The Twyborn Affair (12 page)

 

Very purposeful, he had come out on the front terrace and was calling, ‘Eudoxia! Where are you, E.?' wearing the sun hat with the frayed brim, the spokes radiating from the crown, which made him look like an old woman. (E. said it didn't; it suited him.)

Frustrated in his purpose, he returned through the house. Its structure seemed unstable this evening, rattling, groaning, trembling as he passed from front to back: the hovel which only an avaricious
demi-Anglaise
like Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu would offer tenants poor enough to accept. Poor but not grateful, thank God! He had never been grateful for small mercies in any of his incarnations, not even on becoming what seemed like the last and withering twig of a family tree.

Passing a wall-mirror in the hall he saw reflected in the fluctuating glass, amongst the scales and blotches, this figure in the plaited hat. E. was wrong: it was the face of an old woman and a peasant. Not that the aged don't tend to pass from one sex to the other in some aspects of their appearance. He didn't
feel
that he had undergone a change. E. appeared to appreciate him as much as ever—to love? he sometimes wondered. (If only he could lay hands on that diary. No! There are wounds enough without the diaries; the wax effigies of lovers are stuck with countless pins.)

Angelos Vatatzes steadied himself on a rented console, worm-ridden to the extent that it threatened to crumble. (She would send them a French bill, by God!) This aged revenant in the peasant-woman's hat, stuck with pins down the ages, from Blachernae to Nicaea, and down the map in travelogue to Smyrna and Alexandria. Athens? peugh! that haven of classicists and German
nouveaux riches
.

He remembered in his mother's work-basket a little heart in crimson velvet bristling with pins. She was not all that good with her needle; she was not all that good. But he had loved to draw his finger through the labyrinth of pins, exploring the textures of the stabbed velvet. He would cower over the crimson heart, anything to postpone the walks along the Prokymea with Miss Walmsley, or Fräulein Felser, or Mademoiselle Le Grand—the governesses who had ruled his life in turn.

The women.

Of all those who had attempted to rule him, empresses, hetairai, his sister Theodora, Eudoxia his colonial ‘bride', aunts, governesses, Anna his sainted wife, not so saintly in spite of the candles lit and the raw carrots nibbled at, only one had relieved him of the burden men carry, and that very briefly, long ago.

She was his wet-nurse—a peasant. That perhaps was why he could accept himself as a peasant-woman in a reed hat, and because there is less distance between peasant and emperor than between the Imperial Highness and those who compose the hierarchy.

His memory still showed him Stavroula (the Little Cross) a small woman of blanched cheeks, and enormous globes designed for devouring by the hungry offspring of the rich. (He had loved his milk-brother, however, and had rewarded him later, one Easter while sharing the same bed, by uniting with him in a sea of sperm.)

Stavroula had recurred throughout his youth, offering, always offering: purple figs on a bed of leaves, glasses of cold well-water, food, food, endless food, her face growing smaller, yeast-coloured, welted, in the black kerchief surrounding it, beside the Gulf, and down the coast at Mikhali, its green valleys descending out of Asia powdered with a reddish dust.

He could remember her kissing his hand. Himself always the acceptor, in a peasant hat worthy of an emperor.

Tears gushed out as he crossed the kitchen of the villa they were renting from Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu, and half an eggshell jumped off the table, the surface of which was grooved by use as Stavroula's face had been welted by age and hardship. The shell bounced on the floor which E. had not swept since Joséphine Réboa disturbed them by defecting.

Had E. defected?

Stavroula never would have. That is why he wept for the dead and the past.

He wept for the saints, even the pseudo-ones, the hateful Bogomil—a
Bulgar
.

And reached the back terrace, and shouted, ‘Eudoxia! Where to God have you got to?' He hesitated before shrieking, ‘
Gamo ton olakeron kosmo!
Fuck!' His voice, dying, mumbled, blubbered in a whisper, ‘Doxy—for Christ's sake …'

In the absence of the one who had abandoned him he ground his head against the terrace table, its marble permanently stained by the early coffee they were in the habit of taking there. He dragged his forehead back and forth, the disenchanted Emperor of Byzantium, Nicaea, Mistra, and all those lands threatened by the Slav, the Turk, the western hordes of schismatic, so-called Christendom—the Barbarians of past and present.

E. did not come. The spirit of Stavroula was not moved to appear. Mamma was at cards in another part of the town, Anna the Soul was no doubt copying aphorisms into a leather-bound notebook, or kissing an archimandrite's clammy white hand. She maintained that the hands of high-ranking monks and priests smelled delicious—of rose-water. It was the only streak of sensuality in Anna. He could not believe in the rose-water; he was sure an archimandrite smelled like any other monk or priest: of flannel vests and frustration, or the throbbing overflow of a dammed-up concupiscence.

Where was E.?

Only today he realised the connection between Anna and E., two scribblers: Anna the copyist; with E., he suspected, it was self-expression or-vindication. No, he did not want to investigate the fruits (too frightening) he was only curious about them. Anna had been religious; he suspected E. was too, but differently. Anna was as Orthodox as a burning candle, E. some kind of life-mystic, poor devil—a potential suicide in other words.

Who was not? unless the vegetables.

He lifted his head from the terrace table. He had promised himself a serene close to the day, one of those perfect evenings on the Coast, with music, conversation, perhaps an
omelette aux fines herbes
, a glass or two of Armagnac, then bed. Instead, blood could be threatening.

‘Doxy, where are you? Damn all saints, mystics, literary pretenders …'

The only true saint and woman was Stavroula, and for that reason he had kept it more or less secret, from Mamma, Anna, E. Mamma would have laughed at the idea, Anna would not have believed, E. might have, and for that reason, would have been more jealous than any.

His crypto-saint on her knees in her cell-cottage at Mikhali. She tended it, but it wasn't her own, any more than Yanni her giant husband (another slave) his strength dwindling till he ended, a paralysed flitch of bones wrapped in spotless rags, or Babbis the rosy boy who became a congested, resentful clerk.

You kissed Stavroula once on one of the white welts of her old puddingy cheeks and it smelled of the cleanliness which you recognised as earthly evidence of sanctity. (All nonsense of course if all is nothing as it has been decided.)

Again you recognised the smell of sanctity in the purple soil they opened in the graveyard above Mikhali to lower her into. Babbis glaring blubbering the other side of the grave. Resentful of the love you bore his mother? the milk you had deprived him of? more likely the sea of sperm to which you had both contributed while sharing a bed that Easter night. Anyway, he glared and blubbered,
this grown boy and portly clerk, while you could not raise a tear for the Dormition of Stavroula and the great abstraction of death. (‘Angelos is cold.')

Angelos now crying, his head on a stained table, perhaps crying for himself because close to death. (In those days graveyards, cypresses always on the alert against marauding Turks, belonged by tradition to those who were lowered into their redemptive soil; today all dust, the bones scattered; relatives squabbled over whether they should buy an additional plot—or two—or six—of Attic or even foreign soil in which to lay their mortal remains and those of their descendants.)

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.