This is, of course, an illusion. It didn’t stop Bill Cochrane, amongst others, from being killed with his camera in his hand. But it is a potent illusion, which exists even in the most amateur and innocuous forms of photography, and perhaps it is why the photo, the film, which once people existed entirely without, has become almost a necessity of life. A photo is a reprieve, an act of suspension, a charm. If you see something terrible or wonderful, that you can’t take in or focus your feelings for — a battlefield, the Taj Mahal, the woman with whom you think you are falling in love — take a picture of it, hold the camera to it. Look again when it’s safe. I have always loved flying.
Sophie
How are your classics, Doctor K? Have you brushed up on your Homer lately? It’s strange, I might never have been interested. All those books up there in the study. Fifty years old, the spines faded; but so many of them, inside, scarcely used, the relics of a career that never happened. And the plaster busts. Let me see if I can remember: Homer, Pericles, Virgil, Cicero. Two with beards and two without. And all with blind, white eyes. I might never have been interested, I might have thought of that room just as it always seemed, a place somehow you didn’t go, if it wasn’t that one day — don’t ask me how old I was, eleven, twelve — I had suddenly thought: Greek! Greece! Maybe it was a way back to her.
He never touched the books. Just went up there sometimes to write letters at the desk, which was always kept locked. I remember asking him, and he said, ‘Oh, Greek and Latin. Gods and heroes, all that rot.’ I remember him saying that. ‘All that rot’. So I don’t know why he kept them there, for Mrs Keane to dust. Unless it was just to preserve the sense of a life that might have been. As if, had Uncle Edward, in some fantastic way, suddenly shown up, Grandad would have said, ‘Here you are, old boy. All waiting. Haven’t touched a thing.’
I used to go up there sometimes and pick out a book and look at the name on the flyleaf — Edward Beech, Oxford, 1913, 1914 — and think how it was written by a man not yet twenty, who didn’t know when he wrote his name that he had only a year or two to live. Like Mum, when she left for Greece. And later when Grandad told me a bit more, I figured it all out. Edward, the second son. First Richard, then Edward. They could have afforded, in every sense, to indulge a brilliant scholar-in-the-making. Not knowing that both of them would soon be dead. One in March and one in September, 1915. It would even have looked good to have had some other-worldly and learned element in the family. So: a whole library, bought almost at one go and by the yard by a bountiful if ignorant father (Richard Beech the elder, my great-grandfather, whose strengths were ballistics and business). A whole range of classical texts in the best editions of the day, meant to last a lifetime.
And it was strange to think that if he hadn’t been killed he might have been by then some distinguished Oxford professor, with a bow-tie and half-rimmed gold specs. And Grandad and I might have visited him for tea — can you imagine that, tea in a don’s rooms, overlooking some ivy-encrusted court? — and I would have watched them get jealous and tetchy with each other over me.
So I became this swot. While there was rock-and-roll and Elvis and the Beatles, I became this student of the Ancients. When I wasn’t riding around on Hadrian, imagining I was living in the reign of Queen Anne, I was going back a couple of thousand years more, delving into dead languages and imagining I might one day become, I don’t know, something which made a virtue out of obsolescence — a curator! A brilliant female archaeologist! And all because of her, my mythical Greek mother. Until I was eighteen years old and had a place lined up at University, and I decided to do it by the direct route and go to Greece myself.
You think I’m just another scatty, crack-brained, washed-up Brooklyn housewife who cheats now and then on her husband? But let me tell you, I’ve got culture. I know about Sophocles and Plato and the Persian Wars. I used to show people around the Acropolis. No kidding. And though in the end I never took that place at University, I can still quote you, in the original, the first five lines of the Odyssey. Want to hear? Okay, let’s skip it. And I still think that no one ever got it better, no one said it better. I mean, all that stuff — Odysseus and Penelope, Orpheus and Eurydice — it still gets to you, doesn’t it? It still breaks you up.
Have you ever been to Athens? Have you ever seen the Parthenon? When you first see it, the first thing you feel is that you’re amazed it’s really real. Then after a while you feel sort of sorry for it, stranded up there all alone above the traffic and apartment blocks. Then if you live in Athens for any length of time, you start not to notice it, as if you’re embarrassed by it, as if you’d rather pretend it’s not there.
She was born in Drama. That sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? Like saying: ‘I grew up in Catastrophe’ or ‘I lived in Crisis’. But when you go to Greece all those up-in-the-air Greek words suddenly become literal and actual. Like all those names that shouldn’t belong to real life. You meet a man called Adonis. And his wife Aphrodite. You go to the café Zeus.
And Drama is a town in the far north of Greece, in Macedonia, between two mountains, Mount Pangeon and Mount Falakron. And there never was a town less aptly named. Because all they do around there is watch tobacco growing, then watch it drying, then weigh it and sell it. And smoke it. While they count their money.
But drama is a funny thing, isn’t it? You want it. Everyone wants it. Who doesn’t want a little drama in their lives? Then when you get it, you find it’s just what you can do without.
I went there, in a slow, hot, dusty train out of Salonika. And I went to Thassos too (a ferry from Kavalla), where Uncle Spiro had had his villa, and where I imagined him, I don’t know, sitting on a balcony, reading Wordsworth and Keats, because he was a professor of English at Salonika (with a little library of English books like Uncle Edward had a library of Greek ones — I guess those two would have liked each other), and where she and he weathered out the war. But I never found the villa. Maybe it was gone anyway, or I was looking in the wrong place. And I went to Olympus. Which was easiest. Because I could pretend I was just an ordinary tourist, on an ordinary tourist coach, paying my respects to the home of the gods. And how was I to know exactly where? In all those mountains. I listened to the guide, babbling on about what I knew already, and I never thought that soon I would be doing a job just like hers.
I didn’t find Mum. But I found out about being lonely and feeling a stranger and getting stared at. Especially about getting stared at. I know that Grandad hadn’t wanted me to go. Though he’d never said. I could have spent one last, long, idle summer with him at Hyfield. I could have teased him by getting coolly and carelessly involved (I’m eighteen now, I’ve left school) with one of his junior execs at BMC, or — hell, why not? — with one of the married ones. Ha! Who am I kidding?
But I’d wanted to see the world. And there I was, on a Sunday afternoon in Drama, at what seemed the very edge of it. Lying on a lumpy bed in a bare hotel room overlooking a square that radiated heat and inertia, and thinking that perhaps it was just as well that Uncle Edward never got to go to Greece. Because Homer doesn’t tell you about miles and miles of flat tobacco fields. Or about the sad stumps of crumbling minarets. Or that Greek men wear flat caps and have gold teeth and stubbly chins. Or they have sun-glasses and little thin moustaches. And when they are just talking normally it sounds as if they are having a fight. And the women are mostly fat and swathed in black.