Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

The room is jumping with shadows and thick with incense. Pushed to the wall is a long table where monastery candles drip into the eye sockets of goat skulls, arranged between plates of food and jugs of wine. Incense burns from nose cavities, red roses bloom along each chalky jaw, mounds of jellies in poisonous reds and greens pulsate and glimmer; there are bowls of little fried squid, trays of tiny dolmades, lamb chops, olives stuffed with anchovies, baskets of bread, and in a great heap at the centre a pyramid of honey cakes sprinkled with candied rose petals. Bobby dives in, sloshes wine to our beakers. At the piano, the ex-paratrooper Charlie Heck starts up a new tune.

Out of the shadows springs a near-naked Jean-Claude Maurice in a paisley loincloth, his bare chest and legs streaked with gold paint, waving a fennel staff in his hand.

‘Look out, it’s Dionysus,’ Jimmy says.

‘More like a rutting old stag,’ Bobby scoffs and I join in their laughter but in truth I can’t pull my eyes from Jean-Claude. Is it true that Charmian had an affair with him? Jean-Claude’s gold paint highlights his muscles. He holds the fennel staff between his white teeth as he dances.

Marty – or Orion, as he insists we call him tonight – breaks in with a bellow. The colossal Texan holds up a dagger and shield, his belt studded with stars. Carl and Frank in bed-sheet togas run in with torches flaming and Charlie strikes up the ‘Happy Birthday’ tune on the piano as the birthday girl makes her entrance.

You would never guess that Trudy’s dress has been made from a faded old awning. From a wide sash the skirt sticks out in stiff pink layers; she sports a large rosette at one shoulder and looks ready to present to the Queen.

We sing to her and while Trudy does a twirl in her debutante gown, her handmaidens stand smirking, shamelessly lit by stolen thunder. They are swathed in nothing more substantial than old fishing nets and glitter. Janey has a modesty slip but Edie has evidently decided to do without. The fishing net gathers and falls in loops and folds; I guess it’s more revealing than even she intended. A few silver fish made of cigarette foils glint from the tips of Edie’s breasts as someone leaps forward to take a picture with a flashgun.

Bobby is scowling. He catches me looking at him and offers me a squid from his plate. It looks like a glistening Medusa beneath its crispy topknot but I’m hungry since the row with Charmian put me off eating earlier. I bite into it and gulp at my wine while Edie starts to move to the music. A gramophone twangs out rock and roll from the windowsill and Trudy’s skirts twirl as Jean-Claude spins her across the floor, though I guess most of us aren’t looking at Trudy at all but at Edie who is swaying her arms in the perfumed air and setting the little fish dancing.

Like a man in a trance with his eyes trained upon her, Leonard breaks away from a group in the corner. Bobby’s hand tightens around his beaker as, with a few deft dance steps, he comes towards her. Leonard’s shirt is open a couple more buttons than usual, but other than that he doesn’t appear to have dressed up.

The look on Bobby’s face I know of old and my heart starts to thump as his knuckles whiten. I whisper to Jimmy, ‘I think Bobby’s about to blow,’ and I scoot right up to Leonard whose hand is already on Edie’s shoulder. He turns and I guess he’s good at reading messages in faces.

He glances at Bobby, nods, and shuffles a step towards me. ‘Take my hand,’ he says, and his is a good hand to hold.

We jive a bit and dance the Madison and he leads me across the floor in a gentlemanly way and then everyone’s doing the twist because it goes like this and the party spills out to the loggia. We rest our drinks on the carved marble balustrades and thank our lucky stars.

The fat moon gloats in the black glass of the harbour. Soon it will be time for Jimmy to run home and change into something more suitable for fishing. I’m only half-listening to him. He and Leonard and Göran are discussing love poetry but my attention has wandered. Marianne stands alone, filling her glass from a jug of wine. She downs first one and then a second glass. I can see her hand shaking as she pours a third.

She and Axel arrived late to the party, he in a full-length djellaba, she in her orange dress with some sort of jewel swinging at her forehead. I wanted to stop dancing and talk to her, I thought she might be able to explain why Charmian had lost her temper with me, but then it seemed that almost immediately she and Axel were having a shoving-each-other sort of a row and everyone was giving them a wide berth. Now she couldn’t look lonelier, standing at the balustrade looking out across the gulf.

Leonard hasn’t noticed Marianne yet. He’s too busy needling Jimmy, asking why he’s never written me a poem. ‘Women! Any woman acquaintance is worth a poem. Think about it: you find a girl, think she is exciting, but can’t seem to express yourself properly. The easiest way is to write your feelings down on paper.’

A sob sounds from across the arcade and he turns. Like a frightened cat, Marianne’s found the only dark space and is crouched with her face in her hands among a stack of easels.

Leonard pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and holds it out to her. He’s gentle and kind as he coaxes her from the shadows. He removes the glass from her hand and puts it down and remarkably soon has her tears turn to laughter as he dabs at her face. He takes her hand and as they pass I see that the diadem at her forehead is made out of the shell of a crab and sea glass and wire. He puts his jacket across her shoulders. ‘Come on, Marianne,’ he says and bids us all goodnight.

Thanks to Leonard, Jimmy performs trite poetry to me all the way home and back down to the harbour at Kamini. ‘Erica, I cherish her, I can’t help but stare at her…’ is about the level of it. It makes me happy enough as we goose each other up and down the twisting steps and through the moonlit alleys. He starts singing the song that had been on the radio but he switches the words so it’s: ‘You’ll never find anyone else like me for you,’ and just then I notice an undarned hole in the elbow of his blue Guernsey sweater and it comes to me like a blessing and a curse that this is likely to be true.

All is quiet at the harbour, not even the soul of a fisherman. We wander up the mole to confirm that Panayiotis’s fishing boat hasn’t set out without him, but there it is, snug with ropes and nets, bobbing sleepily at its moorings.

Jimmy tells me that as soon as he has money he will buy us our own boat and paint it pea-green. ‘Before we set sail I’d better have another go at mending your sweater then,’ I say as we wander back to the port. ‘You’re going to need it for winters here.’ And I think of the sea raging all around and imagine the glow from the charcoal pan in our cave of a bedroom.

We can hear music from the tannoys inside Lagoudera. Jimmy says we’ll stop for a drink. The bar has recently been opened and we’ve been only once, put off by the smart weekenders from Athens and the people from yachts who don’t seem to mind paying four times normal prices. There’s something rowdy going on, by the sound of it, but we’re distracted by four bodies lined up at the edge of the harbour. From a distance they might be corpses.

There they lie with the kerbstones for pillows, Leonard and Marianne and Axel and Patricia, all in a row, close as sardines. It isn’t until we hear Leonard’s voice that we realise they are stargazing. Leonard is tracing a constellation with his fingertip. ‘So small between the stars, so large against the sky,’ he says. Marianne’s crab-shell jewel is gone from her forehead, leaving a dent; her knees are bent so the orange dress falls away from her thighs. She lies sandwiched between Leonard and Axel and though we hurry and try not to stare I can tell that Axel’s body veers from his wife and like a plant seeking light to Patricia at his other side.