“I’ve got you a room overlooking the port.”
“Fine.”
“They’re so bloody stuffy in Greek hotels. You know.”
“Toujours the done thing.” She gave me a brief ironic look from her gray eyes, then covered up. “It’s fun. Vive the done thing.” I nearly made my prepared speech, but it annoyed me that she assumed I hadn’t changed. was still slave to English convention; it even annoyed me that she felt she had to cover up.
“Your hair.”
“You don’t like it.”
“Not used to it.”
She held out her hand and I took it and we pressed fingers. Then she reached out and took off my dark glasses.
“You look devastatingly handsome now. Do you know that? You’re so brown. Dried in the sun, sort of beginning to be ravaged. Jesus, when you’re forty.”
I remembered Lily’s prophecy, I remembered—that evening I never forgot—Lily. I smiled, but I looked down and let go of her hand to get a cigarette. I knew what her flattery meant; the invitation extended.
“Alison, I’m in a sort of weird situation.”
It knocked all the false lightness out of her. She looked straight ahead.
“Another girl?”
“No.” She flashed a look at me. “I’ve changed, I don’t know how one begins to explain things.”
“But you wish to God I’d kept away.”
“No, I’m… glad you’ve come.” She glanced at me suspiciously again. “Really.”
She was silent for a few moments. We moved out onto the coast road.
“I’m through with Pete.”
“You said.”
“I forgot.” But I knew she hadn’t.
“Was he fed up?”
“And I’ve been through with everyone else since I’ve been through with him.” She kept staring out of the window. “Sorry. I ought to have started with the small talk.”
“No. I mean… you know.”
She slid another look at me; hurt and trying not to be hurt. She made an effort. “I’m living with Ann again. Only since last week. Back in the old flat. Maggie’s gone home.”
“I liked Ann.”
“Yes, she’s nice.”
There was a long silence as we drove down past Phaleron. She stared out of the window and after a minute reached into her white handbag and took out her dark glasses. I knew why, I could see the lines of wet light round her eyes. I didn’t touch her, take her hand, but I talked about the difference between the Piraeus and Athens, how the former was more picturesque, more Greek, and I thought she’d like it better. I had really chosen the Piraeus because of the small, but horrifying, possibility of running into Conchis and Lily. The thought of her cool, amused and probably contemptuous eyes if such a thing happened sent shivers down my spine. There was something about Alison’s manner and appearance; if a man was with her, he went to bed with her. And as I talked, I wondered how we were going to survive the next three days.
I tipped the boy and he left the room. She went to the window and looked down across the broad white quay, the slow crowds of evening strollers, the busy port. I stood behind her. After a moment’s swift calculation I put my arm around her and at once she leant against me.
“I hate cities. I hate airplanes. I want to live in a cottage in Ireland.”
“Why Ireland?”
“Somewhere I’ve never been.”
I could feel the warmth, the willingness to surrender, of her body. At any moment she would turn her face and I would have to kiss her.
“Alison, I… don’t quite know how to break the news.” I took my arm away, and stood closer to the window, so that she could not see my face. “I caught a disease two or three months ago. Well… syphilis.” I turned and she gave me a look—concern and shock and incredulity. “I’m all right now, but… you know. I can’t possibly…”
“You went to a…” I nodded. The incredulity became credulity.
“You had your revenge.”
She came and put her arms round me. “Oh Nicko, Nicko.”
I said over her head, “I’m not meant to have oral or closer contact for at least another month. I didn’t know what to do. I ought never to have written. This was never really on.”
She let go of me and went and sat on the bed. I saw I had got myself into a new corner; she now thought that this satisfactorily explained our awkwardness till then. She gave me a kind, gentle little smile.
“Tell me all about it.”
I walked round and round the room, telling her about Patarescu and the clinic, about the poetry, even about the venture at suicide, about everything except Bourani. After a while she lay back on the bed, smoking, and I was unexpectedly filled with a pleasure in duplicity, with that pleasure, I imagined, Conchis felt when he was with me. In the end I sat on the end of bed. She lay staring up at the ceiling.
“Can I tell you about Pete now?”
“Of course.”
I half listened, playing my part, and suddenly began to enjoy being with her again; not particularly with Alison, but being in this hotel bedroom, hearing the murmur of the evening crowds below, the sound of sirens, the smell of the tired Aegean. I felt no attraction and no tenderness for her; no real interest in the stormy break-up of her long relationship with the boor of an Australian pilot; simply the complex, ambiguous sadness of the darkening room. The light had drained out of the sky, it became rapid dusk. All the treacheries of modern love seemed beautiful, and I had my great secret, safe, locked away. It was Greece again, the Alexandrian Greece of Cavafy: there were only degrees of aesthetic pleasure; of beauty in decadence. Morality was a North European lie.
There was a long silence.
She said, “Where are we, Nicko?”
“How do you mean?”
She was leaning on her elbow, staring at me, but I wouldn’t look round at her.
“Now I know—of course…” She shrugged. “But I didn’t come to be your old chum.”
I put my head in my hands.
“Alison, I’m sick of women, sick of love, sick of sex, sick of everything. I don’t know what I want. I should never have asked you to come.” She looked down, seemingly tacitly to agree. “The fact is… well, I suppose I have a sort of nostalgia for a sister at the moment. If you say fuck that—I understand. I have no right not to understand.”
“All right.” She looked up again. “Sister. But one day you’ll be cured.”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” I looked suitably distraught. “Look—please go away, curse me, anything, but I’m a dead man at the moment.” I went to the window. “It’s all my fault. I can’t ask you to spend three days with a dead man.”
“A dead man I once loved.”
A long silence crept between us. But then she briskly sat up and got off the bed; went and switched on the light and combed her hair. She produced the jet earrings I had left that last day in London and put them on; then lipstick. I thought of Lily, of lips without lipstick; coolness, mystery, elegance. It seemed almost marvelous, to be so without desire; at last in my life, to be able to be so faithful.
By an unhappy irony the way to the restaurant I took her to lay through the redlight area of the Piraeus. Bars, multilingual neon signs, photos of strippers and belly dancers, sailors in lounging groups, glimpses through bead curtains of Lautrec-like interiors, women in lines along the padded benches. The streets were thronged with pimps and tarts, barrowboys selling pistachios and sunflower pips, chestnut sellers, pasty sellers, lottery-ticket hawkers. Doormen invited us in, men slid up with wallets of watches, packets of Lucky Strikes and Camels, shoddy souvenirs. And every ten yards someone whistled at Alison.
We walked in silence. I had a vision of Lily walking through that street, and silencing everything, purifying everything; not provoking and adding to the vulgarity. Alison had a set face, and we started to walk quickly to get out of the place; but I thought I could see in her walk a touch of that old amoral sexuality, that quality she could not help offering and other men, noticing.
Yet I had chosen the Piraeus; and I even chose that road to the restaurant.