Nightspawn

PART TWO

Autumn is approaching, and the ships are bellowing out on the sea. The fog comes to my window, nuzzles at my window like some friendly blind animal. I can feel the roots of the year withering. The sap retreats. My little feathered foes are growing restless for the golden south. See the seasons trundle off again on their tiresome course. Time passes, nothing endures. Only here, in these sinister pages, can time be vanquished. These little keys on which I dance transfix eternity with every tap. O city city. Tremulous music begins to drop like liquid through the wings. The lights grow dim, and from out of the dimness the lighted stage advances. There I stand, in the sober darkness of my robes, my hands uplifted. I am about to conjure up another world. Watch me closely. Abraca—

I walked across the Plaka, from under the violet shade of the rock into the sunlight. The blazing markets rang with sound and light. On stalls that lined the narrow streets ripe fruit was piled, slow explosions of crimson and yellow, breathtaking purples, the copper acned flesh of oranges. Children scampered, beggars lurched, the vendors roared their wares. A woman laid her hands upon a barrel of tomatoes, and smiled at me with her teeth as white as seashells, her fingers pressing the passionate fruits. Lavender shadows lay between her lips. I carried away the image of glittering sapphire flies drawing a frame about her face. High above, behind me, the pillars of the Parthenon glowed in the sun, gold supports set between heaven and the massive rock. Dust flew in the air like yellow pollen, and a delicate blue heat-haze bloomed on the houses and the little shops, on hand and face and hair, on the ancient stones. In Monasteraki, the mood of the day was calm, matched to the sombre glow of copper and bronze in the bazaars. There I stopped, in an alleyway, to watch an old blind man weaving a basket, while above his head, in its ornate cage, a blinded canary whistled a song of unendurable tenderness, telling me that I would live forever, at the very least. Another spring.

The house was built on the side of one of those hills behind the palace. A high white wall with an imposing wooden gate set into it was all that I could see at first. I hesitated over the bell, then pressed it firmly. From beyond the wall came a tinkle, and again, faintly, tink, the far little chimes ringing strangely, secretively, amid the hum which came up from the streets below. An old woman with a stick passed by on the road. There were pines about, perfectly motionless, their outlines diffused in the sunshine. I watched the old woman until she had hobbled around the bend. Above, beyond the pines, there was the road again, repeating itself, and another wall, another turning, and presently another crone bravely scaling the heights. She struggled slowly upward, toward yet another, higher repetition, fading, as she went, into the furious blue light. Across the road, in the pines, an animal crouched and looked at me with its teeth bared silently. Behind it, half hidden by the trees, a figure stood. It was Yacinth. He laid his hand on the dog’s head. The animal licked its chops and wagged its tail, then came across the road and sniffed at my ankle. Good doggie. Why is it always the ankle that they consider, why not the knee, a much more tender region, with better tooth-holds? It was an enormous black beast with the head of a wolf. Yacinth looked up the road, and down the road, and at his feet, everywhere but at me.

‘How are you?’ I asked.

With a flick of his head he threw the curls away from his brow, and lifted his sullen eyes to mine at last.

‘All right,’ he said.

‘Do you remember me?’

I smiled winningly. He did not bother to reply. I stopped smiling. As talkative as ever, the lovely child. I looked wistfully at the back of his neck, unprotected but for a gleaming whorl of black hair. A swift rabbit punch, and then … and then he asked,

‘Do you want me to come in?’

He glanced sidelong at my left ear.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve come to see your fa— to see Julian.’

Never could get the hang of these relationships. He pushed open a small trapdoor in the gate and we stepped through. The dog growled deep in its throat. The wall enclosed the garden on four sides, and in the centre of the garden stood the house, white, massive, its front face traced with a complex of balconies and outside staircases, hung with flowering creepers. There was an archway, wide enough for the passage of a car, cut right through the centre of the ground floor, and through a short tunnel a courtyard could be seen, with a fountain and a piece of sculpture, and figures sitting at a table. Two long cars were parked on the drive, nose to tail, a situation in which I thought the dog might take some interest, but he did not, and we walked on through the tunnel, into the courtyard. Julian sat by the table, the generous melons of his backside swamping a small cane chair, with, before him, one whom for the first few moments I did not recognize. Yacinth made a careless gesture toward me, and disappeared through the french window beyond the fountain. Julian, without rising, took my hand. The dog went to him and wagged its tail against his leg, thump thump thump.

‘Mr White, Benjamin, my friend. How are you?’

‘Hello Julian.’

‘This is Colonel Sesosteris. Benjamin White.’

‘We’ve met,’ I murmured.

Aristotle exuded a profound gloom. He had changed, looked older and sicker. His eyes moved restlessly about the courtyard, seeming to suffer at the hands of everything they saw. He gave me a distant, faintly irritated glance, and looked at his watch. I could not say if he remembered me or not. I did not very much care. Julian offered me a chair, and I sat down between them. The piece of sculpture atop the pedestal of the fountain represented a peculiar-looking hen, or a cock or something, with one claw uplifted and feathers bristling. Julian patted his belly with an open palm and squinted at the sky, yawning delicately behind three fingertips.

‘How are you getting on with that old crook Rabin?’ he asked.

I squirmed to the edge of the chair, and folded my hands in my lap.

‘Fine,’ I murmured. ‘Fine.’

‘Coincidence, meeting like that, eh?’

‘Yes.’

There was a silence. Aristotle sighed, and looked at his watch again. He scowled at it suspiciously, as though he thought it unlikely that the little hands could be trusted to stagger unaided from one minute to the next. Julian’s glass clicked as he set it down on the marble top of the table. I made an effort.

‘Your house is …’

But my effort was in vain, for already Julian had turned to Aristotle to say,

‘Benjamin is a friend of a friend of yours, Colonel.’

‘Oh yes?’

Aristotle’s voice was weary with indifference. His eyes rested on me for a moment; a flicker of recognition stirred in their lustreless depths, then died again, and he looked away. The waters rose and fell in the fountain, rose and fell. A cricket began to sing somewhere. Julian touched my arm.

‘Many of us in this city live under the protection of the Colonel here,’ he said. ‘Perhaps even yourself, without realizing it.’

I looked at him, but the merry eyes and smile were nothing but themselves. The back of Aristotle’s neck turned slowly crimson. Julian went on blithely,

‘As a visitor, Benjamin, what do you think of the situation here, I mean the political situation?’

I shrugged.

‘I’m not a political animal.’

Aristotle suddenly turned on me and said venomously,

‘Like all the English.’

I reared away from him in fright, stammering,

‘I’m, I’m Irish.’

He looked past my shoulder and sank once again into his pit of gloom.

‘So they tell me,’ he muttered.

