‘You could still keep your job at Rabin’s, and just spend a few hours up here each evening. What do you say? — Oops, there goes Aristotle, insulted again, must go —’
He scampered off into the corridor, and I heard him clattering away down the stairs, calling the Colonel’s name. If Sesosteris heard him, then he gave no sign of it, but went on plodding across the gravel, through the tunnel and away. Julian appeared below me, a hilariously foreshortened figure capering past the fountain with the dog snapping joyously at his heels. There was the sound of a car starting up, and of wheels
squealing
on the gravel. The notion came to me that, had Aristotle not given him an excuse to leave me, Julian would have had to find some other means of escape, for I was convinced that he had been perilously close to laughter when making me that proposition.
I wandered down through the house again, and in a room somewhere at the back I found Helena, standing by a window looking down on the city. The sun laid a tender light on her face. She wore a short skirt of some bright design, and a white silk shirt with ruffles at the throat. Her hair was loose, burning on her shoulders. How can I say what I felt, how could I say it then? I did not try. I shall not try now. Only I think of certain summer days when the air itself seems to sing, and I think of the perfection of silence caught by the best music; I think of Botticelli’s maiden of abundant spring. The essence of such things is the love that I have lost, the one I never had. I am still talking about torment. She looked at me. Expecting
someone
else, it took a moment for my presence to register on her face. I rushed across the room, swept her up in my arms, covered her mouth with kisses, and then found myself still standing like an idiot in the doorway, my gob gaping. I had had one
of those moments when the desire suffices for the action. She said,
‘Ben. I did not think you would come. Julian said that he had met you. I did not think … shut the door.’
Almost a year. Deserted autumn, the wind rattling the olive trees in the square, and a yellowed sheet of newspaper (Get Fix Best Beer) rearing up with singular viciousness and wrapping itself around my legs. The air is filled with strange mournful voices and snatches of awful songs. Then the days dwindle down, September, December, and a glass-hard Christmas eve with sunlight as brittle as a communion wafer, and a wind with teeth in its jaws coming down from the northern mountains; a new year, no different from the old except in number, and that intolerable ache, which might be love or cancer, grinding the breast bone, and now here, here, here at last. While I closed that door, she moved away from the window and sat down demurely on the couch, her knees together leaning sideward, as, with a rush of tenderness, I remembered they were wont to do. Her quiet pale hands were in her lap. She bit her lip and would not look at me. I stood before her. If we spoke, then I can recall no words. That scene reproduces only a deafening hum. She reached forward and touched me with a fingertip. Yes, I was real. She had not thought that I would come, but there I was, as small as life. I knelt before her and put my head into her lap. It seemed to descend with the gigantic slowness of a planet falling. Her cool fingers played about my face, tentatively touching it here and there, expressing a lost, sad helplessness before such a weight of love.
‘Ben, Ben, Julian will see us.’
I caught the wisp of an odour of hot musk from her, which spoke of dealings with the moon. I put my arms around her round little knees. A rose stood on the table near me, and I watched it let fall a petal, like a single drop of blood. I tried to recall when it was that another such flower had been part of the stage-settings for another such momentous instant of the farce which I call my life.
O Helena, poor imitation of a flower, you were better than nothing.
There is, or was, a small restaurant which lies below the sheer cliffs of the Acropolis on Dionysus Avenue. It is a pleasant place, with a dusty courtyard shaded by a trellis of creeping vines. The charcoal spit stands almost on the pavement, and most nights of the week they roast a small piglet whole. The odour of crackling pork lends an air of light-headed hungry gaiety to the evenings there. Two waiters haunt the place, a fat one and an emaciated one, both equally solemn, speaking an odd malapropian brand of English which adds immensely to the general hilarity. They knew me as Mr What, and the querulous quality of that appellation appealed to my self-congratulatory sense of alienation. It was there that Helena and I had our first date of the new age, on a soft spring evening in March. She arrived an hour late, during which period I was reduced to a state comparable to what I imagine must be the fury of a nerve wriggling in the black hollow of a rotten tooth. But of course, as these things will go, when she stepped with that perfect aplomb under the arch of vine leaves, and illuminated the darkness, I was all smiles and tiny attentions, the picture of gibbering idolatry. God, how it burns me now. She had dressed with care for the occasion, in a black dress of severe simplicity, head bare, no jewellery, look on this poor helpless sinner. I held her chair, but she sat down before I could push it forward for her. I never could master the fine timing required by the task. I returned to my place opposite her. I offered her a cigarette, fumbled with matches, flame, smoke, ashes, it was pandemonium. She had still not spoken, but watched me with a thoughtful calm. I said,
‘Will you have a drink?’
