Complete Short Stories (VMC) (62 page)

‘Not your own kind.’

‘I never found my own kind anywhere – only in my husband.’

‘Even everyday things – comforts we take for granted.’

‘Like the Underground at rush hours; fog and rain; cocktail parties; wearing hats.’

‘There is no water at my hotel – one carafe in my room for drinking, which I’m too nervous to do. I have paid extra for a shower, but nothing comes out of it.’

‘Oh, well, the sea is warm now.’

‘I wasn’t complaining,’ he said quickly, wondering if there had been impatience in her voice – even, perhaps, contempt. In fact, he had wanted – and still wanted – everything to be quite different from at home, and had already written almost boastingly to tell his wife about the shower.

‘I know that the man who understands how to work the pumps has gone to Athens to have his chest X-rayed,’ Jane said. ‘He will be back on the boat the day after tomorrow and then you’ll be all right.’

‘I wasn’t complaining,’ he said again, thinking, ‘Two more days!’

‘Can’t you imagine England now?’ Barbara asked. ‘A long light evening and the sound of mowing-machines.’ The children would be going to bed; she tried to visualise them – pink faces, fair hair, blue dressing-gowns – and they remained unreal. A barefooted boy, no older than her son, was driving a donkey along the sea front, whacking its rump and making kissing noises at it. Other children were playing in boats under the harbour wall, their voices conspiratorial above the sound of the water peacefully slapping the stone wall.

‘I could
sleep
… I could sleep,’ she said, and covered her face with her hands and yawned. But Jane was perfectly alert – had hardly begun the second half of her waking day.

‘It’s the air perhaps,’ said Roland, trying not to yawn, too.

‘It’s trying to keep going all day in the heat,’ said Jane. ‘The air is perfectly invigorating.’

When they had said good-night to Roland and seen him going off in the opposite direction to his waterless hotel, the sisters began the steep climb up the hillside. Pausing for breath and looking back at the harbour lights, Barbara said: ‘I’ll have to go home soon, I suppose. Next week, perhaps.’

‘Well, you are not to think of me. I’m quite all right now. You must do whatever you must. I expect you are missing the children.’

‘A little.’ All the way along the track, she was treading on the thyme or brushing against sage bushes, freeing the scent of the herbs upon the air. I don’t really miss the children, she thought. Each day, I miss them less, not more.

When they reached the cottage, Jane lit two oil-lamps. She gave one to Barbara to take upstairs to bed with her, and sat beside the other to read
until two or three o’clock. As she kicked off her sandals and settled down, she said, ‘In the morning, I might get out Alan’s paints and make a start. I’ll teach myself and surprise you all.’ Although she had said this before, and in a tone of great decision and determination, nothing had been done.

Barbara went to her bedroom and leant out of the window, breathing the scented air. She was beginning to understand her sister and even to foresee difficulties for herself lying ahead, and imagined herself back home, unsettled by her experience, deprived of the dazzling light, and the deep silence.

There were fewer boats now down in the harbour. She got into bed. Her sunburned body was fiery between the coarse sheets; she felt wonderfully lulled and, turning her cheek at once to the pillow, she let out a long breath like a contented sigh, and fell asleep.

They saw a great deal of Roland, as it was natural to do in that small village – meeting at the
taverna
, the café, the bathing-place below the rocks. Sometimes, on afternoons when Jane was sleeping, Barbara went on excursions with him – to one of the bays to swim and, once, by mules, to a convent at the highest point on the island. There, among lemon trees, they tied up their mules and Roland sat down on the hillside, while Barbara went into the courtyard. It was filled with stocks and roses and the sound of bees. The Reverend Mother came to meet her. She led her into a cool dark room and gave her a spoonful of jam and a glass of water on a tray. She was a plump lively woman with gold teeth and a great smell of garlic. Although they had no words in common, they had plenty of nods and smiles and Barbara had admiring sounds as well – at the
ikons
in the ugly little chapel, at a piece of sacred bone in a box, at the view, and the arum lilies in the courtyard. She bought a lace-edged handkerchief and was given a bunch of stocks. When she took the old nun’s hand, it was as hard as leather, and creased; for she had worked in the fields like any peasant. As Barbara left, she heard whispering and giggling above her and, looking up, glimpsed two nuns peeping from a high window. She lifted her flowers to wave; but, as soon as she had turned, they had drawn back out of sight.

