“Alison.”
She took a shuddery breath; near tears.
“I realized as soon as we met on Friday. For you I’ll always be Alison who slept around. That Australian girl who had an abortion. The human boomerang. Throw her away and she’ll always come back for another weekend of cheap knock.”
“That’s a long way below the belt.”
She lit a cigarette. I went and stood by the window and she spoke at my back, across the bed and the room, from the door. “All that time, last autumn… I didn’t realize then. I didn’t realize you can get softer. I thought you went on getting harder. God only knows why, I felt closer to you than I’ve ever felt to any other man. God only knows why. In spite of all your smart-aleck Pommie ways. Your bloody class mania. So I never really got over your going. I tried Pete, I tried another man, but it didn’t work. Always this stupid, pathetic little dream. That one day you’d write… so I went mad trying to organize these three days. Betting everything on them. Even though I could see, God how I could see you were just bored.”
“That’s not true. I wasn’t bored.”
“Thinking about this bit on Phraxos.”
“I missed you too. Hellishly, those first months.”
Suddenly she switched the lights on.
“Turn round and look at me.”
I did. She was standing by the door, still in her blue jeans and the dark-blue shirt; her face a gray-and-white mask.
“I’ve saved some money. And you can’t be exactly broke. If you say the word, I’ll walk out of my job tomorrow. I’ll come on your island and live with you. I said a cottage in Ireland. But I’ll take a cottage on Phraxos. You can have that. The dreadful responsibility of having to live with someone who loves you.”
“Or?”
“You can say no.”
“An ultimatum.”
“No sliding. Yes or no.”
“Alison, if—”
“Yes or no.”
“You can’t decide these things—”
Her voice sharpened a pitch. “Yes or no.”
“It’s moral blackmail.”
She came and stood on the other side of the bed; gave me a look of iron. There was nothing gentle in her voice except its volume.
“Yes or no.”
I stared at her. She gave a tiny humorless twist of her lips and answered for me.
“No.”
“Only because…”
She ran straight to the door and opened it. I felt angry, trapped into this ridiculous either-or choice, when the reality was so much more complex. I went round the bed towards her, yanked the door away from her grip and slammed it shut again; then caught her and tried to kiss her, reaching past her at the same time to flick off the light. The room was plunged into darkness again, but she struggled wildly, jerking her head from side to side. I pulled her back towards the bed and fell with her across it, making it roll and knock both lamp and ashtray off the bedside table. I thought she would give in, she must give in, but suddenly she screamed, so loud that it must have pierced all through the hotel and echoed over on the other side of the port.
“LET ME GO!”
I sat back a little and she hit at me with her clubbed fists. I caught her wrists.
“For God’s sake.”
“I HATE YOU!”
“Keep quiet!”
I forced her on her side. There was banging on the wall. Another nerve-splitting scream.
“I HATE YOU.”
I slapped the side of her face. She began to sob violently, twisted sideways against the bed end, fragments of words howled at me between gasps for air and tears.
“Leave me alone… leave me alone… you shit… you fucking selfish…” explosion of sobs, her shoulders racked. I got up and went to the window.
She began to bang the bedrail with her fists, as if she was beyond words. I hated her then: her lack of control, her hysteria. I remembered that there was a bottle of Scotch downstairs in my room—she had brought it for me as a present, the first day.
“Look, I’m going to get you a drink. Now stop wailing.”
I hovered over her. She took no notice, went on beating the bedrail. I got to the door, hesitated, looked back, then went out. Three Greeks, a man and woman and an elder man, were standing two open doors away, staring at the door of Alison’s room. They looked at me as if I were a murderer. I went downstairs, opened the bottle, swallowed a stiff shot straight out of it, then went back.
The door was locked. The three spectators continued to stare; watched me try it, knock, try it again, knock, then call her name.
The older man came up to me.
Was anything wrong?
I grimaced and muttered, “The heat.”
He repeated it unnecessarily back to the other two. Ah, the heat, said the woman, as if that explained everything. They did not move.
I tried once more; called her name through the wooden panels. I could hear nothing. I shrugged for the benefit of the Greeks, and went back downstairs. Ten minutes later I returned; I returned four or five times more during the next hour; and always the door, to my secret relief, was shut.
I had asked to be and was woken at eight, and I dressed at once and went to her room. I knocked; no answer. When I tried the handle, the door opened. The bed had been slept in, but Alison and all her belongings were gone. I ran straight down to the reception desk. A rabbity old man with spectacles, the father of the proprietor, sat behind it. He’d been in America, and spoke English quite well.
“You know that girl I was with last night—has she gone out this morning?”
“Oh yeah. She wen’ out.”
“When?”
He looked up at the clock. “About one hour since. She lef’ this. She said give it you when you came down.”
An envelope. My scrawled name: N. Urfe.
“She didn’t say where she was going?”
“Just paid her check and went.” I knew by the way he was watching me that he had heard, or heard about, the screaming the evening before.
“But I said I’d pay.”
“I said. I told her.”
“Damn.”
As I turned to go he said, “Hey, you know what they say in the States? Always plenny more fish in the sea. Know that one? Plenny more fish in the sea.”
I went back to my room and opened her letter. It was a scrawl, a last-moment decision not to go in silence.
Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever.
It’s finished finished finished.
About ten I rang up the airport. Alison had not returned, and was not due to return until her flight to London at five that afternoon. I tried again at eleven thirty, just before the boat sailed; the same answer. As the ship, which was filled with returning boys, drew out from the quay I scanned the crowds of parents and relations and idlers. I had some idea that she was there among them, watching; but if she was, she was invisible.
The ugly industrial seafront of the Piraeus receded and the boat headed south for the svelte blue peak of Aegina. I went to the bar and ordered a large ouzo; it was the only place the boys were not allowed. I drank a mouthful neat, and made a sort of bitter inner toast. I had chosen my own way; the difficult, hazardous, poetic way; all on one number.
Someone slipped onto the stool beside me. It was Demetriades. He clapped his hands for the barman.
“Buy me a drink, you perverted Englishman. And I will tell you how I spent a most amusing weekend.”
43
Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and… I had all Tuesday to think nothing but that; to see myself as Alison saw me. I took the envelope out, and looked at the thread, and waited. It was a relief to teach hard, conscientiously, to get through the suspense. On Wednesday evening, when I got back from post-siesta school to my room, I found a note on my desk. I recognized Conchis’s almost copperplate writing; and I recognized something else in the elaborate star the note had been folded into. I couldn’t imagine Conchis wasting time on such a business; but I could see Lily doing so. I thought, as I was no doubt meant to, of idle convoluted women in Edwardian country houses.