E.: What’uv we got for dinner, Con? [The Greek can’t know about this hearty self evolved solely for his benefit.]
CON.: Good fress fiss. Tsips. Stike ’n’ onions. Stike ’n’ eggs. All very spessul.
E.: Then echeis kephtehthes?
CON.: No kephtehthes. [Tongue held against the palate produces that clicking noise which is the sound of Greek negation.] You spick Grick, eh? [The Greek eyes again suspicious.]
E.: How I speak Greek!
CON.: You not Grick. Where you learn?
E.: In another life. In Byzantium.
[The Greek roars for this mad joke before steering into safer waters.]
CON.: What you teck for dinner?
E.: Knowing the Greek, whatever he decides I must teck.
CON.: [relieved by this lesser madness.] You teck fiss. Fiss is good. [He calls the order through the bead curtain.]
Two boys have come out, one of a superior teen age, and a small inquisitive roly-poly. If the youth is inquisitive too, he has learnt to disguise it. The father, muttering in the background, tells them he has on his hands some kind of foreign, Greek-speaking madman.
CON.: [returning to the foreground.] You titch my boys Grick, sir. Ross and Phil don’t wanter learn their own language. [The older boy prowls in an agony of disgust against the far wall of the café. He would like to dissociate himself from this communicative father.]
CON.: Ross make big progress at ’ighschool. ’E’ll study Law.
E.: Poor bugger!
CON.: Eh?
E.: Good on ’im!
[Ross can’t take any more. He stalks between the tables and out the shop door, a disdainful Greek imitation of the emu. The father is occupied professionally, but the roly-poly PHIL is fascinated by what is new.]
P.: [very softly, as he examines a heap of spilt salt on the surface of the table.] Where you from?
E.: From here.
[The roly-poly’s lip, his downcast eyes, are disbelieving.]
P.: You been away for long?
E.: Yes, ages — at the War.
P.: [acquisitively] Got any souvenirs on yer?
E.: Don’t go in for souvenirs. There’s reminders enough, if you want them, in your mind.
P.: No helmuts? Byernets? Didn’t you ever kill someone?
E.: I expect I did.
P.: Got any medals?
E.: I lost it.
[The questions are becoming intolerable, and only beginning. The customer gets up and is preparing to leave.]
P.: Hey, yer order, mister!
[For CON is at this moment returning with it, mummified in yellow batter, beside the mound of glistening chips.]
CON.: You no want yer good fiss dinner? [The incredulous wedding ring on the Greek’s stumpy, tufted finger; all the best men are ringed.]
E.: Oh, I want all right — yes! But somehow always miss the bus …
[Puts down some money and escapes into the outer glare, which blinds at least temporarily.]
‘But who will I say?’
‘You needn’t say anybody, need you? If she’s in the garden I’ll just go out.’
It was too much for the young parlourmaid. She had reddened all the way up her neck. The points of her cap were quivering for what she had been taught was an offence against accepted behaviour.
‘Mrs Twyborn won’t like that.’ The girl had begun to prickle with tears of anger.
‘She was never all that orthodox herself.’
The situation was something the maid’s starch was unable to protect her against, so she turned and blundered out in the direction of the servants’ quarters.
He was left with this house in which the owners had gone on living without his assistance. He wondered what part he had played in their lives during his absence, perhaps no more than they in his own unwilling memory: a series of painful, washed-out flickers. Unless those who lead what are considered real lives see the past as an achieved composite of fragments, like a jig-saw from which only some of the details are missing, or cannot be fitted.
Since encouraging his parents’ maid to surrender her responsibility here he was, surrounded by all the details of the classic jig-saw waiting for him to put them together, more alarmingly, to fit himself, the missing piece, into a semblance of real life. He could hear a tap dripping (there had always been a tap dripping in the cloakroom). Hanging from a peg there was the rag hat the Judge used to wear when he went fishing with his mates Judge Kirwan and Mr Mulcahy K.C. Opulence still showed through the texture of scuffed rugs; and on the Romanian mat, the place where Ruffles had pissed was only slightly darkened by time. He hesitated, dazed by the perspective of other rooms, opening through light and memory into a blur of acacia fronds and hibiscus trumpets.
He progressed slowly to the far side of what was referred to as the ‘drawing room’, with its crumpled chintz, sunken springs (‘natural comfort’, Eadie called it) Town Cries, figurines, paperweights, the inherited Dutch chest shedding its marquetry scales, the unnatural photographs of relations, friends, associates, assembled over an indiscriminate lifetime (himself in a white tunic, lace-up boots, simpering from beneath a fringe while holding a sword). Now defenceless (supposedly an adult) standing on the ridge between the French doors, from which he must descend by way of the discoloured marble steps, the corroded, unstable handrail, into Eadie’s ‘beloved’ garden (as her women friends, the Joanie Golsons, referred to it) this morning a chaos of suffocating scents and emotions. He had to face it. Now or never. Must. And did.
And there was Eadie, crouched on her knees with a trowel in her hand, her beam broader in one of those skirts she had invariably worn, a miracle of Scottish weave and an intermingling of dogs’ hair clotted with compost or manure. Oblivious as far as you could tell. As were the six or seven little red dogs, scratching, swivelling on their rumps, sniffing, one of them lifting a leg behind Eadie’s back on a border of sweet alyssum.
To an outburst of barely synchronised clocks in the house behind, and the little terriers giving tongue, she turned on her haunches, and squinted through the smoke from a wilting cigarette at the intruder in her garden.
Making an uglier face she asked, ‘Who are you? Didn’t Mildred answer the bell? Who …?’ then went off into a long whimpering moan, wrinkling up, coughing, gasping.
‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘What you’ve done to us, Eddie! Whyyy?’
She hung her head, and if the cigarette hadn’t slipped from her lips down inside her front, the situation might have grown intolerable, but in the circumstances she had to slap and grab at her blouse, shouting, ‘God … damn …’ before retrieving the source of her wrath and flinging it into a patch of snail-fretted acanthus.
She clambered to her feet, tottering on legs seized by cramp, dropping the trowel from stiff fingers, again threatened with a landslide of emotion, while the terriers pounced, one of them worrying at a trouser-cuff, sniffing to decide the category to which this unidentified person, possibly no stranger, belonged.
‘Shouldn’t we embrace?’ The gruff warning in her voice at once established her as his mother; and as they advanced upon each other, still the victims of their diffidence, he saw that it was she who was beginning to take the initiative, while he, the passive object of her intentions, was drawn into the labyrinth of wrinkles, cigarette fumes, and more noticeable, a gust of early whiskey.