Under a lemon tree lay Roland, fast asleep. Not liking to wake him, she sat down a little way off, smelt her bunch of stocks, gazed down at the dark sea with the pale outlines of other islands circling it. He slept on and soon she felt drowsy, too, and stretched herself out among the rock-roses and wild larkspur and dozed a little.

When they awoke, both suddenly stirring at the same moment, it seemed much later, but they had no idea of the time. They pumped some water for the mules in the convent yard and mounted them. It was an odd, holiday companionship they shared, founded on nothing but what had
happened in the last few days – the mistakes they had made from not understanding the language, their delight in their new experience and, now, the hazards of riding their mules down a rocky, dried-up river bed. Half-way down it, with a guilty backward glance towards the now hidden convent, Barbara threw away the stocks, which had died in the sun.

When they reached the cottage, they found Jane rummaging among some canvases, as if about to make a start at last. She had washed her hair and it hung straight and wet close to her head and dripped on to her shoulders. She smiled when Barbara told her that they had fallen asleep up on the hillside.

The next afternoon, as soon as lunch in the
taverna
was over, the three of them separated. They went back to their rooms, drew the shutters together, and lay down on their beds. And this they continued to do for the rest of their time on the island.

Barbara and Roland began to count the days they had left. She had chosen a date haphazardly and despairingly. She knew that she ought to go early and she wanted to go later and, between conscience and desire, must find a compromise. Roland’s return to England was already arranged, and as it grew nearer he began to sacrifice other projects he had had in mind – Mycenae, Delphi, Perachora. ‘I shall go to Perachora next time,’ he explained. ‘Perhaps in two years’ time.’ He wondered if his wife had been happy with her sister in Buxton and hoped devoutly that she had been.

Meanwhile, he stayed on the island, sitting lingeringly outside the café talking to the sisters, who could not help wondering, when they were alone, how it was that they could find him both amiable and boring. One day, he brought a photograph of his wife to show them, and they looked at it carefully and said ‘Awfully pretty’. An insipid face, they decided.

‘You must miss her,’ Barbara said.

‘She would love it here,’ he said and then added, ‘Yes, in many ways she’d love it. Then things go wrong and I’m glad, after all, that I’m on my own. The frustrations and misunderstandings about the language. And sometimes the food … and having no water all that time.’

‘Well, it’s all put right now,’ said Jane. She was really making a start that morning and had brought a sketching-block and a box of water-colours down to the café and was now washing in a grey sky above the tiers of white houses. For the first day, there was no sun. It was hot, though, and a glare came off the sea.

Spyros, bringing them more coffee, looked over Jane’s shoulder and said something angrily and rapidly in Greek. She shrugged and pointed at the sky with her brush. He protested, set down their coffee, slopped water over the table, then shrugged too – but crossly, not indifferently – and pushed
his way back through the chairs, banging the tray angrily against his knee as he went.

‘What was that about?’ asked Barbara.

Still washing in grey, Jane said: ‘He wanted me to paint a blue sky. Over this island, he says, the sky is always blue. When I pointed out that today it was not and it was today’s sky I was painting, he said that people from other islands would misunderstand.’

‘Day after day, there are the same illogical arguments,’ Barbara said.

‘Trivial, silly things happen in Blighty, too.’

Roland, who had been fidgeting with his wife’s photograph, flipping it to and fro, glanced at it again and slipped it into his pocket. He was leaving the next day. His holiday was almost over and he felt lost and disconsolate. Dreams had come true, but merely to give birth to others. He had overcome discomfort, his skin was now at terms with the sun as his digestion was with the food, and he had formed new habits, such as sleeping in the afternoons and eating late at night. It was life in Hampstead that had the look of strangeness about it now – the little dinner parties with the lace mats set out on the polished table, coming back from his office to those, or to an evening’s gardening, or listening to records while he stuck his holiday photographs in an album. He was an intensely patriotic man and dearly loved the English landscape. ‘I could never live anywhere else,’ he told himself. He thought it very strange that Jane could, but there was almost nothing about her that he could understand. She was hard, he thought – unlike her sister, whom he found rather girlish and sentimental. He was not greatly drawn to either of them; but they had been part of his holiday and because of that he must feel disturbed at saying good-bye to them.