The sun drew a length of shadow painfully across the table. It lay quietly between us, faintly shaking, drinking from our glasses. My eyes followed it to the ground, and to the dancing water of the fountain, from whence it came. My eyelids were wet. In the house, a clock chimed thrice, deep black notes that reached far down into the silence and left it quivering. Julian was drawing patterns in the gravel with the blunt toe of his shoe. He wore a nice light linen suit and a cream shirt. There was a tiny purple scratch on his jaw, where he had cut himself with his razor. The dog lifted its head, looked at something in the blank air which only it could see, then set its chin down on its paw again. We had none of us anything left to say. I felt as though the heat were trying to suck me into the sky. My brain was banging, and my head was like a lump of scorched wool. Something stirred behind the dark glass of the french windows. All this had happened before, somewhere, on another plane. I thought of that four-letter word of which Heraclitus was so fond. Things fluctuate, merge, nothing remains still. A late September day, say, and you pause in a deserted corner of a strange town. There is a white sunlit wall, and a patch of dark shadow. Dandelions nod among sparse grass. All is silent, but for an intimation of music somewhere, just beyond hearing. The leaning lid of a dustbin beckons you around the corner. You step forward, and come suddenly, breathtakingly, upon the river, far below, calm and blue, with a small white cloud swimming in it. You think that this has all been arranged, that some hand has set up the props, that wall, those flowers, all of them exact and perfect and inimitable, so that you may catch a strange memory of something extraordinary and beautiful. It never reaches you, but you walk on, down to the river, smiling, enriched by the mere knowledge that such a memory exists and may some day be caught. You have touched the mystery of things. In time that moment in that strange town becomes itself a memory, and merges with the one which eluded you. Life goes on. Spring sunshine wrings your heart, spring rain. Love and hate eventually become one. I am talking about the past, about remembrance. You find no answers, only questions. It is enough, almost enough. That day I thought about the island, and now I think about thinking about the island, and tomorrow, tomorrow I shall think about thinking about thinking about the island, and all will be one, however I try, and there will be no separate thoughts, but only one thought, one memory, and I shall still know nothing. What am I talking about, what are these ravings? About the past, of course, and about Mnemosyne, that lying whore. And I am talking about torment.

‘Yes,’ said Julian. ‘Almost perfect, do you think?’

I brought my wandering eyes back into a semblance of straightness.

‘Is Helena here?’ I asked.

He was startled by my question, but nodded, and waved his hand at the house.

‘Yes, I think she’s about somewhere.’

He watched me curiously, but I had not the energy to be prudent. Aristotle’s eyes were closed, and his chin was sinking slowly down to rest on his breast. I left them, and went through the french windows, and found myself in a large, totally empty room. The walls and ceiling were painted a frozen blue, and the floor was of bare polished wood. Someone had to be insane to keep a room so indecently bare. I crept across the echoing floor and through a door into a dining-room, where five or six stark pieces of modern furniture stood in mutinous silence, as though, when I entered, they had halted in the midst of an electric dance, and were impatient for me to be gone, so that they might continue. There were other rooms, all of them extraordinary in some way. In that house, I was ridden by a nameless unease. The upper storey had a maze of white corridors flanked with closed and ominously silent doors. Each corridor found its way to a conclusion on the balcony, which ran, without the protection of a hand-rail, around the perimeter of the open courtyard. I peered up into the blue square of sky, and my horror of spaces, enclosed and open, worked on me a rare treat of terror.

‘Highly dangerous, don’t you think?’ Julian said.

He stood behind me at an entrance to a corridor, one hand against the wall, the other in the pocket of his jacket. He came to my side and we looked down into the courtyard. Down there Aristotle sat, morosely eyeing the fountain, while he in turn was morosely eyed by the sleepy dog.

‘Yes,’ said Julian, with a little sigh. ‘Highly dangerous. For some reason, the architects refused to put up a barrier. Or perhaps it was the builders, a dispute of some kind. A senior official of the French embassy once fell from here into the fountain, during a party. He was very drunk.’

With a slow sweep of his hand he traced the line of the Frenchman’s descent. He pursed his lips, and sadly shook his head, but then I caught him glancing at me, and he could contain himself no longer. He began to laugh.

‘I must admit it was all great fun. You know, I think I shall have another party soon. What do you think? Will you come?’

He looked at me with his head on one side, and his eyes, well yes, what the hell, they did, they twinkled.

‘Yes, I’ll come,’ I said.

‘Good, good. Seen Helena? No? She must be around somewhere.’

We stood together quietly. Julian frowned, and looked at his toe, which drew an invisible parallelogram on the smooth stone of the balcony. He was going to ask a question, I knew, and I had a message from somewhere which told me: fend it off, quick. I lifted a finger and opened my mouth, but I was not quick enough.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I have a proposition. How would you like to become the boy’s tutor, Yacinth, you know, hmm?’

I called down that uplifted finger, but my mouth stayed open.

‘Eh?’

‘A tutor. You. For Yacinth.’

He watched me now with an unsettling scrutiny, his head thrown slightly back, lips parted, eyebrows raised, like a conductor waiting for the piercing sweetness of that first note of the flute which tells him yes, this performance will be perfect.

‘Brush up his English and so on.’ A twitch of the baton. ‘He’s extraordinarily precocious for his age, and we just cannot find a suitable school.’ A lifting of a rosebud of fingers.

‘What age is he?’ I asked.

The question seemed profound at the time. Julian chose to ignore it.

‘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.

‘Do you like it here?’ I asked.

He nodded swiftly, then lowered his eyes and shyly smiled. It was never easy for him to smile. His solemnity was intriguing. Helena said,

‘We shall come here very often.’

The meal ended. None of us had been very hungry. I lay down on the soft new grass with my hands behind my head. The voice of summer whispered around us.

‘Julian is going to have a party,’ Helena said.

She sat with her legs folded under her, examining the tips of her hair. The sunlight flickered on her lowered lashes. The boy was lying in the same position as me, with his hands behind his head. Emulating his hero. Ha.

‘He mentioned it to me, yes.’

Helena smiled, but shook her head.

‘I am not sure that I approve of the idea,’ she said.

Far calls; some animal complaining.

‘What idea?’

‘Of a party.’

‘Ah.’

Indolent pauses lay between our remarks. Nothing was important. I could not believe that anything would ever again be important except this sunlight, this peace.

‘Do you realize,’ I asked, ‘I’m supposed to be giving an English lesson to Yacinth.’

‘You can start tomorrow.’

‘Or next week.’

‘Next year.’

‘Never.’

Music somewhere. Pan piping under the leaves in an olive grove. She tickled my ear with a blade of grass, and, to oblige her I pretended that I thought it was a fly, and flapped my hands. She laughed. I told them about Botticelli, and of Dante’s first meeting with Beatrice, of his love for her, a child. I fell asleep for a moment, and wakened trying to remember a word.

‘What is that word?’ I murmured. ‘It means fragrant, full of fragrance.’

‘What?’

‘That word. It’s on the tip of my tongue.’

‘Perfumed?’

‘No. The air was blank of roses. What is it? Damn.’

There were birds, lizards, flowers burning in the wood. We stayed for a long time. The sun declined.

‘I think I shall dye my hair red,’ said Helena, pulling forward a yellow strand and considering it with a critical eye. I laughed. Yacinth at last plucked that word from my tongue.

