Complete Short Stories (VMC) (61 page)

After a time, the scene was peaceful again, the empty boats hardly moving on the water and, looking out to sea, Jane and Barbara would watch the ship making its wide curve before disappearing round the headland.

Then they would go to a
taverna
and choose their fish (except on Sundays, the boat came at about noon), and when it was cooked and eaten, they would walk slowly up the hillside track, through the herb-scented scrub, to Jane’s cottage.

‘I shall never go home to England now. I feel it in my bones,’ Jane said once. ‘Every time the boat goes back to Athens, I think that.’

‘But you still say “home”,’ her sister said.

‘I didn’t mean to.
This
is home. The other’s Blighty – I can’t imagine it any more. Do they still have those double-decker buses?’

Her husband – an expatriate painter, as Barbara’s husband, Leonard, always referred to him – had died that spring and Barbara had come from England to be with her sister for a time and eventually to take her home – for she believed that what Jane had written in letters could soon be reasoned away; and so she had sent the children to their grandmother, drawn
all her savings from the bank and had arrived on the island ready to clasp her younger sister in her arms and soon restore her to her proper place.

‘There is nothing to keep you,’ she had pleaded on her first evening on the island. There had been a sudden, brilliant sunset and afterwards it was dark and warm. The streets smelt of honeysuckle and carnations. Their sandals slapped quietly on the flagstones. They spoke in low voices and were greeted softly by passers-by. ‘There is nothing to keep you,’ Barbara repeated.

The next day, they climbed the hillside to Alan’s grave in the cluttered little cemetery above the sea; but even standing there, Jane did not weep or seem particularly moved. She turned, instead, to look downwards at the sea and she took a deep breath – almost a satisfied, a triumphant breath, thought Barbara.

‘I’m afraid I have come all this way for nothing,’ she wrote to Leonard. ‘But I will stay on a little as you suggest.’

Day by day, she lost her usual pallor and became almost as brown as Jane, and she slept long and deeply at night. Her letters were insincere, for she could only write of how much money she had wasted on the journey and how many people she had inconvenienced at home.

On one of their usual mornings at the café, they waited to see the boat come in from Athens. They had bought a basket of artichokes and some paraffin oil, and now sat under a bamboo awning drinking coffee. The boat appeared far out; it rounded the headland and they watched it curving in towards the harbour. A few people collected by the water’s edge with their baggage – baskets of cheeses, chickens and bunches of flowers.

Barbara sipped her glass of ice-cold water to take away the bitter taste the coffee had.

‘The flowers are always dead by the time they get to Athens,’ Jane said.

Two rowing-boats put out across the water towards the anchored ship and later, when they were returning, Jane said: ‘I never watch them without thinking of the day Alan and I came. The houses seemed to rise higher and higher as we rowed into the harbour, and I felt alien and self-conscious when I stepped ashore – all the village out watching, taking note of my London clothes. My shirt was far too bright for here, but luckily it soon faded.’ (She had worn it ever since Barbara’s arrival, washing it sometimes at night, but never ironing it and never mending the tear in the sleeve. ‘In London, I couldn’t have just one shirt,’ she had said. ‘And that is all I care to have.’) ‘When we came ashore that day, I had no idea what impression we were making. We were the only visitors – which is how we thought of ourselves then, not knowing that we were here for ever.’

‘What will you live on?’ Barbara asked. She had given up persuasion at last, convinced now of her sister’s obstinacy, of her determination to stay
exactly where she was – among people whose language she spoke indifferently – wearing her one shirt till it was threadbare.

‘I’ve got Mother’s money.’

‘It isn’t enough. Mine hardly keeps me in cigarettes.’

Jane put on her sunglasses and turned in her chair to look across the bright water and the approaching boats. She said: ‘Don’t fuss so much. I can always take summer visitors. You could send them out to me from Blighty. I should like some nice, bewildered-looking visitors like this one. I would take them under my wing.’

There was only one bewildered-looking person on the boat. He was dressed in khaki drill and carried a rucksack which – when he had jumped ashore – he set down so that he could give his hand to an old woman, who was swathed in black and proudly carried a Pan-American travel bag. When he had her safely on land, he bowed and said, ‘
Khérete.
’ She drew her head veil across her mouth and nodded.