The cloud at last drifted out to sea and the sun shone in a clear blue sky. Spyros ran out from the café, pointing upwards, smiling triumphantly at Jane.

‘Now I can finish my spool of photographs,’ Roland said. He took out his camera and began fussing with it. ‘If I may; if you will both look up.’ He studied the light meter. ‘My wife’s the photographer, I’m afraid. She has endless patience over everything. I don’t understand the gadget.’

So his wife took a positive role occasionally, Barbara thought. From her photograph this was not to be guessed.

‘There … and now if you would …’

Obediently, they took off their sunglasses and looked up at him and smiled – Jane holding a paint brush and Barbara a coffee-cup.

He left next day on the morning boat. They waited for it at the café. He thought of it as an enemy vessel, coming malignly round the headland; making directly for him, he felt.

He and Barbara had exchanged addresses, for they would meet in England – husbands and wives would be introduced and, in her case, children. There would also be the photographs to be sent on.

They stood on the waterside and watched him stepping into the rowing-boat. He had his rucksack and a large sponge as a present for Iris. Barbara had tears in her eyes – for she could not bear any good-byes, and departures by boat were especially poignant to her. She was also reminded of her own going away in two days’ time.

Roland, steadying himself, standing up in the crowded boat, turned to wave. They waved back and called good-bye, as he was rowed out across the harbour. To him, the shape of the island changed as he went farther out from it – the hills spread out and the coast line was seen to be dotted with windmills.

‘Well,’ Jane began, as they turned away. ‘You may be invited once to Hampstead; then you’ll have to ask them back, and you’ll wish you hadn’t to – and Leonard will, even more. “My friend I met in Greece,”’ she said mockingly. ‘After that, you’ll send Christmas cards for a year or two – especially if you can find any with a Greek flavour, which I should think would be unlikely.’

‘I know all that. People are different in different surroundings.’ Barbara, under her sunglasses, wiped her eyes. ‘I cry too easily,’ she explained. ‘Just as I’m sick too easily.’

‘It’s a good thing to be easily sick,’ said Jane.

It was another kind of poignancy Barbara felt when it was time to go herself. As she left the harbour, she was surprised to see Jane turn and walk away almost at once. She was not the type to stand waving until the boat was out of sight, but her turning away seemed impatient and abrupt. She was soon too far away to be seen and the whole of that little world where she was seemed to lock itself closer and closer together until the expansive waterfront life, with its comings and goings – its landings of fish and sponges, its trotting donkeys, its desultory spectators – could hardly be imagined any more.

Leaning on the rails, she watched until all she could see was the little village against the golden hills and a white speck at the summit of one of them – which was the convent to which she and Roland had ridden on the mules.

Soon the whole island was lost on the horizon; but all the time other islands were coming up on either side – some close, so that she could see more white villages, more blue-domed churches; some distant, misty shapes.

This journey to Athens was the first stage of her journey, which would end next day in England. ‘Blighty!’ she thought, and she leant over the rails
and stared down into the brilliant, wrinkled sea, feeling very strange, both sick and tearful.

Jane went for a walk along the cliffs and after a while noticed a strange dog pacing along with her – sometimes a little in front as if to guide her, and then at her heels as if to comfort her. He had an air of obedience about him, and might have been ordered to keep her company now that her sister had gone. When she sat down to rest, he sat down in front of her and gave her anxious looks.

She felt painfully unsettled. Barbara’s visit had made her first loss so much worse. She had come too soon and her departure added the second loss to the earlier one, a second kind of silence to grow used to. ‘Which can be done,’ she thought.

She looked out to sea, but the boat was out of sight and nothing was left but its faint trail across the water. She made her way back to the cottage and when she reached it, she thanked the dog for his company and shut the door on him. Then she went and lay down on her bed, for it was siesta time.