‘Welcome, dear boy; welcome, my dear.’ Edmund repeated phrases as if there was doubt the first time around, though the second, unnecessary version often faded away. He looked like a darling of 1970s London bohemia but he used the old-fashioned, almost camp expressions of his pre-war childhood and his voice warbled slightly. ‘Come in, come in.’ He ushered Ralph ceremoniously into the house, which was painted jazzy colours like arsenic green and acid tangerine. Edmund helped relieve him of the knapsack and put his delicate white hands on his guest’s shoulders as if to take a better look.
‘Now, you must tell me everything. Chanting monks, flute-playing shepherd boys? Did you find those old women with the improvised mourning songs? And the food? The seductions? There were some of those, I hope? Were you chased from village to village by irate fathers waving blunderbusses and swearing vengeance?’ Edmund laughed, but his face was so sensitive it quivered like a deer’s, watchful and quick.
As the men talked in the hallway, a slender, dark-haired child ran down the stairs. It was hard to tell if it was a boy or a girl. A sprite.
‘Daphne! Hey, Daphne, come and say hello.’
Her eyes flickered past her father towards Ralph, lips opened as if to say something, and then she thought better of it. She was dressed in ripped shorts and a striped T-shirt and wore no shoes. Ralph took in the grubby feet, the burnished skin that must have recently seen more than English sunshine, the muscular limbs and unbrushed, almost black hair. Teasing, moving like mercury, she knew how to disappear before you could get a grip. She laughed, skipped and slithered past them, through the front door that was still ajar and out along the garden path to the road. Without turning, she flicked one of her hands as if dismissing both men.
His intestines juddered. Then, bewilderingly and somewhat shockingly, the beginning of a hard-on. He squatted down to the floor and opened up the backpack to gain time and distract Edmund, who was gazing after his daughter and laughing.
‘Daphne’s a free spirit. As you can see.’
Ralph smiled, trying to disguise his turmoil.
‘I’m glad we can give her and her brother that,’ Edmund continued. ‘We were so battened down with restrictions. When I was growing up there was nothing but rules and barriers. It’s unnecessary. Children find their own way. And it’s important to let them.’
‘How old is she?’ Ralph stood up again.
‘Nine. You know, I think that might be the perfect age. A child at the height of her powers. Unafraid to be herself. A nonconformist without knowing it. It’s a splendid thing to witness.’ Ralph had never been attracted to children, or at least not since school. He had not ogled young girls or prowled in parks. This was something different from anything he’d known. Beautiful and pure and powerful. The beginnings of love.
Before he had gathered his wits entirely, a striking woman approached. He knew Edmund’s wife was Greek; he’d said she was a lawyer who gave up her job with a City firm to try and save Greece. ‘You know, these dreaded colonels? The dictators?’ But Ralph had pictured someone sturdy and hard-nosed, not an adult version of the spirit-child just encountered. She, too, was agile and brown-skinned, with long, dark hair and discerning eyes that challenged him as if she understood his thoughts. You couldn’t say she was short, as her sinewy proportions were perfect, but next to her husband, with his long-boned, Anglo-Saxon extremities, she looked like another species.
‘How do you do.’ She held out a hand formally, and then, more affectionately, grasped Ralph’s with the other, clasping it between her warm, dry palms. ‘Ed told me about the young composer – your travels, the tape recordings… fascinating.’ Her voice was low and, though her English was excellent, a faint accent with richly rolling Rs betrayed her origins.
‘Ellie, meet my friend, Ralph Boyd. Ralph, this is Ellie, my wife,’ said Edmund, looking down with beneficence. ‘Eleftheria, to give her the full dues of her Orthodox baptism. Or Liberty, as I sometimes call her.’ He placed a tender hand on Ellie’s arm and she patted it.
‘I’ve just met your daughter.’
Ellie merely smiled and said, ‘Come and meet our friends.’ He followed her down a staircase, past walls plastered with photographs, postcards and newspaper clippings in an open-ended collage. They entered a spacious, bright yellow room where maybe a dozen people sat at a refectory table or sprawled in armchairs. The scene spoke of unhurried pleasures: bottles of red wine, coffee cups, ashtrays, orange peel, the remains of a circle of Brie in its balsawood box. Open French doors looked out through a mass of overgrown honeysuckle towards the river.
Ralph was introduced to four or five Greeks belonging to a political protest group, whose names he immediately forgot, and he sat down at the table next to an American woman called Meg. She gave off a potent waft of patchouli each time she fluffed up her mass of hennaed hair and talked about dreams and astrology – Ralph’s least favourite topics. He became mildly interested when she let drop that she was not wearing any underwear, something that scrutiny of her long, diaphanous skirt confirmed when she got up to go. As she left she gave Ralph her number, which he put in one of the side pockets of his army-surplus trousers.
In later years, when Ralph discussed the early ’70s with contemporaries, he identified it as a flash of light exploding in the drab, post-war darkness. We all believed in taking pleasure where we found it. And why not? We were war babies, children of rationing and the frumpy 1950s. Eating a banana was a highlight of my childhood, for God’s sake. We respected men in uniform. We believed the authorities. And then there was this wonderful blast that rearranged all the pieces into a new pattern. It wasn’t that we left our parents’ generation behind – that’s nothing new. All the clichés of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll are not the point at all. No, we saw the world from a different perspective and were trying to make it into something better, freer and more honest.
He hadn’t eaten lunch and Ellie made him up a plate of food – some sort of Greek lamb affair and his first taste of ratatouille, then glamorously unfamiliar in England with its defiant use of garlic, olive oil and audacious aubergines. Ralph had travelled but he was still an innocent in many ways. The Greeks lapsed more and more into their own language, furiously smoking, gesturing and shouting – apparently about the fascist junta which was strangling and torturing their country. They didn’t seem to notice when Edmund took Ralph off to his study – an appealing attic room overlooking the front garden and Barnabas Road. There were so many books they had been doubled up on the bookshelves, and the floor was stacked with towers of manuscripts and hardbacks as though it was a game to see how high they could be piled. His desk was a trestle table, also littered with books and papers, which threatened the prime position of a typewriter, and a chaise longue draped with rugs stood against one wall. The windows were almost at the level of the nearby bridge, and each time a Tube train passed there was an impressive roar, the room juddered and a tin of pencils on the desk rattled with sympathetic vibrations.
When still in his twenties, Edmund had written a successful novel, Oedipus Blues, and had become quite well-known. ‘It’s all wine-dark sea and bouzouki riffs,’ he had said dismissively. ‘A potboiler really, that helped put food on the table.’ In fact, it was obvious that Edmund was proud of his idea that turned Laius and Jocasta into a bouzouki player and a singer in the poverty-stricken, twentieth-century port of Piraeus. A film had quickly followed the book and Ralph managed to see it at an afternoon screening in Soho. It included sailors, druggy musicians, thugs and prostitutes and, as Edmund liked to point out, was made a couple of years before Never on Sunday with Melina Mercouri. Laius and Jocasta abandon their deformed baby Oedipus in a ruined temple behind the shipyards where he is found by a holidaying English couple who take him home. Eddy (as he is named) returns to Greece as a young man, crashes into his natural father with his motorbike and ends up living with his mother. Ralph found the film rather melodramatic, but loved the book.