Somebody knocking, was it? The bell had eroded long ago. Neighbours came round to the back with their offerings of eggs, fruit, a strangled cockerel. Peasants don’t knock.
‘E.? E.?’ He barked his shins against the iron cradle of this hateful marble table.
Above him the French sky held firm, when that above Mikhali, Smyrna, or any of the Imperial staging posts would have split open at his command.
Not far below the terrace where the Imperial Highness was creating such a rumpus, ‘Eudoxia Vatatzes’ was seated on a rock, bare feet enjoying the texture of stone (and childhood) long arms emerging from these faded, but still lovely, carnation sleeves, to embrace bony knees.
E. had not written up the diary, but here it was, all in the head, in the waning light above the pine-crests, between sea and sky: ‘E. Vatatzes’ stroking it out of terracotta arms.
‘… now that I’ve done the deed, now that I’ve invited them, shall I be brave enough to tell? To commit myself to the Golsons even in a moment of crisis: to Curly’s alcoholic breath, cracking seams, Joanie’s steamy bosom, her gasps and blunders, the smell of caoutchouc — to dismiss all the mistakes of the past culminating in Marian s driving the tennis ball against the ivy screen in which sparrows are nesting.
Whatever is in store, I must go up. My Angelos is screaming as only a Byzantine emperor can scream.
No, I can never leave him. He is too dependent. Only I am more so. We are welded together, until war, or death, tears us apart.’
He opened the door. ‘Qui est là?’
‘Nous sommes les Golsons.’
‘Who?’
‘Joan and — Curly — Golson.’
He stood looking at them from under that incredible woman’s hat, his lower lip protruding and trembling.
Joan Golson, too, was trembling. ‘You met my husband. You are Monsieur Vatatzes, aren’t you?’
‘He is not at home.’
She could hear Curly murmuring behind her, dragging the soles of his stationary boots on the stone paving. In a moment she would be accused.
‘But how tiresome of us! Have we come on the wrong day? I’m sure your wife said Thursday.’
‘Anna died.’
Joan Golson thought she might burst into tears, when Madame Vatatzes appeared at the end of what must have been a poky hall, but which in the circumstances had taken on the endlessness, the proportions, of a dream perspective, down which this vision was advancing, burnt arms outstretched towards them from long, floating, carnation sleeves.
‘My dear Mrs Golson, I’m so glad you were able to come.’
The voice seemed to weave, as though through water. Bubbles almost issued from Madame Vatatzes’ underwater voice as she delivered the opening line of a role she must have been trying to master up till the last moment, not in a play, more of a two-dimensional masque.
Old Vatatzes flung his vast hat on a worm-eaten console. ‘Gamo olous!’
‘He forgets,’ she explained.
He sprayed them with laughter. ‘On the contrary, I remember too much.’ But seemed to be settling for the inevitable.
Madame Vatatzes resumed her flat, under-rehearsed role of hostess, suggesting, ‘Shall we go in here?’ Her tone implied there was infinite choice.
Then they were standing in the room where Mrs Golson had seen the Vatatzes on the occasion when she had spied on them. From inside, it looked as poky as the hall, irregular in shape, its floor raked. Or had her own uncertainty brought it about? She wondered as she stood smiling, clutching her bag (it belonged, she realised, not to the Melton velour she was wearing, but the Papillon of her first and perhaps more suitable choice) the bag in which was the little brooch she must decide whether to offer or not. At the moment, in the presence of mad Monsieur Vatatzes, the amethyst brooch seemed too much an exposure of her own secret sentiments, on which his eye would most surely focus with a glittering malevolence. So she grappled the bag to her entrails while tottering on her Pinet heels.
And smiled her most social smile. ‘So charming!’ Mrs Golson murmured, looking about her at the grubby walls, the battered Provençal furniture, and one or two bibelots of no value in a rented villa. Only the piano had any connection with an experience she might repeat, if those who could gratify her wishes were willing to collaborate by drawing from the warped keys the same skeins of passionate colours and swirl of romantic sentiment.
‘Charming! — arid so typical!’
‘Typical of what?’ Monsieur Vatatzes cracked down on her; his nose looked alarming.
‘Of those who live here.’ Mrs Golson gasped.
If only Curly would back her up, but like most Australian husbands, he never did if one ventured into country considered in any way ‘artistic’ or ‘intellectual’.
Monsieur Vatatzes almost screamed, his spit flying in the faces of his guests. ‘We only exist in this filthy hovel! If we live, it is in our minds — the past;’ here he turned on Madame Vatatzes, ‘though E. rejects the past. Don’t you?’
Madame Vatatzes composed her lips into what looked like two narrow strips of pale rubber. ‘Would you care for a glass of porto?’ she asked the alarmed Golsons.
Her teeth appeared smaller than they normally were, Mrs Golson thought; on the other hand, the feet, she noticed for the first time, were bare, and looking enormous planted in Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu’s shabby carpet.
The Golsons silently agreed, with idiotic smiles and nods, that porto would be on the one hand ‘delightful’, on the other ‘the real oil’.
Poor Curly! so far out of his depth, visibly clinging to his clothes as a form of reality in the situation in which they found themselves. Had they been left alone by their hosts just for a moment, she would have nibbled one of his ear-lobes; to Joan Golson there was something delectable about a lobe, like a single oyster on a roundel of bread as opposed to the gross gourmandise of overt sensuality.
But they were not alone. Madame Vatatzes had gone, only too willingly, to fetch the porto, and they were left with the old man.
He told them, ‘Having company so seldom — and, I must admit, not needing it — one wonders what would amuse the guests.’ He looked at them so intently he might at any moment splinter in all directions.
Hands deep in his Harris pockets, Curly found the courage to suggest, ‘If you didn’t want us, why did you invite us?’
‘That, you must ask E.,’ Monsieur Vatatzes replied, ‘who may now be going for a swim instead of fetching the porto. E. is inclined to attempt suicide at all those moments one doesn’t care to face.’
‘But will probably never succeed if she hasn’t brought it off by now,’ Mrs Golson contributed, and added, ‘I am the least successful suicide.’
Her husband was amazed. ‘Aren’t we being morbid?’
‘After the Italians, “morbid” is a condition of cheeses,’ said Monsieur Vatatzes. ‘Human beings are human—hélas.’ He stood mopping his high forehead on which sweat was glistening.
As she hadn’t been invited to sit, Mrs Golson now did so, and her husband followed suit. They might not have been the human beings old Vatatzes insisted did exist, more likely inflated rubber dolls invoked for their hosts to puncture.
Just then Madame Vatatzes returned with a tray, a bottle of porto, and four glass thimbles. (Curly used to say, ‘Foreigners see to it you don’t get drunk at their expense.’) On entering the room, one bare foot stubbed itself on the edge of the carpet, and the bottle might have crashed to the floor if Curly hadn’t sprung and caught it. (Joanie Golson was so proud of her cricketer husband.)