“That’s not fair.”
“Then I thought I could do it if I wrote a note first explaining why I did it.” She eyed me, still hostile. “Look in my handbag. The shorthand pad.” I got it out. “Look at the back.”
There were two pages scrawled in her big handwriting.
“When did you write this?”
“Read it.”
I don’t want to live any more, it said. I spend most of my life not wanting to live. The only place I am happy is here where we’re being taught, and I have to think of something else, or reading books, or in the cinema. Or in bed. I’m only happy when I forget I exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist. I can’t remember having been happy for two or three years. Since the abortion. All I can remember is forcing myself sometimes to look happy so if I catch sight of my face in the mirror I might kid myself for a moment I really am happy.
There were two more sentences heavily crossed out. I looked up into her gray eyes, still watching me.
“You can’t mean this.”
“I wrote it today in coffee-time. If I’d known how to quietly kill myself in the canteen I’d have done it.”
“It’s… well, hysterical.”
“I feel hysterical.” It was almost a shout.
“And histrionic. You wrote it for me to see.”
There was a long pause. She kept her eyes shut.
“Not just for you to see.”
And then she cried again, but this time, in my arms. I tried to reason with her. I made promises; I would postpone the journey to Greece, I would turn down the job—a hundred things that I didn’t mean and she knew I didn’t mean, but finally took as a placebo.
In the morning I persuaded her to ring up and say that she wasn’t well, and we spent the day out in the country.
The next morning, my last but two, came a postcard with a Northumberland postmark. It was from Mitford, the man who had been on Phraxos, to say that he would be in London for a few days, if I wanted to meet him.
I rang him up on the Wednesday at the Army and Navy Club and asked him out to lunch. He was two or three years older than myself, tanned, with blue staring eyes in a narrow head. He had a dark young-officer moustache, which he kept on touching, and he wore a dark-blue blazer, with a regimental tie. He reeked mufti; and almost at once we started a guerrilla war of prestige and anti-prestige. He had been parachuted into Greece during the German Occupation, and he was very glib with his Xan’s and his Paddy’s and the Christian names of all the other well-known condottieri of the time. He had tried hard to acquire the triune personality of the philhellefle in fashion—gentleman, scholar, thug—but he spoke with a secondhand accent and the clipped, sparse prepsehoolisms of a Viscount Montgomery. He was dogmatic, unbrooking, lost off the battlefield. I managed to keep my end up, over pink gins; I told him my war had consisted of two years’ ardent longing for demobilization. It was absurd. I wanted information from him, not antipathy; soin the end I made an effort, confessed I was a Regular Army officer’s son and asked him what the island looked like.
He nodded at the food-stand on the bar. “There’s the island.” He pointed with his cigarette. “That’s what the locals call it.” He said some word in Greek. “The Pasty. Shape, old boy. Central ridge. Here’s your school and your village in this corner. All the rest of this north side and the entire south side deserted. That’s the lie of the land.”
“The school?”
“Best in Greece, actually.”
“Discipline?” He stiffened his hand karate fashion.
“Teaching problems?”
“Usual stuff.” He preened his moustache in the mirror behind the bar; mentioned the names of two or three books.
I asked him about life outside the school.
“Isn’t any. Island’s damn beautiful, if you like that sort of thing. Birds and the bees, all that caper.”
“There’s a village, isn’t there?”
He smiled grimly. “Old boy, your Greek village isn’t like an English village. Masters’ wives. Half a dozen officials. Odd pater and mater on a visit.” He raised his neck, as if his shirt collar was too tight. It was a tic; made him feel authoritative. “A few villas. But they’re all boarded up for ten months of the year.”
“You’re not exactly selling the place to me.”
“It’s remote. Let’s face it, bloody remote. And you’d find the people in the villas pretty damn dull, I can tell you. There’s one that you might say isn’t, but I don’t suppose you’ll meet him.”
“Oh?”
“Actually, we had a row and I told him pretty effing quick what I thought of him.”
“What was it all about?”
“Bastard collaborated during the war. That was really at the root of it.” He exhaled smoke. “No—you’ll have to put up with the other beaks if you want chat.”
“They speak English?”
“Most of 'em speak Frog. There’s the Greek chap who teaches English with you. Cocky little bastard. Gave him a black eye one day.”
“You’ve really prepared the ground for me.”
He laughed. “Got to keep 'em down, you know.” He felt his mask had slipped a little. “Your peasant, especially your Cretan peasant, salt of the earth. Wonderful chaps. Believe me. I know.”
I asked him why he’d left. He became incoherent.
“Writing a book, actually. Wartime experiences and all that. See my publisher.”
There was something forlorn about him; I could imagine him briskly dashing about like a destructive Boy Scout, blowing up bridges and wearing picturesque offbeat uniforms; but he had to live in this dull new welfare world, like a stranded archosaur. He went hurriedly on.
“You’ll piss blood for England. It’ll be worse for you. With no Greek. And you’ll drink. Everyone does. You have to.” He talked about retsina and aretsinato, raki and ouzo—and then about women. “The girls in Athens are strictly O.O.B. Unless you want the pox.”
“No talent on the island?”
“Nix, old boy. Women are about the ugliest in the Aegean. And anyway—village honor. Makes that caper highly dangerous. Shouldn’t advise it. Discovered that somewhere else once.” He gave me a curt grin, with the appropriate hooded look in his eyes; T. E. Lawrence run totally to seed.
I drove him back towards his club. It was a bronchial midafternoon, already darkening, the people, the traffic, everything fish-gray. I asked him why he hadn’t stayed in the Army.
“Too damn orthodox, old boy. Specially in peacetime.”
I guessed he had been rejected for a permanent commission; there was something obscurely wild and unstable about him under the officer’s-mess mannerisms.
We came to where he wanted to be dropped off.
“Think I’ll do?”
His look was doubtful. “Treat 'em tough. It’s the only way. Never let 'em get you down. They did the chap before me, you know. Never met him, but apparently he went bonkers. Couldn’t control the boys.”
He got out of the car.
“Well, all the best, old man.” He grinned. “And listen.” He had his band on the doorhandle. “Beware of the waiting room.”
He closed the door at once, as if he had rehearsed that moment. I opened it quickly and leaned out to call after him. “The what?”
He turned, but only to give a sharp wave. The Trafalgar Square crowd swallowed him up. I couldn’t get the smile on his face out of my mind. It secreted an omission; something he’d saved up, a mysterious last word. Waiting room, waiting room, waiting room; it went round in my head all that evening.
6
I picked up Alison and we went to the garage that was going to sell the car for me. I’d offered it to her some time before, but she had refused.
“If I had it I’d always think of you.”
“Then have it.”
“I don’t want to think of you. And I couldn’t stand anyone else sitting where you are,”