Of course I wrote back, if not every day, two or three times a week; long letters full of self-excuse and seff-justification until one day she wrote Please don’t go on so about you and me. Tell me about things, about the island, the school. I know what you are. So be what you are. When you write about things I can think I’m with you, seeing them with you. And don’t be offended. Forgiving’s forgetting.
Imperceptibly information took the place of emotion in our letters. She wrote to me about her work, a girl she had become friendly with, about minor domestic things, films, books. I wrote about the school and the island, as she asked. One day there was a photo of her in her uniform. She’d had her hair cut short and it was tucked back under her fore-and-aft cap. She was smiling, but the uniform and the smile combined gave her an insincere, professional look; she had become, the photo sharply warned me, a stranger, someone not the someone I liked to remember; the private, the uniquely my, Alison. And then the letters became once-weekly. The physical ache I had felt for her during the first weeks seemed to disappear; there were still times when I knew I wanted her very much, and would have given anything to have her in bed beside me. But they were moments of sexual frustration, not regretted love. One day I thought: if I wasn’t on this island I should be dropping this girl. The writing of the letters had become as often as not more of a chore than a pleasure, and I didn’t hurry back to my room after dinner to write them—I scribbled them off hurriedly in class and got a boy to run down to the gate at the last minute to give them to the school postman.
At half-term I went with Demetriades to Athens. He wanted to take me to his favorite brothel, in a suburb. He assured me the girls were clean. I hesitated, then .—isn’t it a poet’s, to say nothing of a cynic’s, moral duty to be immoral?—I went. When we came out of it, it was raining, and the shadowing wet leaves on the lower branches of a eucalyptus, caught under a light in the entrance, made me remember our bedroom in Russell Square. But Alison and London were gone, dead, exorcized; I had cut them away from my life. I decided I would write a letter to Alison that night, to say that I didn’t want to hear from her again. I was too drunk by the time we got back to the hotel, and I don’t know what I would have said. Perhaps, that I had proved beyond doubt that I was not worth waiting for; perhaps that she bored me; perhaps that I was lonelier than ever—and wanted to stay that way. As it was, I sent her a postcard telling her nothing; and on the last day I went back to the brothel alone. But the Lebanese nymphet I coveted was taken and I didn’t fancy the others.
December came, and we were still writing letters. I knew she was hiding things from me. Her life, as she described it, was too simple and manless to be true. When the final letter came, I was not surprised. What I hadn’t expected was how bitter I should feel, and how betrayed. It was less a sexual jealousy of the man than an envy of Alison; moments of tenderness and togetherness, moments when the otherness of the other disappeared flooded back through my mind for days afterwards, like sequences from some cheap romantic film that I certainly didn’t want to remember, but did; and there was the read and reread letter; and that such things could be ended so, by two hundred stale, worn words.
DEAR NICHOLAS,
I can’t go on any more. I’m so terribly terribly sorry if this hurts you. Please believe that I’m sorry, please don’t be angry with me for knowing you will be hurt. I can see you saying, I’m not hurt.
I got so terribly lonely and depressed. I haven’t told you how much, I can’t tell you how much. Those first days I kept up such a brave front at work, and then at home I collapsed.
I’m sleeping with Pete again when he’s in London. It started two weeks ago. Please please believe me that I wouldn’t be if I thought… you know. I know you know. I don’t feel about him as I used to do, and don’t begin to feel about him as I felt about you, you can’t be jealous.
It’s just that he’s so uncomplicated, he stops me thinking, he stops me being lonely, I’ve sunk back into all the old Australians-in-London thing again. We may marry. I don’t know.
It’s terrible. I still want to write to you, and you to me. I keep on remembering.
Goodbye.
ALISON
You will be different for me. Always. That very first letter I wrote the day you left. If you could only understand.
I wrote a letter in reply to say that I had been expecting her letter, that she was perfectly free. But I tore it up. I realized that if anything might hurt her, silence would. I wanted to hurt her.
8
I was hopelessly unhappy in those last few days before the Christmas holidays. I began to loathe the school irrationally; the way it worked and the way it was planted, blind and prisonlike, in the heart of the divine landscape. When Alison’s letters stopped, I was also increasingly isolated in a more conventional way. The outer world, England, London, became absurdly and sometimes terrifyingly unreal. The two or three Oxford friends I had kept up a spasmodic correspondence with sank beneath the horizon. I used to hear the B.B.C. Overseas Service from time to time, but the news broadcasts seemed to come from the moon, and concerned situations and a society I no longer belonged to, while the newspapers from England became more and more like their own One hundred years ago today features. The whole island seemed to feel this exile from contemporary reality. The harbor quays were always crowded for hours before the daily boat from Athens appeared on the northeastern horizon; even though people knew that it would stop for only a few minutes, that probably not five passengers would get off, or five get on, they had to watch. It was as if we were all convicts still hoping faintly for a reprieve.
Yet the island was so beautiful. Near Christmas the weather became wild and cold. Enormous seas of pounding Antwerp blue roared on the shingle of the school beaches. The mountains on the mainland took snow, and magnificent white shoulders out of Hokusai stood west and north across the angry water. The hills became even barer, even more silent. I often started off on a walk out of sheer boredom, but there were always new solitudes, new places. Yet in the end this unflawed natural world became intimidating. I seemed to have no place in it, I could not use it and I was not made for it. I was a townsman; and I was rootless. I rejected my own age, yet could not sink back into an older. So I ended like Sciron, a mid-air man.
The Christmas holidays came. I went off to travel around the Peloponnesus. I had to be alone, to give myself a snatch of life away from the school. If Alison had been free, I would have flown back to England to meet her. I had thoughts of resigning; but then that seemed a retreat, another failure, and I told myself that things would be better once spring began. So I had Christmas alone in Sparta and I saw the New Year in alone in Pyrgos. I had a day in Athens before I caught the boat back to Phraxos, and visited the brothel again.
I thought very little about Alison, but I felt about her; that is, I tried to erase her, and failed. I had days when I thought I could stay celibate for the rest of my life—monastic days; and days when I ached for a conversable girl. The island women were of Albanian stock, dour and sallow-faced, and about as seducible as a Free Church congregation. Much more tempting were some of the boys, possessors of an olive grace and a sharp individuality that made them very different from their stereotyped English private school equivalents—those uniformed pink termites out of the Arnold mould. I had Gidelike moments, but they were not reciprocated, because nowhere is pederasty more abominated than in bourgeois Greece; there at least Arnold would have felt thoroughly at home. Besides, I wasn’t queer; I simply understood (nailing a lie in my own education) how being queer might have its consolations. It was not only the solitude—it was Greece. It made conventional English notions of what was moral and immoral ridiculous; whether or not I did the socially unforgivable seemed in itself merely a matter of appetite, like smoking or not smoking a new brand of cigarette—as trivial as that, from a moral point of view. Goodness and beauty may be separable in the north, but not in Greece. Between skin and skin there is only light.