‘Oh, come off it!’
I realise I am trembling with rage. I am nauseated by the cigarette doused in the bowl of half-drunk coffee, roused by the friction of my gown against my skin, drugged by the colours and scents of Smyrna as conjured up by the old magician. (Isn’t this how our relationship works?)
‘The year she made her pilgrimage to Tinos — before the Turk was driven out of Thessaly …’
‘Oh yes, we’re off now — off to the Martyrs’ Stakes, the Orthodox races …’
‘… I went with her, but only to see they treated her respectfully on the steamer — that they gave her the cabin I’d reserved for Anna Vatatzes — that they did not seat boors at her table in the saloon — and replaced the stained tablecloth. Otherwise, I sat on deck, amongst the peasant women surrounded by their bunches of fowls and bleating kids, the cheeses they were bringing to sell receiving the spray from their vomit. This was my pilgrimage from Smyrna to Tinos. On arrival I sit waiting for my sainted wife at a café on the paralia—because my faith, or lack of it, will not allow me to go up to the church with her.’
‘Masochist, Angelos!’
I am enraged, always, at the sight of the saintly Anna’s face, herself a walking candle lighting candles in the dark church. I reach for my lover’s hand, past the broken crusts, past the used cups. I disturb the surface of cold café au lait in which the cigarette has disintegrated. When I have locked his fingers in mine, we sinners sticky with half-dried semen sit and watch as she kisses her own reflection in the glass protecting the jewelled icon from sinners, germs, and thieves.
Then I lean forward, I cannot restrain my impulse, I kiss the hand I am holding, and we are bobbing like two helpless corks on the tide of our emotions.
‘At breakfast, E.!’
I bow my head. I am exposed from my divided breast, past the slope on which my navel is embossed, as far as the muslin folds of my lap.
‘Why are you crying, Eudoxia?’
‘Fuck it — I’m not! Being emotional isn’t necessarily crying, is it? If I weren’t emotional, you’d call me a cold fish — or worse still, an Anglo-Saxon. Of all the insulting names you call me, that is seldom one of them.’
We sit laughing, legs entangled under the table, his old bony kneecaps eating into me, neither of us aware that this will be the Day of the Second Coming of Our Lady Mrs E. Boyd Golson.
All day long the dream of my Father kept recurring. In a series of waking dreams I found myself adding details to it.
Mummy came in. I was lying vaguely telling the rosary of dreams and thoughts while sucking the forbidden lolly I had hidden under the pillow. She rattatted on my bedroom door, only as a joke, because she barged straight in. I thought at first she must have wanted to catch me at something, but soon realised this was the last thing in her head, she was too exhilarated, so excited it did not even occur to her that she was the one who might be caught out. She was dressed in a pair of check pants and a coat which could have belonged to my father. Certainly the waistcoat of crumpled points was his, though she hadn’t been able to commandeer the watch-chain. She was wearing a hat, its brim pulled low, which I recognised as a Sewell Sweatfree Felt. Chugging along in the rear was Joanie Golson, her bosom expiring in palest blue charmeuse.
Mummy announced, ‘We are going out, darling. If there’s anything you want, Daddy’ll be here, reading through some — legal stuff.’ She gulped down what was turning into a hiccup.
Though the shutters were closed, and only a feeble glimmer from the night-light swimming in its saucer, a green moon could have been presiding over a painted scene. Its most incredible detail was that Mummy had corked on a moustache: the perspiration had worked its way to the surface and was winking through this corked band, while behind Mrs Judge Twyborn, Mrs Boyd Golson glugged and panted, her charmeuse melons parting and rejoining, parting and rejoining.
Having done their duty by Eadie’s tiresome child, the couple left, and I began drowsing and waking, drowsing again, to the tune of Joanie’s globular breasts.
Though Mrs Golson re-appeared regularly at the Twyborns’, she was on my list of avoidables from the night of the corked moustache until she sprang upon us yesterday.
There was nothing to disturb this afternoon’s siesta: Byzantium might never have begun falling apart, figments became the reality parents and lovers like to believe they have created. Could one dismiss as figment Eadie’s emissary Joan Golson rising through the dusk in her green motor the other side of the garden wall?
Later this evening, under a resonant sky, Angelos proposed to make music. We did, too.
We launched into the Chabrier waltzes, dashing them off too quickly, turning our backs on other eventualities, side by side on Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu’s stool. I would like to appear less tentative, less receptive of the ruler and the rules. I would love to splash music around me, while A. is determined to control my least impulse for extravagance. His hands. His wrist-watch. His veins. Chabrier’s oxydised streamers stream out behind us, in my case never freeing themselves because knotted to my wrists, and because the old bastard won’t allow me the freedom of music.
All desire for music had left me. I knew I was giving a brazen performance, but saw it through. Blew a raspberry at the end. Overtaken by contrition, I forced an embrace on him. Normally we would have joined also in laughter. Not now. He began what was a visible gnashing: a guard dog’s teeth, flared nostrils, not a dog’s, those of a frightened man, the gristle in an aristocratic nose rising out of transparency, thickening at a bridge still delicate. There have been times when I could have bitten off this nose.
As he gnashes, he warns, ‘I think she has come again, E.!’
Not so soon. It wasn’t possible.
‘Comme hier soir … Ti zeetahiy afti then xeroh …’
I jump up and look out. There she is, sure enough, against the wall, under the olive which till now was my best protection. Her surroundings and her body make her Paris clothes look ridiculous, giving a couturier’s model the stamp of Golson’s Emporium Sydney Australia. Whatever the label, Paquin or Golson, it is Eadie’s Joanie.
I latch the shutters.
This evening we didn’t eat. Neither of us had appetite, thirst only. And as he quenches himself in brandy, the Pantocrator rises, like the phoenix strewing his golden plumage on the head of the one faithful — his hetaira.
He says, ‘They shut her in a tower. My wife Anna. Or was it my mother? Or my concubine? Or the Empress Eudoxia?’
‘Oh, come off it, darling! My Australian arse won’t take any more!’
I try dousing the two of us. My eyelids will only half-open. I am a bundle of sticks and rag, an old battered umbrella.
My darling’s skin is turning black.
‘They shut her in a tower at Pera.’
‘Yesss!’
The ivy alive with Australian sparrows.
I know, I know the smells the feel of a monk’s clammy hands candle-wax sweat verdigris cold slimy kritkarakia in the tower in which I am in-carc-er-ated the cancerous tower of a dying human relationship.
He breaks up. Laying his head on the keys of the piano. To which we have returned inevitably, to be played out.
I ignore my lover and unlatch the shutter. Outside, the past is spread, in pools of blue, in black limbs, in felted voices. I lean against the sash. If only to be drawn back into what I could not endure, but long for …
By now she knew the narrow streets by heart. She knew the abridged biographies of the girls who worked for the pharmacist, every fly which crawled on the chicken livers and rabbits at the poulterer’s, the almost petrified heap of excrement (human, she suspected) on the paving at the south-west corner of St Sauveur. She had read every novel in the catalogue at the English Tea-room and Library, excepting those withheld from her by conspiracy. At the Grand Hotel Splendide des Ligures, ces Anglais Monsieur et Madame Golson were on the verge of acquiring the status of permanent guests.