‘Redolent.’

‘Yes, of course. Full marks. Perhaps, Helena, your brother should give me lessons.’

I raised myself on my elbow, and frowned. Yacinth was gone.

‘That’s strange,’ I said.

Helena glanced at me.

‘What?’

‘I thought … it doesn’t matter.’

Suddenly she leapt forward, and fell on top of me. The light cut jewels from her hair. We explored each other’s faces with our fingertips.

‘I’ll never leave you, Helena.’

She smiled.

‘Oh yes you will.’

‘No.’

We went to look for the boy. I picked some of those flowers, his namesakes, and gave them to her. She put one in her hair. What matter if that bloom was too large, and made her look silly? It was something of mine which she wore. A little further on, among the trees that smelled so sweetly, I found that she had left me, and I was alone. I knelt and put my fingers to the flowers. Her voice came to me, calling her brother.

‘Yacinth, O Yacinth, Hyacinth, where are you?’

The slow clear calls fell about me like petals, settled softly on the leaves, the branches, on the flowers, and I was assailed by something which I cannot define, a feeling of the nerve of that day perhaps, redolent of sunlight and happiness, of tiny creatures stirring, and the air singing, like the hollow call of muted horns heard distantly across the sweltering fields of summer. No, I shall never forget.

When, in late evening, as dusk was gathering, we got back to the house, we found a note from Julian to say that he would be away overnight. There were mornings I shared with her, evenings, afternoons, long hours stolen from the nights, but one dawn, and one dawn only, which we saw together. This was to be it, I knew. The scrap of paper on which he had written, like so many other scraps I was to see, for Julian was a compulsive note-leaver, shook in my fingers. I looked at Helena, but she refused to meet my eyes, and turned away with Yacinth toward the stairs. When she came down again, trailing a pale hand on the polished banister and picking a fragment of leaf from her pullover, I was sitting on a straight-backed chair in the hall, pouring a generous dose of brandy into my face.

‘Well?’ I asked, my voice thick. The heat and rarefied air of the mountains had left me slightly drugged, and now the brandy was punching my lungs as it passed them by on its downward journey. She paused on the last step, her head bowed.

‘Do you want to stay?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

She took my hand and led me up to the master bedroom, an enormous, vulgar, and vaguely frightening room. She sat before the mirror of the dressing table, combing out her long hair. The long gold strands were dark at the roots, dark on dark, gold light, mirror, crystal; I was lacerated by her beauty. She stood up, and took off her clothes.

I had such acrobatics planned for the occasion, a whole gymnasium of crippling and outrageous postures, but when finally we made it into that acre of bed, I was exhausted just on the thought of all we were going to do to each other. We lay in each other’s arms in the darkness. She was such a tiny creature, as delicate as a bird. Her breasts were hardly noticeable when she pressed against me. I kissed her shoulders, her ankles, her tiny gleaming cunt. Ah, she said, ahh.

‘I love you,’ I murmured, wishing there were better ways of expressing that ancient lie.

Something touched my arm. It was a tear, with a perfect, tiny miniature of the lamp on the dressing table trapped inside it. She was weeping silently, terribly, without a sound. I moved my arm so that those stars could freely fall, but they were extinguished so brutally by the sheets, and turned into grey smudges, that I put back my hand and caught a whole sky falling. I had no wish to probe the well from which the tears sprang, but understood in silence that they were a tribute to this little precious thing which we had found. We knew that it would not live long. It was sickly. I would leave her, or she would leave me, or we would leave us, or they would leave them, or it would leave you … bah, we knew nothing of the kind. She probably had a pain, and I was too tired to bother asking her where it was. We fell asleep, as chaste as children.

It was a long, restless and exquisite night, filled with the intimation of future pain. I had a foul and garrulous dream in which hulking giants did disgusting things to little boys. I woke to find Helena clinging fiercely to me.

‘I thought you were gone,’ she cried. ‘I thought you were gone away already.’

What wounds these moments inflict. They do not heal, they never heal. Get your fucking claws out of my throat and let me be tender for a while, there is enough cruelty, is your thirst for blood never sated?

‘No no,’ I murmured. ‘I’m here, Helena, I’m here.’

And we fell asleep again, weeping in each other’s arms. Later she sat up suddenly and gaped at me, her teeth flashing.

‘Julian?’ she whispered.

I said nothing, pretended to sleep. In a moment she lay down again, and with a great sigh turned her back to me. I smiled. She had turned her back on him, yes, on him.

I wakened for the last time just as the first crippled fingers of light were crawling into the room. Helena lay beside me with her eyes wide.

‘There is someone outside,’ she said, terror-stricken.

‘Don’t be silly, there’s no one.’

There was. I left the bed and went silently to the door. Came a rustle of cloth from the corridor. I looked out. Yacinth stood on the landing holding up the trousers of his pyjamas with one hand, and the other thrusting one of its knuckles into the corner of his eye. We stared. His lips curled slowly away from his teeth, and he made a hoarse hissing sound deep in his throat, which chilled my blood. He turned abruptly and scurried away. I closed the door, went back and covered myself to the nose under the sheets.

‘Who was it?’

‘Only the dog,’ I said.

She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. She nibbled the nail of her little finger thoughtfully. I put my head against her shoulder and closed my eyes.

‘Ben. Ben. Be-en, wake up.’

‘What?’

‘This must stop.’

‘Helena.’

‘Well it must.’

‘For Christ’s sake.’

‘I’m afraid of you — I mean for you. If Julian discovers —’

‘He won’t.’

‘But he might.’

‘What would he do?’ I asked. ‘Have me assassinated?’

She pushed my head away and stared into my eyes, biting a lip which would not be kept from trembling. I laughed at her.

‘I’m not afraid of Julian.’

‘You don’t know,’ she muttered. ‘There are things that you do not know.’

‘Aye, and things you don’t know either.’

Oh yes, I knew my part well, the gay pirate with a cutlass in his teeth, laughing heartily in the face of the king and his justice. What a fool, what an incredible fool. I kissed her mouth to silence her, and soon we were making violent and lunging love, causing the bed, the window panes, the very walls to rattle. But afterwards, that sadness returned, and we lay captive in a fearful silence, our wide eyes watching the light grow in the window. Helena touched a bruise on my throat, and said,

‘I want so much to be happy, and I never will.’

For once I believed one of her stricken sayings, and gazed at her for a long time. She curled herself up and lay against me like some small pale injured animal. A petal broke from a blossom, but did not fall.

I picked my way down the stairs, knees unsteady, nerves jangling, to Yacinth’s study where the boy sat calmly waiting for his lesson. He had a desk by the window which looked into the courtyard, and caught any sun which made its way there. He opened a book, before I had time to sit down, and pointed to a word.

‘What does that mean?’

I scratched my ear and frowned.

‘Well, it means that people, close relations, you know, it’s when they, ah, like a sister and brother … sister and brother …’

He looked at me with that intelligent gaze of his, and I looked down at the fountain.

