Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

Leonard doesn’t look back, not even once, but Marianne’s waving and waving until the boat is lost in churning foam. It’s simultaneously yesterday and ancient history, thinking about this. I’m swept by a surge of loneliness. Too many goodbyes.

A lemon tree grown taller than the wall is hung with strips of insecticide. I pretend to myself that she’s still here, just the other side, picking tomatoes on the terrace. Leonard and that tragic boy of hers too. Marianne was happiest making a home, bringing flowers to his table and calm to his storm, sewing curtains, pouring wine, baby Axel lulled to sleep by the strings of his guitar… I think of Axel Joachim, or Barnet as Leonard took to calling him, sleepily sucking his thumb, his sun-bleached hair as white as his pillow.

Leonard brings his guitar out to the terrace, watches us dancing. The embers glow beneath the lemon trees, just the other side of this wall, but the bellowing of a workman snaps me back to earth and it might as well be Mars. We were heady with ideals, drunk with hopes of our languorous lope into a future that had learnt from its past. I reach the door of Leonard’s house feeling quite giddy and a groan escapes me at the thought of that man in the White House, of a world turning backwards.

The nightmares will always find you even if you do live on a rock.

There’s nobody about to hear my muttering, though flowers have already been left on the step. The white walls of Leonard’s house rise blankly, grey shutters shut. By the look of it, Fatima’s brass hand has recently been polished. I hope someone has been in to cover the mirrors. I bend to the step and place the stone among other offerings: drying carnations, teabags, oranges, a single gypsy rose. I think about snatching it back but it was his and Marianne’s, and not mine at all.

‘A talisman,’ Marianne said, and added with a giggle, ‘maybe it’s the petrified heart of Orpheus.’

I kneel at the step. The other side of this door, in the hall, the mirror keeps its secrets above a polished table with a lace cloth where they laid out their treasures.

Marianne and Leonard made up stories; along with Orpheus’s heart, they had a fossilised goat’s horn Dionysus had drunk from, gold and blue fragments from Epidaurus, an iron monastery bell that Marianne once found buried in a pine forest in Santorini, a large rusting tin box with a relief of a blindfolded woman playing a harp without strings. The carved mirror was their oracle. Leonard painted in gold ink: I change. I am the same. I change. I am the same. I change. I am the same . He once made me stop and look into it. He lit candles and said some sort of prayer, bid me to keep looking until I knew who I was.

I change. I am the same. I guess he meant well even though he got carried away and Marianne hated me for a while. Ah well, that’s how it was in those days.

That was the last year without electricity up here. Sometimes it seems a shame. An hour or two after sundown the town generators fell silent and we were lit only by moon and flame. Lanterns, charcoal braziers, icons flickering above bowls of oil with little flames floating on corks. Everyone is beautiful by candlelight. I take my cooker and fridge for granted these days but my memories are golden. I change. I am the same.

I was here one Shabbat. The lighting of the candles, the little dishes of salt and oil, olives, fresh anchovies. Marianne had somehow managed a challah loaf from his temperamental oven. Leonard’s benedictions were not misplaced. The hand-embroidered tablecloth, sweet water from the wells, the glass of the kerosene lamps sparkling, white anemones gracefully dipping their heads from an earthenware jug; even the air around her was luminous.

I think of those nights lit by lamps, music and dancing, of Magda’s mournful Russian songs, shadows leaping on the walls, of guitars and bouzouki and accordion, Mikhailis with his fiddle, Jewish songs known to both Magda and Leonard, and sometimes, strumming his guitar, a few hesitant lines or verses of his own that seemed to stalk him like cats to the creamery.

I don’t think he’s been here for almost twenty years so I’m surprised to find myself weeping like this. I haven’t even brought a tissue. But then, unlike Leonard, who leapt right in with this house and another man’s wife and child, I didn’t expect this place to become home.

Many dine out on well-worn yarns of backpacking along the winding dusty roads east that became known as the hippy trail. The man across the table will tell you of his summer of love almost before you’ve caught his name, and as he pours the wine your mind replaces that grey suit with patched shorts and tanned shoeless feet, a guitar on a knotted string. But we didn’t hitch-hike to Greece and hadn’t thought of India, or even Istanbul or Beirut. And we weren’t hippies, at least not when we set off. I’m not sure that hippies had even been invented as early as 1960.

My journey that Easter was mapped by a mind that dreamt only of a boy. Specifically, Jimmy Jones, who combined a face for poetry with a naturally graceful and muscular body that leapt and ran and balanced and twirled and invariably triumphed in press-up contests with my brother. First love arrived in a flare of flaming lust, a genie sprung from a grubby lamp that brightened my life and opened the world.

Jimmy Jones was twenty-one, four years older than me, and his wishes extended beyond simply granting mine. He had plans to travel that summer and his backpack shook with impatience at the foot of his rickety bed. I was needy and adrift since caring for my dying mother had so abruptly reached its conclusion and wanted nothing but Jimmy Jones’s warm skin and soft kisses and a backpack of my own.

Mum left me the means to escape by way of an enigma. There wasn’t much to go on, just the surprise of one thousand unexplained pounds in a Post Office Savings Account and, in its wake, the serendipitous arrival of a book. The author of the book was Charmian Clift, an Australian writer who lived here on Hydra and who, for several years in London, had been my mother’s closest friend. I was looking for any sort of road and thought Charmian might shed some light on the secrets my mother had taken to her grave.

The typing pool where I worked was a torture chamber in triplicate of clattering keys, pinging bells and bottom-pinchers. The most exciting thing to happen was a cream cake on a birthday. This was not the stuff of dreams that my dying mother had wished for me. I dreamt of the sun and a glittering sea, of a beautiful man-boy diving from high rocks, surfacing, surviving. I dreamt of light through shutters falling across a bed, though I’m sure I had plenty to say at the time about freedom and escaping the rat race. Mainly I dreamt of dreaming.

My education petered out when my mother became ill and my future remained an unimagined thing. There was little to tie me to London. My father, had this been the Middle Ages, would most certainly have had me fitted with a cast-iron chastity belt. During the dreary London winter that trailed my mother’s death he knew that something was making me cheerful and decided that that something had to be stopped. That boy – that dropout – was not allowed over the threshold.

The days stretched into weeks of half-hatched plans to run away. It was unrelentingly cold and rainy; al fresco activities in the secret dips and wooded corners of London’s royal parks became soggy affairs. Most days, since my father rarely allowed me out, Jimmy waited in the greasy spoon across from my office to walk me back to Bayswater through the dripping trees and sodden grass. We snatched moments in the pavilion of the Italian Gardens, or in the shamefully familiar hollows in certain trees of St James’s. I’m amazed we were never arrested! I clung to him while we plotted our escape with his raincoat a canopy above our heads.