natural environment, was what was considered to be so typically English about the system. Perhaps to Greeks, made blase by living among the most beautiful landscapes in the world, there was nothing discordant in being cooped up in such a termitary; but it drove me mad with irritation.
One or two of the masters spoke some English, and several French, but I found little in common with them. The only one I could tolerate was Demetriades, the other teacher of English, and that was solely because he spoke and understood the language so much more fluently than anyone else. With him I could rise out of Basic.
He took me round the village kapheneia
and tavernas, and I got a taste for Greek food and Greek folk music. But there was always something mournful about the place in daylight. There were so many villas boarded up; there were so few people in the alley-streets; one had always to go to the same two better-class tavernas for a meal, and one met the same old faces, a stale Levantine provincial society that belonged more to the world of the Ottoman Empire, Balzac in a fez, than to the 1950s. I had to agree with Mitford: it was desperately dull. I tried one or two of the fishermen’s wineshops. They were jollier, but I felt they felt I was slumming; and my Greek never rose to the island dialect they spoke.
I made inquiries about the man Mitford had had a row with, but no one seemed to have heard of either him or it; or, for that matter, of the ‘waiting-room’. Mitford had evidently spent a lot of time in the village, and made himself unpopular with other masters besides Demetriades. There was also a heavy aftermath of anglophobia, aggravated by the political situation at that time, to be endured.
Soon I took to the hills. None of the other masters ever stirred an inch farther than they needed to, and the boys were not allowed beyond the chevaux defrise of the high-walled school grounds except on Sundays, and then only for the half-mile along the coast road to the village. The hills were always intoxicatingly clean and light and remote. With no company but my own boredom, I began for the first time in my life to look at nature, and to regret that I knew its language as little as I knew Greek. I became aware of stones, birds, flowers, land, in a new way, and the walking, the swimming, the magnificent climate, the absence of all traffic, ground or air – for there wasn’t a single car on the island, there being no roads outside the village, and aeroplanes passed over not once a month – these things made me feel healthier than I had ever felt before. I began to get some sort of harmony between body and mind; or so it seemed. It was an illusion.