‘When they what?’ he inquired.

‘I’ll tell you when you’re older. Here, study this poem.’

He bent his head over the page I had selected at random, a bright tip of tongue between his teeth. A ray of dusty sunlight took his cheek bone and moulded it into an exact replica of hers, and there I was, suffused with her again, sodden with her. One night, with the black rain hammering on the roof of her car, Helena came rearing up at me to ask what the hell did I mean by muttering at her about tigers burning in forests. She had, by some osmosis through the porous walls of my brain, received half of a lesson, meant for the boy, panted into her ear. Yacinth began to read aloud, startling me in the midst of my reverie.

‘“And the afternoon, the evening sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep … tired … or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.”’

He paused, and glanced at me. His English was perfect. I watched him suspiciously.

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘“Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed …”’

He broke off, and threw down the book.

‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘What crisis? What does he mean?’

Helplessly, I showed him my hands.

‘I don’t know, Yacinth.’

‘You are my teacher.’

‘But I don’t know everything.’

‘No, you don’t.’

We sat motionless, our eyes downcast, and listened to his watch ticking tensely. I was terrified. Our eyes met. Then he laughed, and turned his face away from me.

‘Tell me about Dante again,’ he said, very softly, and yet venomously, his voice loaded with derision. ‘Tell me about him and Beatrichy.’

His mispronunciation of sweet Bea’s name was, for some reason, unbearably touching, like listening to a child trying to fit his mouth around ill-learned obscenities. I began to wonder, for the first time, about the manner of his life in that strange house. Never once had he spoken to me unless in answer to a question, but a few moments ago he had offered me a revelation, and I had refused it, out of reasons that were too frightening to probe. I recalled, with extraordinary vividness, how he had stood on the landing in the grey dawn hour and bared his teeth at me.

At that moment we were, mercifully, interrupted by the sound of an engine beyond the archway. It died in a moment, and then there was the sound of a car door being slammed.

‘Julian is back,’ I said, and could not keep the disappointment out of my voice. I think I had hoped, in some insane recess of my mind, that he might get lost in the great world and never be seen again, but now there he was, crossing the courtyard, looking despicably alive, with a stupid little trilby hat pushed jauntily down on his curls. Yacinth left the room without a word, and he had not been gone for a dozen seconds when Helena came in to take his place. What a house, my god, like an amateur theatrical with all these comings and goings.

‘Hubby’s back,’ I said.

I think I must have been grinning, with my teeth bared and eyes starting from their sockets, hating someone, everyone, furious with the world. She laid a hand with maternal concern on my wrist. I snarled at her touch.

‘Ben,’ she said. ‘You must be careful. He has planned something for you, I know it.’

‘Listen, what age is he?’

She frowned.

‘Who?’

‘Never mind.’

It must have driven her crazy, the way I ruined her best scenes. I asked,

‘What plan, what are you talking about?’

She took her hand away and looked at me closely.

‘What has happened to you, Ben?’

‘Nothing, nothing, for the love of god leave me —’

There the door opened, and Julian came breezing in, all smiles, and smacking his hands. He took off his ridiculous hat and flicked it away. It settled softly on a chair.

‘Here you are, children.’

I wanted to do something to him, something violent. Rage was bubbling in my blood, a rage made unbearable because I could find no real cause of it. I would not speak for fear that my voice would choke me. Julian stood with his feet apart, hands stuck in his pockets, and surveyed us both with a merry eye. The fool, I thought, he suspects nothing.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘You both look glum. Had a nice weekend?’

Helena waved a hand toward the distant hills.

‘We went for a picnic yesterday.’

‘Oh yes? Very nice. How are the lessons going, Benjamin? Think the boy is a genius?’

‘Shit —’

‘Pardon —?’

‘It, ah, it’s going very well.’

‘Good, good.’

He drew up a chair and sat down before us, his big balls bulging in his overstuffed trousers, his hairy hands on his knees. I tried not to laugh. His trilby hat was now squashed flat under his arse. Helena fiddled with a pen on the desk. I looked through the window. Our moods had run down, like toy trains in need of winding, and we did not know what to do with each other. Had it been any other trio there in that moment of ease, they might have come to terms, resolved some tensions, offered some confessions, become friends at last; but not us. Helena was the first to drift away. She did so in stages, almost droopingly, from desk to chair (straighten a cushion), from chair to wall (straighten a picture), wall to door, to the hall, gone. Julian coughed. He was playing with a piece of paper, twisting it in his thick fingers.

‘Did I ever tell you about my mad Uncle Victor?’ he asked idly.

‘No.’

‘His passion in life was roller-skating. He bought a disused monastery in the Lake District, had the cloisters repaved with cork, and spent the rest of his life up there, gliding up and down the silent halls, dressed in a frock coat, top hat and yellow spats. A curious man. I cannot imagine why, but I’ve been thinking about him all day. Dear me. Life sometimes seems… terribly long, and the world a very grey institution, don’t you think?’

‘Yes.’

We looked down at the fountain. Julian said,

‘I think, you know, that you should leave Greece.’

He said it very casually, almost as though he were thinking of something else, and only now does his advice strike me as momentous. I asked,

‘Why?’

He did not answer, did not seem to have heard me. He glanced at the page from which Yacinth had read.

‘A bit advanced, eh?’ he murmured, and then pushed the book away and scratched his jaw.

‘Yacinth is advanced,’ I said.

‘I suppose he is. It’s strange, but I often think that I am completely lacking in … sensitivity, is that the word? No, not sensitivity, but … I don’t know … compassion, maybe? Uncle Victor taught me the value of such things, though, and I can appreciate them in others. I think you should …’

The subject dropped soundlessly down into the well of silence. I went away. Perhaps I was wrong, perhaps we did come to some kind of terms. As I was closing the door, I glanced back to see him rise and take up that flattened hat and hold it in his hands with a slow little smile of wonder and delight. Yes, Julian had his points, but I did not trust him, and I remember moving cautiously down the stairs for fear of stepping into something nasty.

The little shop stood wedged into a crevice of the little street, opposite the underground station. The books on display inside the grimy window were bleached to the bone. I pushed open the rickety door. Bing, said the bell, wagging its head. From the rear there came a rustling, as of tiny furry feet trampling old newspapers, and Rabin shuffled forward and peered at me. He was a tall gaunt ruin of a man in an ancient, shapeless black suit which bore a fine shine on the elbows and knees. His spectacles were held together at the bridge with a lump of dirty surgical tape. Doctor Hieronymous Rabin, professor of classical Greek literature, bookseller extraordinary, scholar of the ancient arts.

‘Oh, you,’ he said. ‘You are early today.’

He gave a humourless grin, displaying a horrendous set of yellow tusks.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t get away any sooner.’

A loud sniff.

‘So, busy you were, eh? How is Julian?’

‘He’s all right.’

‘And his dear wife?’

‘She’s fine, they’re both just fine. I’m giving lessons to Yacinth.’

‘That precocious child of theirs.’