‘No thank you.’
‘Coffee?’
‘No thank you.’
‘How about a screw? Ho ho.’
She laid her elbows on the table and put her hands, with fingers clasped, under her chin.
‘I want to warn you,’ she said evenly. ‘If you insist on
speaking
to me like this I shall see no reason to remain here. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
How, how could I take such solemn crap from her, meekly, with a little simpering smile, how could I do it, how? With the greatest of ease.
Spiro, the fat waiter, came and moaned at us. I ordered some food or other, god knows what, hot twat maybe, I cannot remember. It never did get eaten. Helena puffed delicately at her cigarette. She looked really splendid, her hair newly washed and glowing at the tips in the swaying light from the bulbs above us among the leaves. A cat leapt suddenly in silence on to the table between us. Helena did not stir. Any other woman would have squealed at that sudden blur of fur, but not my Helena. I gave the animal a punch in its surprisingly delicate rib-cage, and it went away (not without a last spiteful glance) as it had come, without a sound. Helena said,
‘I came to speak to you about Yacinth.’
‘You too?’
‘Yes. Julian asked you today if you would tutor him.’
‘What could I teach Julian?’
‘I meant Yacinth, as you well know.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Your sense of humour is very childish. Well, will you do it?’
‘What?’
She looked heavenwards, leafwards, groaning.
‘My god,’ she muttered between clenched teeth. ‘You are impossible.’
‘Helena.’
‘Well?’
‘Don’t you ever laugh? No wait, I mean really laugh, just for the sake of it, not at something clever or witty, but just at the foolishness of things, you know? I’m serious. I want to know. You must have a sense of humour, everyone has.’
‘What you mean is, I must have a sense of humour like yours because you … you like me, isn’t that so?’
I put a hand to my forehead and stared hard at a spent match on the table.
‘No, that isn’t it. It’s just that, I can’t take all this solemnity.’
‘You do not have to take it, as you put it.’
‘Don’t say things like that, Helena. I’m trying to talk to you. We’ve never really talked. I want to understand you.’
‘Why?’ she asked, with an odd venom.
‘Because I love you.’
She lowered her eyes and gazed at the cigarette burning in her fingers. She had that habit, which I find dementing, of never breaking the ash before the last possible moment. A good inch and a half of dead tobacco now drooped obscenely from the tip of her cigarette. In the quietest of voices, she said,
‘He has laughed at me so often that now I have forgotten how to laugh myself.’
There was no need to ask her who
he
was. She dropped her ash into the waiting tray. People with that habit always do make it at the last moment, and that, for some perverse reason, drives me into an even more extravagant rage.
‘Is it that bad?’ I asked.
She made no reply, and did not look at me. Her attitude, perfectly still, with head bowed, was heartrending. I felt a
terrible
pity for her, a pity which was based on deeper things than the difficulty of her life with Julian. I reached forward and touched her hand.
‘I’ll teach you to laugh again.’
I said that, I did, I really did. Let us have it once more, for the joy of it.
‘I shall teach you to laugh again, Helena.’
O boy, O boy. I am slapping my thigh. Spiro laid our meal before us with such a depth of melancholy concern that it seemed that he was convinced that it would be our last taste of food. We both pawed at the stuff for a while, and then pushed it aside. The cat returned and stuck a claw into my trouser-leg. I gave it a look and it slunk away. Then I lit another cigarette, without fumbling this time. I was in command now. Nothing like a bit of pity to send one soaring above the poor lump who had merited it. I said,
‘Come to my flat.’
