Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

If I hadn’t witnessed what I had with Axel and Patricia, she would have had me fooled with her carefully choreographed happiness. ‘Baby-bun-cheeks will be content there for a while just cooing at his clever pappa’s mobile. Will you take a little wine with me? I have a jug right here.’

We drink our wine on the terrace where yellow marguerites run crazy between the stones. She has a large ornate rocking chair with a rope that runs through the door of the house and she shows us how clever Axel has tied the other end to the crib.

‘I can sit here at night with my glass of wine and look at the stars and just rock, rock, rock our baby to sleep.’ She is smiling, closing her eyes, as one overcome with ecstasy. Charmian shoots me an anguished look.

We sip our wine. We look down over the harbour, at the colourful boats and the sugar-cube houses spilling up the hills, the windmill at the crest of the cliff, the domes and spires of the many churches, the crosses on the peaks. Marianne scoops up the cat and nuzzles it as though she can’t bear not to be cuddling something. She nods towards the house.

‘As you can see, Axel’s not here. He’s once again at the boatyard. Yet another thing he needs to do for his beloved boat instead of getting on with writing his book.’

This time Marianne catches what is passing between Charmian’s eyes and mine. ‘ Pfft ,’ she says, waving a hand. ‘That Patricia is leaving the island tomorrow. Going back to the States.’

Good riddance! I want to cry but Marianne lowers her eyes and turns to Charmian. ‘I went to see her at Fidel’s place this morning.’ Her voice is barely more than a whisper. ‘I don’t know why she would choose to live in that stinking tip anyway; everything’s falling down, rotting food, Fidel’s horrible paintings propped up everywhere you look, and all the island’s sickest cats going there to breed. Patricia is covered in flea bites.’ Marianne lifts a leg as though checking she isn’t similarly afflicted. Her tan is uniform and golden, her legs smooth and hairless.

‘I didn’t see her room; Patricia and Fidel were wild not to let me up there. But I’d come all that way over the rocks with the baby carriage so, anyway…’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘The cup she gave me was all caked and cracked around the rim. All the time I was there she did her best not to look at my son. Fidel wouldn’t leave us alone, put his dirty finger in the baby’s mouth. No matter. I didn’t know how brave I’d be face to face so I’d brought a letter and I left it in an envelope on the table. She came running after me, caught up at the windmill. She had my letter, unopened, and when I wouldn’t take it back she started to cry. That’s when she told me she was leaving. She has an arts scholarship at Chicago to get back for.’ Marianne buries her face in the cat’s fur. Charmian grimaces at me as baby Axel’s cries summon his mother indoors with the cat in her arms.

The studio dances with shadows as Charmian puts a match to a lamp and leads me to the bookcase. Beside George’s dusty globe, a dog-eared paperback lies waiting, tan with black lettering. The Second Sex in curly type that makes the S ’s look like serpents.

‘One is not born but is made a woman and it is high time that we break those bonds and learn to soar, to create for ourselves a world of free choices, and though a wide-open vista can be terrifying it is also more thrilling than plodding on along the worn tracks in a man’s world.’ Charmian is lecturing me as she hands me the book but adds with a snort, ‘Which is, I suppose, all very well if you’re de Beauvoir and Sartre and don’t have children’s feelings to consider.’

She’s led me up here just for this book. It’s vital reading, she says, though I suspect she mostly wanted to get away from George who has started ranting below.

I’m still here, long after the final farewells of the other dinner guests, helping to put a dent in the clearing-up. Shane, Martin and Booli all scarpered to their rooms when the night was still young and not yet slurring, and around two in the morning the others staggered out, with the exception of Jimmy who is still busy baiting George. A brandied disagreement about Kafka escalated to include Dostoevsky, Rilke and Robbe-Grillet. ‘Pissants!’ George was spluttering as Charmian pulled me away.

I recognise the book she’s handing me. It’s the one she hurled at me before. There’s a wobble to her voice as I take it. ‘If I had an eighteen-year-old daughter I would want her to read this,’ she says. ‘Your generation has many more choices than mine. I feel certain that Connie would have wanted her daughter to flourish in a system that doesn’t assume that female “otherness” makes her only of use in service to the real deal that is a bloody man. I’m pretty sure she read it, actually.’

The book is dismayingly fat. I’m still waiting to be seduced by Henry Miller within the forbidden green covers of Jimmy’s treasured Olympia editions. I’m shamefully only on the first volume and Jimmy is insisting I read all three.

Charmian can sense my resistance and changes tack. ‘George hates it. He thinks de Beauvoir’s a prophet of a change in values that is bogus and can therefore only be destructive. But it seems utopian to me. Shared ideas and history and commitment with the added spice of lovers…’

The flame of the lamp dances in her eyes. ‘Oh dear, too much vino. I don’t know why I’m rambling on, and hell it’s all very well for Simone and Jean-Paul to let it all hang out and spill the beans with no children left crying.’

As though on cue we hear a baby in the street. Someone’s banging on the door; the baby’s got a good pair of lungs. Charmian snatches up the lamp and we fly down to the hall to find George taking Axel Joachim while Marianne looks up at us, ashen-faced and smeary with mascara. The white blouse she was wearing earlier is now spattered and stained. She speaks in gasping sobs.

‘My husband’s gone mad. He threw this.’ She points to her shirt. ‘It’s the dinner I cooked for him.’

‘Oh Marianne, it can’t go on like this,’ Charmian says, thrusting the lamp at me.

Marianne is shaking. ‘I told him to leave me alone and be with his American brainbox and that made him go mad.’ There’s blood on her feet. ‘He found out about the letter I wrote to Patricia and now he’s smashing the house up, all the windows, everything. I had to get away. I thought he might hurt the baby. I have to get back before he hurts himself.’

Her knees are starting to buckle and Charmian guides her to the couch. George walks back and forth shushing Axel Joachim as his mother struggles to calm down. ‘It should be simple. A man lives with his wife and together they make a good life for their baby.’

Charmian brings a bowl of water with rags and disinfectant, squats at her feet.

‘Axel says I think like a farmer,’ Marianne wails, and fresh tears run down her face as Charmian tweezes splinters of glass from her feet.

Jimmy takes my arm, steers me away. ‘Time to be going,’ he says.

As we are released into the night Charmian is persuading Marianne to let her make up the divan and silencing her protests that Axel might kill himself. Jimmy puts his arms around me, holds me tight. I rest my head on his chest as we stand catching our breath, in the dark shadows beneath Charmian’s bougainvillea.

Max’s barking alerts us; a figure is lurching our way. Jimmy holds me tighter when we see it’s Axel and he might be an ogre for how we shrink against the wall as he hammers his fists on the door. George stands above him, the lamp swinging, making a monster of his shadow.

George blocks the way. ‘Go home, Axel. You’ve terrorised your wife and child enough already tonight. And for God’s sake, man, your hands are bleeding.’