‘He’s Hel— Mrs Kyd’s brother.’

‘Ah yes, of course. And would it be permitted to ask what kind of lessons you are giving him?’

‘English.’

‘I see. Hum.’

‘What did you think?’

‘Oh nothing, nothing. But I thought you might have some useful lessons to teach him from your long years in the university of life.’

‘I teach him English.’

In spite of his sarcasm, I think that Rabin really liked me. He shrugged, and stamped away to his desk at the back of the shop. I followed him. He opened his hands over a book lying before him on the desk, the bitter lines of his old face softening.

‘Is it not exquisite?’ he murmured. ‘I got it for, as you would say, a song.’

The book was indeed a beautiful thing. I left him alone with his love, and went behind the counter in front of the shop and sat down on my three-legged stool. The hours danced slowly away, and the sun reached its angle where, for five minutes, it sent a sliver of dusty yellow light plunging into the floor beside me. A few customers came and went, tourists for the most part, they came slowly and went hastily, and one of them bought a book, a nasty little edition of the Kama Sutra. The door had a habit of slamming of its own volition, and each time someone went out, Rabin would give a faint squeak of protest as the thunderclap disturbed his day. I punched the till, let the coins trickle in, closed the drawer, sat down. The hours began their minuet again. Rabin came forward and paused irresolutely beside a step-ladder which leaned against the shelves, then grasped the uprights and scaled it with surprising speed. His ascension was brought to an abrupt halt when his shaggy head struck the ceiling with a thump. He stood stock still, astonished, and then indignant. He caught sight of me grinning at him, and scowled.

‘By the way,’ he said. ‘Someone was asking for you this morning.’

‘Who?’

He searched through the shelves, muttering to himself, leaning dangerously sideward to follow his fingers where they trotted among the titles. He drew out an enormous, ancient volume and jammed it under his arm. Its dislodgement brought down a cloud of dust on his descending head. Down from the heady heights once more, he paused, bent slightly forward, while a hand scampered in panic from pocket to pocket of his shiny suit. Up came a dirty red handkerchief, transcribed an arc, and met, just in time, coming from his face, a tremendous, shattering sneeze. He wiped his nose, like a dog shaking a rat.

‘Who was it?’ I asked.

‘Eh? Oh yes, what was his name … Ten … Tinbean?’

‘Twinbein?’

‘Yes, that was it. Extraordinary name.’

‘A German, was he?’

‘No, English, most definitely. A consumptive with spectacles, a friend of yours?’

‘No.’

‘Well, he seemed eager to find you. I told him… (a sly smile) … that you were in bed… (a cackle)… ahem.’

He returned to his desk, tittering over his joke. It was rumoured that Rabin had a wife hidden away somewhere, by whom he had begotten an uncounted brood of children. Whenever I thought about that, I had a vision of a little army, clad in shiny black suits, marching across the city in single file, from toddler to octogenarian, each of them a replica of their father. It was an awesome image. The ancient telephone spoke. One could not say that it rang, for it had an oddly querulous, croaking call, like that of some awkward, ugly and sullen bird. Rabin answered it, jamming it against his ear and glaring down into the mouthpiece as though he could see there a tiny caller waving at him in urgent semaphore.

‘Yes yes,’ he snarled. ‘That is the number you called, is it not? Who? I cannot hear you. He is.’

The receiver, still gobbling, was thrust at me.

‘For you.’

‘Hello.’

A gloomy voice travelled its way through the wires.

‘Mr White?’

‘Yes.’

‘Colonel Sesosteris. Perhaps you could come to see me today?’

‘Well I —’

‘Good. My address. In an hour? Goodbye.’

Click. I had not thought that Aristotle could be so capable. I went down to where Rabin sat again by his desk.

‘Ahm … Doctor?’

‘Well?’

‘Can I have an hour off?’

He sat back on the chair and stared at me glumly. I could never win those staring contests of which Rabin was so fond. He was an old hand. When I had dropped my eyes, and was pawing at the floor with the toe of my sandal, he said sweetly,

‘Just one hour? The whole day, why don’t you take? The whole week? And tell me, what have you to do with this man Sesosteris?’

That was a surprise.

‘How did you?… I just know him. He’s a friend of a friend of mine.’

‘I suppose Weiss is involved? All right, don’t tell me, so it is no business of mine. But you should be careful.’

‘Why?’

‘You know why.’

‘Do I?’

‘One hour.’

‘And a half?’

‘Take the day, take the week, go on, go.’

I was halfway down the street when he came to the door and called me back. I retraced my steps.

‘Yes?’

‘I am going to have that telephone taken away,’ he growled, then turned, went into the shop, and slammed the door behind him. Inside, the little bell had hysterics.

My chronology is all wrong. No matter.

The house was old and shabby, colourless, with a minimum of furniture, square chairs, tables scratched and stained, fingermarks on the doors. In the room where I stood, wondering… all kinds of things, a pile of yellowed newspapers were wedged under a punctured couch, and a plate of spaghetti was slowly dying on the top of a bookcase. Aristotle entered. I had the impression that he was poured through the door, he was so pale and silent.

‘Mr White,’ he said. ‘Sit down. Would you like a drink? No? Just as well, I am not sure if there is anything in the house. I am sorry to have called you here so suddenly. But please sit down — no, not there. The leg, you see, has come off, ha ha. Take this chair.’

I took that chair. Which was not too sure of its legs either. His opening speech finished, Aristotle was at something of a loss. He clasped his hands, unclasped them, made an effort to smile, thought better of it, and suddenly sat down. We faced each other now across the cluttered top of a coffee table. Aristotle breathed heavily through his nose. A window framed a sunlit view of a stretch of road, a mudguard and one punctured wheel of a car, and, farther down the street, a man with an excited dog romping at his heels. I cleared my throat, and the noise knocked echoes from the walls.

‘I suppose you know why you are here?’ said Aristotle.

‘No.’

He nodded absently. His fretful gaze shifted, and he stood up.

‘Come outside,’ he said. ‘It’s cooler.’

But in the garden there was little coolness. The sun came raging down on the lawn, an uneven stretch of dry dust dotted with disconsolate tufts of grass, and nothing was still in the upward flowing ripples of heat. A broken deck chair lay on its side below the verandah, and in the grass two empty beer bottles leaned drunkenly neck to neck. But in the centre of that wasted place a long, deep swimming pool was cut, with a gleaming steel ladder, a brand new diving board; it lacked nothing, except water. In the deep end, a lizard was dying among brown leaves already dead. The little creature made regular, feeble efforts to scale the pale blue tiles. I think I could hear the painful rasp of its claws on the smooth enamel. Aristotle’s shoulders drooped. He looked around the garden and murmured,

‘My house is in ruins.’

‘There was in his voice another, smaller voice which said, I can take no more, treat me gently, for I am ready to break. He spent some time assembling a chair which wished to remain folded. We sat and looked at the pitted concrete wall behind the pool. Aristotle said,

‘It will be very sad about Julian.’