‘One of our fellow-countrymen,’ said Jane, glancing at him without enthusiasm.

He stood looking about him, smilingly refusing to hire a donkey or rent a room or have his rucksack taken from him. Then he appeared to make a great decision and he came over to the café and sat down.

‘
Kali méra
,’ he said self-consciously.

‘Good-morning,’ the waiter replied. That, however, was the extent of his English, and confusion arose about what sort of coffee he should order.

Jane, over her shoulder, off-handedly explained.

‘You wouldn’t
like
having visitors,’ Barbara said softly. ‘And you wouldn’t take them under your wing.’

‘I should like their money. That is what would appeal to me about them.’

‘You would resent them.’

‘Let’s go.’ Jane jumped up and went inside the café to pay, then she took up the oilcan and handed the artichokes to her sister. As they were passing the Englishman’s table, she relented. She stopped to ask him when he had left home.

‘A fortnight ago,’ he said, pushing the table as he stood up, slopping his glass of water.

‘And it was raining, I suppose?’

‘Pouring down. It was like another world. And still is, my wife writes to say.’

‘You are badly sunburned,’ Jane said in a stern voice. ‘Spyros will give you some yoghourt to soothe it if you ask.’ She nodded towards the café. ‘Are you staying at the Amphitryon?’

There was only one hotel on the island – on the other side of the bay
from her cottage. She pointed it out to him and gave careful instructions how to reach it, up flights of steps and between orchards of lemon trees.

He watched them walking away, carrying the artichokes and the oilcan, marked out by these as inhabitants, he thought. It was not the kind of shopping that visitors would do.

When Spyros came outside again, he asked him for yoghourt, but was not understood. He shouldered his rucksack and made for the hotel, soon taking a wrong flight of steps and getting lost between the close-packed houses. The sun beat down and the whitewashed walls dazzled him; his shirt under the rucksack was soaked with sweat. He took a map from his pocket and unfolded it and held it up as a screen between the blazing sun and his peeling face. From dark doorways shy children stared at him; old women, shelling peas or spinning, inclined their heads graciously towards him. ‘
Kali méra
,’ he repeated gallantly as he passed the open doorways. ‘
Kali méra sas
.’ The children smiled and turned aside their heads.

‘It is quite wonderful,’ he told himself. ‘I am here. It is true.’ His wife was miles away in a dark world underneath the clouds. He was sorry for her; he told himself he missed her; he forgot her. ‘Hibiscus,’ he murmured, looking up at a wall. He recognised it from pictures. When he reached the hotel, he would describe everything in his diary – the sea, the boat, the two Englishwomen at the café, the flowers. He had climbed to one of the higher streets and could look down through the leaves of some lemon trees at the harbour. The waterfront was deserted now, for everyone had gone in out of the heat and there was complete human silence over the island – bees buzzed, crickets chirped, a church bell chimed – but there were no voices. At the end of one of the deserted streets, he saw the word ‘Amphitryon’ written on a board over a doorway and he went towards it in triumph.

Jane and Barbara, at lunch, discussed him – Jane, with an almost Greek sharpness of curiosity and detachment, her sister thought. It was very much like the way she was eating her artichoke – the deft stripping away of leaves, the certainty of the hidden heart being there for the reaching. Licking oil from her fingers, Jane said: ‘So his wife writes to tell him about the rain. Complainingly, I dare say. He thinks he is glad to get her letters, but he is gladder to put them out of his mind.’

‘This you know,’ said Barbara.

‘This I know. And he also thinks he is glad to be in Greece. He has to be. I expect he has waited twenty years or more to come here and how can he afford, now that he’s here, to dwell on his sunburn and his blistered feet and mosquito bites? I bet he gets frightful diarrhoea, too, poor old thing.’

‘Is everyone who comes on the boat such a matter of conjecture?’

‘Everyone. Luckily one doesn’t know till later, or who could dare to brave it? You noticed the crowds when
you
arrived? Although you were expected and known about, so there was a more critical turnout for you.’

‘I thought they were meeting people off the boat, or going back in it themselves.’

‘Well, you know better now.’

