Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

It seems everyone but me is in the grip of creative fervour. Edie and Janey spend hours cloistered upstairs, sewing costumes for Trudy’s party, secretive as brides, an old boat awning, once red, now a sun-bleached chalky pink, falling from the ledge between them. Out on the terrace Jimmy decorates our linen sacks in flesh tones which he plans to fix with real fig leaves at the front, while behind he’s painted us realistic and rather shapely bare bottoms. Later on he wants us to gather vines and flowers for our headdresses.

Bobby takes a break from the easel. I join him to help sort through some stones that he’s been collecting from the beach. They are mostly no bigger than marbles. The greens are like jade and malachite and cheese mould and lichen. There are reds in all shades of the butcher’s; sienna and bronze and grey with white marbling and bone-white and pure-black obsidian. The sea here is so clear that you can swim well out of your depth and still all these colours shine up at you like jewels through the water. Out here on the terrace they look dusty and incongruous, heaped up among the flaming geraniums. Bobby empties another pocketful at our feet. I’m willing to do anything to be close to him. This has always been our way.

Bobby and his ideas: it’s easy to get drawn in when you have none of your own. For as long as I can remember I’ve been his willing assistant, my pockets crammed with snail shells collected in the park, painting macaroni or cutting shapes from magazines, grinding pigments, boiling glue with zinc to prime his canvases.

We’re companionable, children once more. Jimmy’s moved across the terrace to the table to play poker with Marty, a six-foot-five Texan with an impressive drawl. We have batteries for the radio, which we keep tuned to the Armed Forces radio station from Athens. It’s mainly country and western but this pop song comes on that’s been in the charts and we know the words and sing along. At each chorus, Jimmy swings around to sing at me: ‘There will never be anyone else but you for me. Never ever be, just couldn’t be, anyone else but you.’ And I look at him there in the luminous air with his cards fanned to his chest and believe him.

Texas Marty’s another painter and seems to have more or less moved the great bulk of himself into Janey’s room, though she doesn’t consider him her boyfriend.

Bobby doesn’t exactly know what he plans to do with his growing collection of pebbles. ‘I’m trying to figure it out. They’re the fragments of an idea,’ he says in his preoccupied way. ‘You know how it is. I’m simply laying out my materials.’

This strikes a chord; ‘That’s how I feel,’ I blurt, and my sadness rushes in like a tide. ‘I’m like all these pieces and I don’t know what the whole is supposed to be…’ I flick a round black stone towards a pile of its friends.

Bobby, squatting in front of me, stops trawling. A shout goes up from the table as Jimmy lays down a winning hand and throws himself back against the cushions.

‘You’ve got a cool cat in Jimmy, maybe that’s enough for you for now,’ Bobby says, looking up at me. ‘What do you reckon?’ I try to smile as Jimmy holds up a fistful of drachmas and says, ‘Baby, we’re rich!’

‘There you go,’ Bobby says. ‘Seriously, Erica. You’re a kid. You’re lucky that Mum left you enough not to worry for a while.’

It’s hard to make him understand what I mean, only that I feel like something amorphous, a lump of clay that’s been taken from dank storage but must find its own shape in the sun. I tell him about Mum always saying that the world was my oyster and panicking because inside an oyster would be a terrible place to be. I knew, particularly while she lay dying, that there were things she wanted for me, choices I could make that were different from her own, but as she never found the words it was hard to give any sort of shape to them.

‘I spent all that time while she was in bed. That might have been the time to talk about what I should do with my life, or at least to be honest about her own.’

‘Well, look at all this.’ Bobby gestures to Jimmy and beyond to the sky and the sea. ‘It’s not so bad, is it, doll?’

The sun is beating down on the terrace, the unbroken blue of the sky is at odds with my restlessness. Across the ravine I can hear the children in the playground of the Down School chanting their alpha-beta.

I lower my voice because I don’t want Jimmy to overhear. He and Marty have started a new game. Double or quits. ‘You’re right, Bobby, maybe it’s enough to live somewhere beautiful with someone who is talented. But yesterday, talking to Marianne, and knowing what we do of Axel’s behaviour, well, I don’t know. And now Charmian’s to be exposed as an adulteress by George! Did I tell you that?’

Bobby starts to laugh. ‘Those two women don’t make being a muse look at all amusing, do they?’ And I give him an exasperated kick.

‘Anyway, Charmian’s a man-eater, you can see it in her eyes,’ he says, returning my pretend-kick with a pinch.

I rub my arm. Bobby’s pinches are always less playful than perhaps he intends. I skitter on, eyes smarting.

‘I know you don’t like me talking about all this, but it makes me scared that we didn’t really know Mum, and sometimes I can’t help getting this wobbly feeling, do you know what I mean?’

He grimaces and shakes his head. I start to wish I could find the brakes.

‘It’s like that half-fledged starling we once brought home from Kensington Gardens. Do you remember?’ He sighs, still shaking his head. ‘You and just about everyone else on this island, you’re all flying.’ I gesture to the easels, the boxes of paints, the jars of brushes. ‘I don’t even write anything much any more. I’ve no idea what I should do or if I’ll ever be any good, and sometimes I just wish Mum was here…’

My eyes start to sting. ‘And the starling was always going to die because, for all the worms and whatnot we found, and the teat pipette, only its mother could teach it to fly.’

Bobby is silent. I watch the shadows return to his face and regret spoiling our day. Eventually he stands up and growls at me, ‘I don’t know why you worry. We’re all going up in a giant mushroom cloud anyway,’ and lumbers inside for a beer.

I head down to Johnny Lulu’s for more beer because I happen to know Jimmy drank the last one. It’s the least I can do after snivelling like that. Besides, it’s my turn to cook and Charmian’s friend Creon has promised me a salami. I’m getting good at ferreting out the island’s secret stashes of treats, especially since Jimmy’s been so inspired and it’s so often my turn to sort out a meal.

An old grapevine tumbles over a wall to the street, its leaves young and tender, just begging to be wrapped around meat and spices for dolmades, if only I knew how. Axel and Patricia come towards me, hand in hand, and I take the butcher’s alley, find a shadow and flatten myself to the wall. Patricia’s hair is wet and drips on to the front of her shirt. A tabby cat winds around my shins and I am glad to have an excuse to duck down and stroke it while keeping them in sight.

Patricia is tiny, with a powerful walk. She gesticulates with her free hand, the wet parts of her shirt cling and she isn’t wearing a bra. Axel cleaves so close to her you wouldn’t get a fishing line between them. They look lively together, their conversation urgent.

Patricia stops him just short of the alley. He turns and gathers her hair into a wet bunch.

‘This is where we part company,’ she says and he looks at her for what feels to me an excruciatingly long time. He does not relinquish her hair. She is large-eyed as a child.

He winds the rope of hair around his hand as he speaks. ‘You have no idea how my little wife is torturing me…’ I strain to hear what he’s saying. ‘Tonight she cooks fårikål . Her big black cauldron of mutton and cabbage has been simmering all day on the charcoal. She knows it’s my favourite dish. Every Norwegian man is beckoned by the sorcery in that vapour but tonight I shall hold my nose.’