I did not reply to what seems to have been a question. He glanced at me, with the faintest touch of reproof.

‘Do you not think it will be very sad, Mr White?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything. I don’t know him all that well.’

‘Oh. I thought you were an old friend.’

‘No.’

‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’

‘No.’

‘You have heard nothing about his factories?’

‘No.’

‘I wish you would not lie to me, Mr White. There is no need.’

‘No.’

There came a silence then, and we listened to the metallic chorus of the cicadas. I put my hand to the top of my head. My hair was hot to the touch. I had a strange, not unpleasant floating sensation, as though I were surrounded by thick warm fluid. The air was like placenta. To go on saying no, that lovely little moan, seemed enough to separate me from anything and everything of import. A sound came from the house, the slamming of a door, and Aristotle turned and peered through the windows which we had left standing open. No one appeared there, and, with a little sigh, he turned back again, and yawned.

‘Chill in the air,’ he said.

I lit a cigarette. As I released the first breath of smoke, I felt Aristotle’s eyes upon me hungrily.

‘Do you want one?’

‘I am forbidden to smoke now.’

There was a world of woe in his voice. I tried to blow the smoke away from him, but a sadistic breeze insisted on carrying it to his nose. He coughed, and mumbled,

‘What was I saying? Ah yes. A whale.’

‘Pardon?’

He turned to me suddenly, his hands clutching his knees.

‘I think I will take a cigarette, Mr White.’

He lit it with a trembling fist, and sucked greedily at the gay coils of smoke. He smiled. His mouth smiled.

‘The whale,’ he said. ‘I once read somewhere that whales are really very gentle animals. Frail even, in their way. It’s strange, for such an enormous beast, although I don’t see why. Perhaps their size … I don’t know. The sharks could kill them, it seems, but the whales act as bait. Shoals of tiny fishes swim in their wake, and the sharks feed on them. So, with the peculiar wisdom of unthinking things, they know better than to take one large meal in place of a constant promise of sufficiency.’

He paused, seemingly pleased with the nice turn of that last sentence. Then he frowned, and went on,

‘I wonder if that’s true? I really think I must have read it incorrectly. It sounds most improbable, don’t you think, sharks being such incredibly savage creatures?’

I said,

‘No.’

Aristotle joined his fingers at their tips and touched them to his chin. He began to rock slowly backward and forward on the chair. The bolts creaked.

‘He is quite brilliant, you know, but he has this ridiculous obsession with revolution.’

‘Colonel.’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s very hot. I wish you’d —’

‘Come to the point?’

‘Yes.’

Regretfully he drew the last wisp of smoke from the butt of the cigarette. The nicotine seemed to have revived in him some interest in the aspects of the world outside his eyes. He looked about his property, decaying though it was, with a hint of satisfaction. He asked,

‘Do you think that it is possible to achieve anything through armed uprisings? I mean frankly, do you think it is?’

A figure came out through the windows, a short, dapper little man in an army uniform. His pigeon-chest flashed with bright bits of metal. Aristotle stood up, and they stood at attention, their hands twitching at their sides. But they did not salute, and turned away from each other in anger and confusion. Aristotle said,

‘This is Colonel Panagoulis.’

Panagoulis looked at me, and his neck sank into the folds of his khaki collar. He had the look of an irritable tortoise. I ran my tongue across my lower lip.

‘I can’t stand this heat,’ Panagoulis snapped, and turned and strode back into the house. Aristotle sat down. His fingers twitched. He said,

‘I was at the end of my career before I realized that I was not suited to the army. A wasted life. It is astonishing.’

He went to the edge of the pool, and, taking up a long pole, to the end of which there was tied a net, for trapping leaves, he deftly scooped up the fast-failing lizard, and reunited it to its native soil. He watched it with tenderness as it crawled away into the grass.

‘Amazing creatures,’ he said. ‘I always wanted to study them.’

He sighed, and peered across the garden with his eyes narrowed. He was drifting away from me.

‘It’s very hot,’ I said.

‘Is it? I don’t feel it very much now.’

He looked at his liver-spotted arms.

‘I’m sixty-two,’ he said.

Panagoulis came out on the verandah.

‘He’s here,’ he called, and disappeared once again.

‘Who?’ Aristotle asked, turning, and, seeing the verandah empty, he threw up his hands and swore. And then he suddenly turned to me, fixed me with a keen look, and said briskly,

‘Take my advice, Mr White, and leave this country.’

‘Why?’

‘Look at me, Mr White. Look at Panagoulis. The gods are dead. There is nothing left for people like you.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

But his speech had taxed him beyond weariness. He sat now, crouched and old, his eyelids lightly closed. He lifted a hand in a tired gesture of dismissal. I turned away. The windows yawned silently, and as I passed through them it seemed that huge jaws with teeth might come crashing down on me from the ceiling.

And when I returned to the shop, Rabin was standing over a pimply pale young man from the telephone company, who was busily, if clumsily, extracting from the wall that black buzzing tooth which had so pained the old man. Now who will tell me that this world is sane?

There follows, until the next evening, a curious hollow silence in my memory. The events of those hours seem to have slipped down into some hidden fissure of time. Perhaps there were no events. It is quite possible. Something does remain, however, like the dark blur of an unidentifiable though vaguely unsettling object trapped inside a block of ice. It is the recollection of the blank and dispersed mood of that time, like the animal sense which those in shock must retain of the forcibly forgotten blood and twisted metal of the disaster. There was no carnage or death in my case, I think, but only that soundless, fascinated horror one feels when the top step of the stairs proves nonexistent, and the foot descends into an empty eternity of darkness. Something was flying violently out of my hands, and I could only watch it fall, and wait for it to smash at my feet. I can do no better than these vague suggestions, this mixed bag of metaphors. Perhaps it was my life which was beginning to fly from my grasp.

I climbed the hill in the dark, with the lights of the city burning behind me, and the stars burning in the sky. It was a soft balmy night, with only the voices of the trees stirring the silence. Fire in the western sky now and then illuminated a serrated horizon, a stark tree, a bit of roof. Gleaming limousines crouched in their spoor on the road outside the house. Faint music sounded distantly. I was nervous, all brushed and shaved, and bundled into the constricting second skin of a suit. The trap door in the gate was opened, dropping a neat square of light at my feet, and an elderly Arab in a flowing white robe asked softly,

‘Yes?’

‘Ben White.’

‘Come in, Sair,’ he murmured, and, throwing back the loose sleeve of his robe, he offered me the garden. As I stepped past him I asked,

‘Have I seen you before?’

He did not understand me, but he was not the one to admit that. Gravely he said,

‘I am Yusef, Sair.’

‘Well, that’s nice.’

Lights burned in every window of the house, and powerful lamps, concealed about the garden, lit up the walls. Yusef moved ahead on quiet feet, the murmurous billowing of his robe lending a peculiar sinuous movement to the darkness. He led me through the tunnel into the courtyard. The place was crowded, the guests tightly packed into the little space, all in that early-party stance, one knee bent, one foot turned out, glass joggling in the hand. Yusef murmured a fair approximation of my name, and Julian rose from the table to greet me.

