While I was left to hobble, and enjoy the scents of the evening garden, so much subtler if less exciting than the male stench.
(I would like to think myself morally justified in being true to what I am — if I knew what that is. I must discover.)
They calmed down eventually, the two, and suspicion began to set in between the Emperor of Byzantium and the raw Colonial Boy.
A. began clutching me as though the crutch he thought he had lost might still be snatched away from him.
A.: Thank you, sir, for returning me my … wife. I really don’t know how to thank …
C.: Not at all, not at all, Mr — Tatzy. A very special occasion — to make the acquaintance of this charming young lady — your wife.
(Australian wives with aspirations are so constantly ‘charmed’, I have noticed that it rubs off on some of the husbands, especially when overseas.)
Curly began saying good-bye, Angelos looking gloomier, not for being separated from this new acquaintance, whom he had accepted wholly, too readily, and then regretted doing so. Boyd Golson was not a man one would have to reward materially (not like Joséphine Réboa) but my dearest husband, when faced with the less tangible demands, is apt to grow morally poverty-stricken. I could feel his arm clutching me, not only from relief, but also in a sense asking for forgiveness, in that he was not prepared to give to one who possibly deserved some token of recognition.
I must tidy it up later if I can — and in spite of my own unwillingness (most of us are French underneath.)
Curly: (jerking at his tweed cap.) Good-bye, good-bye. Perhaps we’ll run into each other, Mr — Madame Tatzy … again.
Angelos: Oh yes, we must see one another. Oh, we shall—sans doute …
Angelos displays a long-toothed smile. E. Boyd Golson is laughing. His open pores. His clear-blue eyes, the lights in them heightened by the Australian climate and alcohol. Poor Curly, his boyishness racks me, his manhood disturbs …
Finally he is driving off in the bottle-green Austin, and nothing definite has been arranged. All will depend on me and/or Joan: the women.
It astounds me that anybody should depend on me, that anyone, even Joanie Golson should expect; and here is this subtle old Greek lizard, my husband, dragging me towards the claustrophobic evening prepared for us, yet from which he hopes to extract a sense of security, faith (apart from his agnostic/Orthodox one) hope — Eternal Hope.
Animals are more dependable: Eadie’s frowzy, till-death-us-do-part Australian terriers. Plants are less detached than they seem, more responsive than many human beings, their insinuating scents, their reasoning habits. I am only I — a plant too, but one the wind spins on its mooring.
All evening we recapitulate the Macedonian and Thracian campaigns. ‘The Bulgars, E., are without necks, or not altogether, they have the necks of pigs. They squeal and bleed like pigs when stuck with a Hellene’s javelin.’
Oh yes, those Bulgars! Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu’s mobilier provençal is threatened by the press of cavalry returning from the wars, the salon filled with the clash of metal, a stench of leather and hairy, black, bloodshot men swaying in their saddles.
I await him on the steps, along with the palace officials in strict order of hierarchy, we too, sweating in our robes, collecting the dust blowing out of Asia.
This small, unlikely figure dismounts. ‘Where is Her Imperial Highness?’
Nobody dares answer a question so mad.
I break off my novelette to smoke one of his cigarettes. I’m growing as mad as Angelos, who hasn’t stopped smoking all night, while slaughtering Bulgars in Thrace and Macedonia.
When we had gone to bed he asked, ‘Will your new friends take you away from me?’
‘Why should they?’
‘Eudoxia was given as a bribe to Grimaldi. They hoped he would help them recapture the City. But it didn’t work that way. He shut her up in that tower at Castellar.’
Always these towers! I am the one shut in a tower more fatal than those experienced by his other fictions — his Eudoxias and Annas. I bet even Anna the wife is a fiction.
At least the towers usually materialise as a prelude to tenderness. We fell asleep locked together.
However much I need him I must somehow escape.
Waking in the night, he said, ‘I could see it in his eye.’
‘In whose? And what?’
‘The Golson man — that he’ll take you away.’
‘We aren’t living in the Middle Ages. You almost make me wish we were.’
When he had turned his back on me he said, ‘He’ll take you to Nice.’
‘We might all go there together. In the green Austin. Wouldn’t it be fun?’
‘Nice is the most vulgar place on earth.’
‘There are some you haven’t seen, darling.’
In any case we must return their kindness. Perish the thought! Those who are kind don’t, surely, expect their kindness duplicated? Or perhaps they do, a carbon copy, a kind of receipt. I’ll write Joanie a letter of thanks, a civil note, the exquisite sentiments of which will fan her passion from a safe distance, Curly’s too.
Must stop being a cock-tease.
Mrs Golson was growing ashamed of herself. ‘Vous n’avez pas quelques lettres pour moi?’ she heard herself bleat at the porter’s desk, not only on returning from an outing, but sometimes less excusably after taking the lift down from her Louis Whichever suite for the express purpose of making her futile enquiry.
‘Non, madame. Pas de courrier. Rien.’
At times the porter scarcely bothered to turn his head and glance in the direction of the pigeon-hole. She could see that he, even more than the hunchback liftman, was becoming suspicious, connecting her with the rumours of war; when she was less responsible for its threats and stratagems than anybody on the European scene.
She must restrain herself. But didn’t.
‘Toujours rien pour moi?’
‘Si, madame, il y a une petite lettre.’
Mrs Golson experienced the greatest difficulty in receiving her letter with an indifference to match the porter’s own. She knew her skin was glowing, her hands were trembling, and that idiocy had crept into the smile the porter would in any case not have expected from this foreigner he only just deigned to serve.
‘Merci,’ she barely whispered, and even then it sounded to her ears regrettably Australian.
Grasping her unopened letter, she took the lift. All the way up, while hauling on the greasy rope, the silent hunchback stared at her clenched hand, she was convinced, out of the corner of one suspicious eye. Along the corridor Joséphine stood leaning on a millet broom, smiling, but watchful. They, the servants, were the spies.
Mrs Golson felt downright faint by the time she had unlocked her door and was free to tear at her blessed letter.
18th March 1914
Quite laughable! She had waited three days, not a lifetime. She did in fact laugh now that she could afford to.
My dear Mrs Golson,
The letters one writes to thank for a genuine, spontaneous kindness usually seem forced, their words, and the sentiments the words fail to express, inadequate. That is why I have hesitated these few days to try to convey my appreciation of your help — Mr Golson’s too, it goes without saying.
I think it is in part the reclusive life I lead which gives rise to these difficulties — not that I would choose to live otherwise, for I have to consider the needs of an elderly, invalid husband. You must not imagine I am making further inroads on the kindness you have already shown. I have learnt to cultivate my garden! Even the persistent rumours of war have failed to destroy our peaceful existence. (Don’t you think the French the worst of all warmongers?)