She nodded mutely. Was there a tear in her eye? Some hope. I
put a guiding hand under her elbow.
So she returned with me to my squalid quarters, and for an hour we had some rough and tumble on the bed, while a neon sign outside the window punctuated our darkness every second second, a great red heartbeat now illuminating a smooth flank, now a bruised and bitten nipple. And what was her first question afterwards, what was it? I give it in all of its passionate abandon.
‘You’ll do what I ask, you’ll be Yacinth’s tutor?’
And what was my reply? It also quivers in the coils of erotic fever.
‘All right.’
She put on her clothes and went away, leaving me in a pulsing red and black world, a trident of nail-wounds on my shoulder, my mouth throbbing with echoes of the soft
explosions
of her kisses. So much for odours of hot musk.
In dreams now I sometimes see myself sitting motionless in a room, a room which I have never known in any waking moment. All my most precious things are gathered there, but I never look at them; my attention is fixed upon a flower which stands on a low white table before me. A petal has broken from the blossom, but it does not fall. It never falls, never decays. I can feel the velvet softness of the flower’s flesh, can feel the enormity of the gap which lies between the petal and the stem, am torn by the agony of separation. The petal does not fall. That is how I remember. In real time, god knows, the petal did fall, a whole cornucopia of rot and wrack came spilling down around me, until my mouth was choked with foul sodden leaves and the pus of cancerous orchids. But
recollections
do not decay, unless I should forget, and I shall not forget. Take these moments. Treat them with care, for they are my inheritance.
The bus took us away from the burning city, and the burnt lowlands, up into the mountains. In the foothills, the air was sharp with the scent of lentisk bushes, of thyme and myrtle. The narrow tortuous road wound through forests of dwarf pine, dark fir, and the woodland grounds were vivid with spring growth, violet and white anemones, fragile dogroses twined with briar, a myriad other passionate blooms. I sat with Yacinth, and Helena had the seat behind us, the bottles and baskets piled beside her. Now and then she would lean forward and touch the boy’s shoulder with two small fingers, and point out to him some beauty of the pastoral scene through which we passed. I watched them with their faces together, gazing through the window, the glass giving back the wisps of a reflection. They were so alike. Helena said, Oh, and, look, and the boy
murmured
, yes yes, I see it. And they would glance at each other, and smile. I smiled also, unseen by them. By accepting me with such ease, they offered me love. It was all so simple.
At the terminus we alighted. The bus turned with difficulty, and went away. The silence of the mountains seemed
inviolable
. There was a view over all the Attic plain. Piraeus to the south and the distant islands could be seen, Glyfadha and the rocky coast down to the wind-torn cape of Sounion. The sea, the sky and the mountains merged to fuse a light over the pure white city hard and bright as blue burned glass. We turned away from the overwhelming austerity and brilliance of the land, and went into the woods. The trees smelled sweetly. I carried the baskets. By secret dusty paths we moved. There was a humming in my ears, like the last echo of music retreating, never to be quite lost, into the hollow tunnel of eternity. It was the sound of happiness. Yacinth walked ahead of us, slashing at the trees with a piece of stick.
‘We must bring him here more often,’ I said. ‘Children should grow up in the countryside.’
She lifted an eyebrow at my ponderous paterfamilial tone.
‘Where was your childhood spent?’ she asked, and stopped to disengage a waving coil of bramble which had sunk its tiny
teeth into her skirt.
‘My sister and I were brought up in the depths of the country. We lived by the sea with a decrepit aunt.’
‘And your parents?’
‘Dead.’
‘But you spoke to me once of your father, I’m certain.’
I skipped lightly away from that subject.
‘Did I? Look, there’s a good place to sit.’
Helena unpacked the baskets. We sat on a hillock which looked down over the trees to a white house far in the valley below. Inquisitive lizards came to survey us with bright little eyes, then pottered off about their business. There was even a bird or two. The weather was perfect. A bald blue sky was fringed with white curls of cloud on the horizon. There was cold duck and other delicacies, wine for Helena and me, and grape juice for the boy. He sat cross-legged before us, chewing slowly and looking about him with an appraising eye.