Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

Axel lunges, tries to barge past, but George shoulders him so hard he half-falls and half-stumbles down the stone steps. ‘Go home, you great galah, and put some disinfectant on your cuts and think about your bloody idiocy while you do it. I hope it bloody stings.’ Upstairs the baby is awake and crying again.

I met Dinos for the first time that night. Charmian had told me about him while we made the dolmades. In fact it was Saint Constantinos’s name day and the dinner was in his honour. Constantinos: Dinos. Handsome, she said. The scion of a sponge-merchant family, he brings a bag of good Aegina clay and takes it to his kiln high up on Episkopi and barely comes down to the port all summer. She says his pots are good and that she likes him very much.

As well as Dinos, who was indeed handsome, Patrick and Nancy, Chuck and Gordon, a playwright called Kenneth, his wife Janis and sleepy child, pregnant Angela and her husband David, who was some sort of aristocrat but looked like a bum, a Californian couple called Demetri and Carolyn, a bumptious New Zealander called Bim who was writing a novel, and Robyn his pallid wife. There was plenty of wine, Jimmy and I made to feel like honorary members of the true foreign colony when we declared that we intended to stay on. ‘Oh, I don’t like that word “colony”,’ Charmian said. ‘But I don’t know what else to call it.’

‘Ah, when you’ve lived on Hydra you can’t live anywhere else…’ Kenneth said.

‘Yeah. Including Hydra,’ George and he chorused. George had left his bad mood upstairs with his typewriter. He was loquacious, spoke more than anyone.

I find I can write very little about any of it in my notebook. Any pleasures of the evening have been blotched by Marianne’s tears. The morning comes too soon, poisoned by my hangover. Maybe it’s true, what Charmian says about me so easily accepting the role of drudge, serving the talents of others. I am Cinderella-ed in soot from the charcoal range, ragged from lugging stuff up and down the steps. The lavatory is stinking because no one else has bought the right chemical, no one but me ever seems to remember to refill the slosh buckets or deal with the malodorous bin. It’s overflowing as usual. We’re almost out of kerosene, the Buta needs changing over. Jimmy is going out fishing again tonight and needs to sleep in.

I stomp upstairs and, though I know he’ll give me hell for it, throw open the door to Bobby’s room with a great rattle and immediately regret it. The shutters are closed but there’s no mistaking Janey and Edie on the bed platform. They are naked, facing each other even in sleep, entwined. Bobby is alone on a narrow mattress by the window, his hands folded behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Canvases are propped along the walls; there’s the stench of unwashed clothes, stale smoke, turpentine. Bobby turns to look at me from the bare ticking. Says nothing as I back away.

The ice is already sweating at the foot of the steps. I tie our bit of sacking and rope it into position. The wet hessian is unpleasant on my back and I haul it up the hill with every cock on the island crowing, every builder’s hammer hammering and the cicadas singing only ugly songs, like they’re frying in hot fat.

Walking bent over makes it easier to climb the steps but my mouth is filling with acid drool. I spin around, willing myself not to vomit, and look for the cure beyond the jagged orange geometry of roof and wall, but the vastness of the sea’s glitter hurts my eyes and the bruise-coloured folds of the mainland look like they’re made out of lumps of my brother’s old plasticine. I think of him looking at me from the mattress, his eyes without light. I reshoulder the ice. The weight of his misery almost makes me buckle.

Of course, Edie and Janey have now joined the ranks of those who must be left to sleep. Beauty sleep, I think, with the tide of bitter water rising once more. On this island of painters, how come not a single person ever asks me to sit for them? Edie and Janey are in constant demand up at the art school, earning a few drachmas, sometimes posing late into the night. Disrobing and lying around comes naturally as breathing to the pair of them. I swallow hard, tell myself I only care that they still do their share of the tasks. The church bells are too loud, discordant, like children banging wooden spoons on saucepans; the ice a clammy cold burden.

There’s no sign of Bobby or the girls when I get back. Jimmy has lit the Primus and is waiting for the coffee to boil. He’s absently walking up and down in his shorts and yellow T-shirt, biting into an apple and reading Charmian’s Simone de Beauvoir book. He puts the book down when he sees me, holds the apple between his strong teeth and unropes me from the ice. He soaks some pieces of sponge and leads me outside to the shadiest part of the terrace. ‘Poor baby,’ he says as he lowers me to the mats. He presses the icy water to my hot face, shushes me.

‘Bobby’s OK,’ he says. ‘Give him time. At least there’s plenty of that here.’

He fetches hot coffee sweetened with NouNou and peels me some oranges. We talk about Marianne; it feels vital that I hear him condemn Axel, and he duly agrees, but says he’s read Axel’s book about the Sahara and it’s quite possible the man is a genius. ‘She’ll be all right, pretty woman like that,’ he says, and winks and taps his nose as though he knows something I don’t.

All this kindness just makes it worse to think about Bobby upstairs, so miserable alone on that mattress, and no mother to run to. Jimmy takes my head into his lap and strokes the hair from my temples.

Sad thoughts wash over me. I think of the first time I saw Marianne, her white shawl and baby, a radiant Madonna with her dashing husband at the tiller, the red and white boat. I replay my visit to her house with Charmian. Marianne on her hands and knees, making the stones and wires of Axel’s mobile spin and bob, ‘Clever pappa,’ the rope that he’d tied between her rocking chair and the cradle, a bowl of radishes that lay waiting, each one carved into a rose. I see her bleeding feet, her ruined blouse, Axel kissing Patricia. For once Jimmy is content to sit still. I open my eyes and look up at him. The sun is filtered through the almond tree and his eyes glint as gold as my mother’s eighteen-carat wedding ring. ‘Tell me you’ll never be cruel,’ I say and he sits there and rakes back my hair until I fall asleep.

I am cured by my sleep beneath the old almond tree and the sweet slices of melon that Jimmy brings when I wake. The songs of the cicadas seem romantic once again. The promise of the afternoon, just the two of us on the beach at Plakes, is restorative, as is aspirin. It’s as though the morning has broken anew as we pack our bathing suits and towels into my basket.

The ferry is due in half an hour. Jimmy is expecting a letter from a friend of a friend of a literary agent and if he’s lucky a cheque from his mother. I still live in hope of some word from my father.

‘You’ll have to write to him, to ask permission to marry me,’ I say, as we smooch to the radio.

‘I’d better find out what sort of a dowry he’s offering first.’ Jimmy tickles my ear and I push away the thought that Mum’s post-office savings won’t last forever as Brenda Lee sings of sweet nothin’s.

The blazing bougainvillea, the whitewash, the noonday sun. It’s too much for our eyes. I’ve filched Edie’s Jackie Kennedy sunglasses; Jimmy looks like Jean-Paul Belmondo in his Wayfarers.

We arrive at Katsikas hand in hand, order sardines. ‘Good morning, dewy youths,’ Charmian says with a throaty chuckle and I feel bad that I let Jimmy talk me out of The Second Sex . Instead he’s given me his collection of Sartre’s stories. ‘He’s the better writer.’ Intimacy has a vampish woman on the cover but at least it’s pleasingly slim.