In the afternoon – as on every afternoon – Jane lay down on the big brass bedstead in her room and went to sleep. Barbara, unused to this habit and scorning it, wrote to her children and then took the track down the hillside to the village to post her letter. In the hot, quiet afternoon the smell of wild sage was overpowering as she brushed against it along the path.

The post office was dark and cool, and inside it sat the Englishman. He had come to buy stamps and had been requested to draw up a chair and have some conversation with the clerk, who had a married sister living in Bermondsey. A boy came in from the café, carrying a swinging tray, with coffee and glasses of water. Barbara stood by while the Englishman was handed his cup and glass. He had risen when she entered, but was curtly motioned to sit down by the clerk, who got up to tear off stamps for Barbara and give her change.

‘Roland Bagueley,’ the Englishman said slowly and loudly in answer to an earlier question. He took the pad he was offered and wrote his name in capitals.

‘From London? Swindon? Falmouth?’ asked the clerk.

Barbara, sticking on stamps, lingered. The buckle of her sandal was given some attention.

‘London,’ said Roland Bagueley. ‘A part of London.’

‘Hampstead, for instance,’ Barbara thought. She picked up her change, put it in her purse and, smiling in his direction, went out. As he once more jumped to his feet, she heard him shouting, ‘Hampstead – a part of London called Hampstead.’

She stopped at the café for cigarettes and on her way home printed his name on the packet lest she should forget it. ‘Roland Bagueley from Hampstead,’ she would tell Jane. She wondered if in the end her sister would go mad, living alone, nourished on such trifles.

In the evening, they met him again. He was sitting outside a waterside
taverna
where they went for dinner. Jane looked disconcerted when he stood up and offered them chairs. She liked conjecture about strangers rather than facts about acquaintances.

They sat down and ordered drinks. ‘So you’re not visitors here,’ he said to Barbara, as Jane was speaking in Greek to the waiter.

‘I am, but my sister lives here – Jane Bailey. And I am Barbara Fennell.’

To know their names seemed to gratify him enormously.

‘I heard it in the post office this afternoon,’ Barbara said when he had introduced himself.

‘The clerk knows a little English and hoped to practise it on me. His sister lives in Bermondsey and he supposed that I must know her.’

‘And you live in Hampstead. I heard that, too.’

‘Yes, I am an architect.’

Jane, returning her attention, nodded as if this much she had already guessed. ‘And have you been to Greece before?’ she asked.

‘No. It is a dream realised after many, many years.’

She put out her foot and tapped Barbara’s. ‘And are you disappointed in it?’ Her questions were peremptory and put him out. She was a small, dark, darting person, often intimidating – even to her sister.

He shook his head, looking puzzled; but what he was puzzled about was not his reactions to Greece, Barbara realised suddenly, but the sight of his name written on the cigarette packet which was lying on the table. Unlike Jane, she was liable to blush and, doing so, puzzled him more.

‘
Yassoo
,’ he said painstakingly, lifting his glass.

‘Oh, good luck,’ said Jane, who had just put hers down.

Barbara took the cigarette packet and in rather an affected voice said: ‘How amusing! When I heard your name in the post office I wrote it down on this so that I could remember to tell Jane.’

‘But why?’

‘I thought she would admire my sharpness. No one arrives on this island without being scrutinised, you see; and I am falling into the habit.

‘Wasn’t it your wife’s lifelong ambition to come to Greece, too?’ asked Jane.

‘No, Iris likes to spend her holidays with her sister in Buxton.’

‘Well, I expect that’s very nice, too.’

They went into the
taverna
to choose their fish and when they came outside again the sun was dropping fast into the pinkish water. They watched it go and it was suddenly dark and the air seemed warmer and more still. ‘I really wanted to be alone here,’ Roland was thinking. The brisk, dark little woman was in no way part of what he had come all this distance for and awaited so long, and about the place itself she seemed imperious and possessive, describing to him how she had chosen it for life. She had traded it for a great deal, he thought – for she was a young woman to make such a decision – and under the influence of ouzo, he began to make a list for her of what she lacked.

‘But I have friends here,’ she said, dropping a fish’s head to a pleading cat and wiping her fingers on a piece of bread.