‘I expect Anna has taken her martyrdom to Heaven by special ladder.’
I don’t think he heard.
‘A good woman, but without the flair of the Empress Eudoxia.’ He arranges his tongue against his palate before going off into his usual tumbled Imperial catalogue. ‘She used to wait on the steps … along with the Panhypersevastos … the Grand Stratopedarchs … the Primikerios the Constable the Logothete …’
During the recitation he slips lower on his throne. I pour my Emperor another brandy.
He asks, ‘Did Anna die at Blachcrnae? Or was it after we moved to Nicaea?’
Or Smyrna? Or Alexandria? Or even Athens? The Stations of the Greek Cross.
I help him upstairs, by now so sloshed he is only for undressing. Old cold feet, like skate on the fishmonger’s slab, the feet of my 68-year-old child, the snoring funnel of the aged mouth …
The shutter tears free of the latch, and the room is incorporated into the churning night, the garden threatened with uprooting, its only stable feature the immense olive, in the branches of which the moon appears caught for a second or two, and at intervals the scud of cloud.
How enviable this olive tree encased in its cork armour, hardly a tremor in its gnarled arms, its downthrust roots firmly holding. To have such stability — or is oneself the strongest stanchion one can hope for? To realise this is perhaps to achieve stability.
Writing about oneself at night is release of a kind, but no more than of a kind — like masturbation.
8 feb.
Slept v. little as result of the storm and the Visitation. If I had known there was to be a Second Coming I might have abandoned my old child, made for the railway station at St Mayeul, and spent the rest of the night waiting for the first train — whether to Genoa, Nice, Marseille or Perpignan would not have worried the fugitive.
But this morning was again one of those with which we are blessed in these parts and which exorcise the recurring nightmares.
That very real one: the shutter has flown open, the whole cliffside a churning mass of pittosporum and lantana scrub pressing in upon, threatening all man-made shoddiness. The giant emu’s head and neck tormented by the wind. As its plumage is ruffled and tossed, its beak descends repeatedly, almost past the useless shutter, almost into the room where I am lying in my narrow bed, fright raised in goose-pimples, when not dissolving into urine.
Last night, to make this dream more disturbing, my father came in: this tall man with droopy moustache and swollen knuckles — not forgetting the eyes. My father’s eyes are the most expressive part of him: a liquid, apologetic, near-black, terrifying when faced with any kind of dishonesty, terrified in turn by the grief of others, poverty, children. I never dared call my father ‘Dad’—Mother might become, grudgingly, ‘Mum’, a sulky ‘you’ more often than not — but my father could never have been less than ‘Father’.
I speak of him as though he were dead, when last night he was standing beside me, after the shutter had burst open and the beak of the giant emu was threatening to descend into the room, to tear me open as I cowered on my narrow, sodden mattress (hair, they had decided, on account of the asthma).
Mastering fear of his own child, my father was standing over me, offering a cold, knobbly hand. Which I took in desperation and love. He was trembling. I could smell his fear. It was that of a man, intensified, and overlaid by those other smells of cigar smoke and port-wine. I guessed that my father must be the only person in the house, otherwise he would not have come in, he would have left me to Nanny, or Mummy, even to Emma or Dora. But here he stood in person by the bed, his waistcoat with one of the points crumpled, the watch-chain with its gold symbols, and the miniature greenstone tiki which somebody had brought back from a holiday at Rotorua, and which I would have loved to fondle had I dared.
And now his hand. I did not dare.
‘Is anything wrong?’ he asked, ‘darling?’
He had never ventured on a ‘darling’ before, and this confirmed my belief that Father was the only person in the house.
‘Is there?’
‘No.’
When everything was. I was swimming in it.
Then he said, ‘Aren’t we a bit smelly? Shall I change you?’
‘No.’
I was brimming with love for this man I was privileged to call ‘Father’, while going through life avoiding calling him anything unless it was dragged out of me.
So I repeated, ‘No’.
I could see how relieved he was — this tall, stately, scruffy man. Both my parents were given to food-spots, too argumentative, always in too great a hurry to pay much attention to what they were eating. My mother could look the slut of sluts, and did, except when she set out to kill. But the food-spots seemed to dignify my father, like the asterisks in books too technical to read. My father was essentially technicaclass="underline" a closed book if it hadn’t been for his troubled eyes.
Not like those of my more than troubled, my dotty 68-year-old child. Again eyes which are as near as anything black, but ready to splinter into hilarity and rages. Vatatzes is protected by malice, madness, the Byzantine armour inherited from his ancestors, and the infallible weapon with which he overcomes his chief adversary’s last resistance.
I have often wondered what sexual solace my parents were able to offer each other. This matter of tense when speaking of parents: as far as I know mine aren’t dead, yet almost always I speak of them as though they were. They seemed indestructible; it was their child who died, one of the premature suicides.
When I said he need not change me, Father re-latched the shutter, and managed a smile. The night-light made the smile dip and shudder on his long face. Then, incredibly, he bent and, whether by accident, kissed me on the mouth. It seemed to me I was drawn up into the drooping moustache, as though inside some great brooding loving spider without being the spider’s prey; if anything, I was the spinner of threads trying to entangle him more irrevocably than his tentative sortie into loving could ever bind me.
Then the moment broke. He tiptoed out, lapped in and dislocated by the elongating light, and I fell back blissful on my bed of piss which the two of us had agreed to ignore.
This morning was so bland I brought the table out on the terrace at the back without asking Angelos whether I should. He accepted without comment. Too much on his mind, I suspected: Byzantium, Nicaea, our Visitor of the evening before. As he sat behind his cigarette smoke, under the trellis which is already fuzzing with green, on his face that expression of irony which so often foreshadows cruelty, I wondered whether he hadn’t shared what was either my fantasy or my dream.
To sidetrack my suspicion I launched into the kind of banal remark one makes in the cause of self-protection. ‘Isn’t it a lovely morning here on the terrace?’
No reply. I sit watching his pointed teeth, the quiver of a veined eyelid, a slight trembling of the hand holding the cigarette.
‘Well — isn’t it?’ My chest begins to pout inside my morning-gown, which normally would have gratified my nakedness, ourselves alone together until the arrival of the recently defected Joséphine Réboa.
‘Nobody,’ he aims it with precision, ‘can talk of loveliness,’ he douses the cigarette in his bowl of unfinished coffee, ‘who has not experienced Smyrna. This,’ he almost screams, ‘this French post-card is nothing! La Côte Morte!’ Laughing, but unbalanced by his laughter, this horrible desiccated wretch, to whom I am committed by fate and orgasm — never love. ‘At this hour we used to sit on the terrace, looking out across the Gulf — our senses drenched with the tones, the scent of stocks at whatever season — the mauve marble of our house on the Prokymea stained with gold — before the blood began to flow …’