‘Benjamin, here you are. Have a drink.’

Perceive this scene: that empty blue room behind the fountain, filled now with tipsy revellers. At one end, a makeshift dais, plywood and ill-driven nails. Upon the dais there stands, draped mysteriously in a canvas shroud, a square object five feet by five, four in breadth. Julian, thinking that he is not observed, slips up there for a gleeful peek beneath the shroud. I have an intimation of steel cords and springs, tense, taut, and humming faintly. Julian catches my eye, or I catch his. He winks. I wonder what mischief he has planned.

I wandered in the garden around the house. Dim figures lurked in the shadows, among the scented mimosas, the bougainvillaea. Once I startled the guests in the dining-room by pressing my face to the window and gaping in at them. I found french windows standing open on a darkened room, the curtains softly billowing. I went inside, into the house, and drifted silently across the halls and rooms. Distant music whispered to me. There was uneasiness in the air.

A cocktail was thrust into my paw, most of which spilled when Julian gave me a hearty thump on the back.

‘What do you think?’ he cried, inserting a gentle elbow into the chest of a tiny senile old man who was making vain efforts to gain his attention.

‘Very impressive,’ I murmured.

Julian inclined a furry ear towards my face.

‘Eh? Can’t hear you with all this noise.’

‘I said it looks very impressive, the party.’

He reared away from me, two plump hands patting his chest, a wide smile on his chops.

‘The last grand gesture,’ he said.

A dim figure slunk toward us, spectacles gleaming. Julian threw an expansive arm around its shoulder, almost dislocating its neck. Almost. Pity. I knew from somewhere the pale forlorn face, the soft-boiled eyes behind their thick panes. The mouth gave an indecipherable groan.

‘Pardon?’ I shouted.

‘I said, hello.’

‘Oh. Hello.’

‘Benjamin, you remember Charlie Knight, don’t you?’Julian said. ‘The island that day…?’

‘Oh yes, of course.’

A humble ghost, risen from the past. Hello Charlie, old fiend — sorry, insert an ‘r’. Julian beamed at his friend, and cried,

‘My old procurer. Off you go now and have some jelly.’

Charlie gave us both an unhappy smile, and slunk away. I watched him being sucked helplessly into the throng.

‘I love parties,’ Julian sighed.

I cleared my throat, and shuffled the gravel with the toe of my shoe.

‘A bit tiring,’ I said.

Julian cast a glance at me.

‘But there are so many possibilities, my boy, so very many possibilities.’

‘For what?’

He waved a hand.

‘All kinds of things. Look around. You might meet old friends.’

I looked around.

Over the banisters of the stairs a woman hung, pale arms and hair pointing resolutely downward. I touched her carefully. She seemed to be unconscious. A tall man with grey hair, a dead cigarette in his fingertips, emerged below us, halted, and looked up at me in surprise. I smiled. He stepped forward and inspected the woman’s purplish face. Then he shrugged, and strolled away. I gently unwound her from her perch and laid her down on the stairs, where she gave a great sigh and reclined in a pose reminiscent of those naked Spanish majas. I followed the winding stairs. Somewhere below me, a woman’s strident voice was calling for Melissa, Melissa, Melissima. Tinkle. That music.

Julian was looking at me, grinning and biting his lip. I could think of nothing to say to him. Had I been calmer in those days, I might have listened to him more closely, and heeded that subtle warning which rolling Uncle Victor had been made to carry to me. I have said it before, I shall say it again, I say it now: fool, fool, fool. Helena stood on the dais, holding the rip cord in her hand, biting her lip, trying not to look too ridiculous. She need not have bothered. No one heeded her. Lips were being gnawed all around me. I felt that at any moment a concerted burst of laughter would ring out, and everyone would turn to me, screaming derision. I checked my zipper. Julian said,

‘Ladies and gentlemen, please, your attention.’

In the middle of a deserted room, I found a strange grinning figure standing storklike on one pointed slipper, masked, dressed in a harlequin suit, a pale finger pressed to its lips, another pointing to the shadow beneath a couch, its ear bent to the silence following a sentence broken behind a door. I looked to the couch and caught the flash of a tiny claw, and when I turned back to that figure, it was gone. Tink.

I was perched against a wall with a glass of something in my hand. I was drunk. There was a storm, a lavish production banging about in the sky. The current was uncertain, and the lights kept dipping crazily, and flaring up again, brighter than ever, to catch the guests by surprise in frozen attitudes of inexplicable guilt. Rabin came and talked to me. Could it really have been Rabin? I do not think I heard one word of what he said. He shook his head and went away. I saw an unmistakably twisted back lurch out into the hall, but when I made to follow it, a hand was laid upon my shoulder, and I turned to find friend Charlie, the knight of the night, goggling at me through his goggles.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Your German friend —’

‘Charlie, I must go.’

‘I want you to tell him something. Listen to me. Will you tell him that —’

‘Must go —’

‘Twinbein will be…’

The rest was lost. What did I care? I went into the hall, shaking my head, a stupid thing to do, for a set of billiard balls began to knock against each other quite sickeningly inside my skull. Walls, doors, a carpet with two cigarette burns and one guilty-looking butt.

Horrible brown smoke was soaking through the pores of the canvas. Helena watched it in horrified fascination, forgetful of the cord still clutched in her hand. Someone said,

‘It’s a bomb.’

The crowd backed away. Yack, the thing barked. They backed farther away. Helena looked at me, her mouth open, her head shaking in disbelief. Something prodded me in the back.

‘For God’s sake, do something,’ said Julian.

And I wonder now, here in this autumn, by this sea, whatever became of Julian’s club foot. Could it be that my jaundiced mind afflicted him with it? Jaundiced memory. Given the chance, I think I would cripple the world. I am doing my best to nail a number of its creatures.

I was in a room near the front of the house. The shapes of the furniture impressed themselves but dimly on my eyes, their outlines drawn against an odd purple radiance. That radiance came from the sky: a huge sheet of plate glass formed one wall. There was the hill sloping away, traversed by the white road. The city glimmered, and its sibling, the sky of stars. My knee Struck something low and solid, and there was a tinkle of glass. It was a little cabinet with a royal stock of liquor. I groped my way to an armchair and turned it to face the night. The enormity of the darkness assailed me. Lightning flashed along the line of the far mountains. Tink. I made myself a drink at the cabinet, working by smell, for I could not read the labels. I found brandy. Clink of glass, tinkle of liquor.

Helena pulled the cord, and there, revealed before us, was a magnified model of the diseased coils of an insane brain, with painted wires and bits of tubing twisted together, and a round black ball, like one of those cartoon anarchist’s bombs, resting with an odd malevolence at the centre of the mesh. Helena was rooted to the spot. Yack.

‘Good Christ, it’s going to explode.’

I stood outside the gate, drinking the darkness. The moon peered through a crack in the clouds. A little man shared my vigil. He had an empty glass, a dead cigar, and the bandiest legs I had ever seen. We were almost like friends. After some time of silence, he sighed, laid the glass down on the road, and walked toward one of the largest of the limousines.

‘Ahem,’ he said.

He climbed the bonnet, had a moment of difficulty with the windscreen, and then he was on the roof, where I saw, in awe, his little legs rise, slowly, slowly, a grunt, up; he did a perfect handstand. Coins fell from his pockets, and gave him a silvery round of applause. He clambered down, smoothed his jacket, and swaggered, justly proud, back into the garden.

And I watched the large dent his inverted head had left in the roof of the car, a pool of moonlight, emptying gradually, until, at its lowest tide, the metal suddenly snapped back into its shape with a deep note of booming black music, filling the night with wonder. I turned, and heard glass crunch under my feet.

When I lifted my eyes I found a figure coming toward me through the purple gloom. I raised my glass in a toast.

‘You,’ I said.

The figure went past me to the window and looked down at the city.

‘Why did you not come for my lesson yesterday?’

‘What?’

I was busy with that bottle again.

‘I said you didn’t come for that bottle yesterday.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The lesson.’

‘Was busy.’

I took the bottle back with me to the chair and sank down into its waiting arms. I asked,

‘Shouldn’t you be in bed, this hour of the night?’

‘What?’

‘Should we go to bed tonight?’

Silence. Thunder rolled in the distance. The pool of moonlight vanished. A finger was drawn down the glass, ee ee ee. I tried to recall something, a fleeting memory.

‘On such a night as this,’ I murmured.

There was the sound of the silver applause of coins falling, tinkling on the road. A thunderhead with a silver gash in its forehead was rolling in from the mountains. I heard the soft hushing of rain.

‘Always something,’ I said. ‘Something always comes along to ruin it.’

‘In Egypt once I saw a group of pilgrims on their way to Mecca,’ said Melissa, Melissima. ‘It was at the airport. They were bewildered, as though they could not connect the two worlds. They were like refugees. Pilgrims or refugees, there is no difference. You make me think of them.’

‘Why?’

Their plane crashed in the desert before it reached Mecca. I thought of their white robes. And now you make me think of them again.’

Think. Tink. Once, in winter, on a deserted beach in a strange part of the country, I found an abandoned baby seal dying in a crevice of the rocks. It had such exquisite moist brown eyes. I wanted to kill it, to put it out of its misery, but I did not know how to go about it, and I went away instead and left it there. Sometimes those eyes stare at me out of the velvet darkness of a dream. Do I digress?’

‘You told me you loved me,’ I said.

‘I never did.’

‘Then you didn’t love me?’

‘I never said that either. That ridiculous machine. He planned it, how could you fail to see that? I shall never forgive you, never.’

She was sitting on the floor, her arms around her knees and her forehead laid against the glass. Lightning flashed on her face.

‘How can I keep you?’ I asked. ‘What have I got to offer you, to make you stay?’

‘You know.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t think I do.’

‘You know. The first day we were together, you spoke of…’

‘What would you do with it, if you found it?’

‘Would that matter to you?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You are such a fool.’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh go away, leave me alone.’

‘Yes.’

I went away, I left her alone. The music had ceased. I searched for Yacinth, but I could not find him. Their plane crashed in the desert. What did I expect from him, anyway? Downstairs, the guests were becoming noisy, recovering from their fright. You fool. It was only a little thing. Why could she not…?

Suddenly, with a great groan, the whole thing began to uncoil. Pieces of wire hopped into the air like a troupe of undisciplined acrobats. Smoke billowed. A girl screamed, and then a tremendous, though undeniably comic, bang came from the machine, and the thing finally exploded with an hilarious, groaning, ungainly slowness. Ping, ping, said the springs, lying down dead on the floor. The last wisps of smoke cleared. I found that I was laughing, while Helena screamed abuse at me from the stage, her fists clenched, feet stamping, her teeth out and eyes ablaze. The immediate area of the disaster was cleared (the artist, Horsfall, who had created the bomb, had been one of the first to flee, tittering as he ran), but beyond that, figures were fleeing, dowagers skidding cumbersomely through the windows into the courtyard (snouts appearing again a moment later), old men dancing with delight, women waving their hands, and a few fat men loping away, pausing every few steps for a glance over their shoulders, fear telling them to flee, curiosity urging, yes, but not yet. Into the centre of the room there tottered a plump woman in pearls and a black dress, wailing, her mouth a round black hole. She halted, her hands in her hair, and her squeals swung into a higher key, then her mouth closed, and she sat down abruptly on the parquet with a soft plop. The thread of her necklace broke, and the little white beads went rolling in all directions. Rescuers rushed forward, drew back before her screams, advanced again and caught her by the arms, legs, tits, head, ribs, and she was hoisted to her feet, roaring in protest. Helena launched herself at me. She had reached a stage of total incoherence by now, just one unbroken howl cleaving a passage for her which led to my most pluckable orbs, all four of them. I turned and ran, but not before I glimpsed, in one of those frames of stillness which, running, one can catch so beautifully, Julian, his hands in his trouser pockets, watching us with amusement, and not a little sympathy, yes, sympathy. He had won.

The lights sank with what I would swear was a sucking sound. My hand found a knob, pushed open a door. Lights, lights, bring tapers to this scene, we are not finished yet, I have some revenge, there must be … But soft you now. The lights swooped down from the ceiling and lit up a little tableau for me, quaint as a picture. Look at this descending scale of hilarity. Shelves of books, a chandelier, french windows again. Andreas crouched on his heels in the middle of the floor, one hand behind him pressed to the carpet for support. In front of him, the good Aristotle cowered, knees bent, back arched backwards, an arm lifted across his forehead. And there, last but best, leaning over them with a stick upraised above the Colonel’s unprotected pate, Julian, our genial host, master of assorted jokes and japes, his tongue out and eyes bulging, ready to thrash the living daylights out of his quaking foes. O lord, that I should have had a camera and one of those little bulbs that go pop, to transfix that scene forever. On, on to the finale. There was a roar behind me, and I leapt aside, fearful of a stick descending on my own head, and Erik (remember Erik?) went galloping through the doorway, across the floor, threw the combatants to all sides, then crashed through the windows (closed, by the way) and fell headlong into the courtyard. The last thing I saw of him was his heels disappearing into the darkness. An absurdly melodramatic clap of thunder bawled up in the sky, and when its rumbling had ceased there came to us the prosaic sounds of Erik being extravagantly sick.

And when, toward dawn, I returned to my flat, the place seemed curiously bare. There were my books, all my possessions, all intact, yet I could not rid myself of the feeling that something was missing. I thought of searching for it, but how could I, not knowing even where to start? The last of the storm was still grumbling in the sky. I went out on the balcony and watched the rain falling on the silent humbled city. Strange lights were burning, each with a moist, white halo. Down in the streets, the beasts were feeding. It was strange. I heard my name called across the roof tops. I thought that I was free again, that I was ready to begin writing, to leave Greece, to return home, even. I was not.