Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

I nodded to the bartender: big ones please. Visions of my mother were pooling behind my eyes. She was kneeling at my father’s feet, scrubbing congealed casserole from the floor. She was shielding me from the man I’d seen in the mirror. We were running at night along a gnarly path through woods. Her hands were shaking as she presented my father with her accounts, a twisted seam in her stocking, sherry on her breath.

My mother reasserts herself, stands from the floor. She drives her secret car, meets her good doctor in the woods.

‘It was our mate Peter Finch she was really out to get that night,’ Charmian was saying. ‘It was Finchy brought Joe L. to cocktails, and boom. “Joe L.” to distinguish him from Finchy’s other friend who was “Joe O.”, a playwright.’

I plagued her for details. ‘So this was the “chance” you believed she still had when you wrote to her?’ I said and she nodded.

‘Why didn’t she take it? Why did she stay with our father if she loved this other man?’

Again Charmian tried to make sense of her watch. ‘Connie believed, with some justification I think, that your dad would have had her declared an unfit mother by the courts if she ran off. She couldn’t bear the thought of giving you up.’

We were out of time. ‘I’m sorry to leave you so rattled but I think my last direct train’s on the hour. I must go,’ she said, as we rose unsteadily to our feet. ‘I’ll tell you everything I remember when you come to the farm.’

By the time we went our separate ways it had started to drizzle. I returned, with my head in a spin, to Nina and her banners and Charmian to her train. ‘To give up a child is a pain that not many women can endure,’ she said as we parted. That has stuck with me, agonising to think of now.

That was the last time I ever saw her. I watched the lovely suede coat become speckled with rain. I regret that I never did visit her at Charity Farm, but I had other things on my mind – not least, the beginnings of my son and an uncertain marriage to his father.

It took me ten years to return to the island. I came alone, my son with his father, our first trial separation, the beginning of our end. I boarded the ferry at Piraeus, armed with a bundle of notebooks, longing for Hydra’s big shoulders and wishing for the moon.

In the taxi from the airport, a Leonard Cohen song came on the radio. ‘Bird on the Wire’. I took it as a blessing, wondered if by any chance he’d be there despite the military junta, if his midnight choirs of fishermen would still be wending their way in three-part harmony through the lanes. I knew from something I’d read in the newspaper that in his way he had failed to be true to Marianne but perhaps she would still be there waiting.

I’d lost touch with everyone, moving around as much as I did, didn’t have a clue if anyone I knew would be around. I had mentally prepared myself for the absence of George and Charmian as they’d finally said goodbye to Hydra and been back in Australia for five or six years by then. He got his bestseller, his television series, his important literary awards. The thought that another family would be living in the house by the well was so disturbing I drank several shots of ouzo on the crossing to steady my guts. The last I heard from Charmian, she told me she was writing a weekly newspaper essay that had a wide readership and an impossible mailbag. After that we lost touch. I hadn’t wanted to add to its weight.

There were military police on the ferry, the only sign that Greece was now ruled by the Colonels, but they took their coffees at the bar, lolling and smiling with the tourists.

The Nereida was crowded with memories: Jimmy, my brother, Trudy, Jean-Claude Maurice, jostling one after the other through my ouzo-clouded mind. I fell into a stupor, a welcome relief after many nights of sleepless warfare with my husband, woke with the bells of Poros, someone shouting dockside. I climbed to the top deck where the diesel fumes were as strong as I remembered.

The month was July and I was glad of my sunglasses, could feel the sting of sun and salt on my bare arms. I was growing ever more exhilarated, and fearful, my stomach lurching as the island’s first rocky shoulder swept into view. I clung to the rail, suspended between the dazzle of sea and unbroken blue sky. The boat turned and there it was! Hey presto, the sudden flourish, conjured from bare rock by the gods and lit by the sun. A theatre for dreamers. The trick worked every time. The white houses, the crescent harbour: it took a moment to believe it was real. My heart lifted and I wished for wings so that I might fly the rest of the way.

I went soaring for the mountains of bold stone, for the town they held in their lap. My eighteen-year-old self was still there, and I let my eyes trace her footsteps through the pines to the monastery and on, climbing to the peak of Mount Eros, with the cold sweat of night on her skin and Charmian’s deafening silence. I drifted over the hills, silver with olive groves heading for the groove between the rocks of her favourite valley, looked for the grand house of the artist Ghikas to get my bearings and found in its place a burnt-out wreck. What on earth had happened? Apart from Ghikas’s blackened arches, all was as I remembered. Spires, cupolas, windmills, the beautiful ruins, sun and sea spangling the grey stone of formal mansions with gold coins, the best seats in the house. I could see people in the wings, at the naval school and on the rocks at Spilia, splashing and diving, bright caiques, cannons lined up along the walls. I watched a boy leap from the lip of the cave and longed for my son.

I bounded down the steps with my holdall as the port drew close, impatient to leap ashore. The fishing boats waited at the mole, flags were flying at the quay, blue and white pennants looping the harbour front, café tables, awnings, bells clamouring, donkeys, men with wooden carts. I drank it in, almost drowned in it.

I wanted to be the first to set foot on the island, as I had ten years before, but two military policemen held me back, told me to start a line. One of them took out a clipboard and asked me for my name, which spoilt the moment.

I made it down the gangplank on shaking legs, almost sick with stage fright. New dramas were unfolding around me in several languages: family reunions, groups of backpackers greeting one another; one particular boy kissing his girl brought on a wave of nostalgia and loneliness so powerful I almost cried out. The policemen were taking everyone’s names, the donkey-boys jostling, the smell of donkey shit, the flagstones beneath my feet not gleaming as pink as I remembered. A gang of blond ragamuffins came flying past, a boy pursued by two little girls and a younger tot, all brandishing wooden swords. They were shouting and clanking, strung around with battle-dress made from flattened tin cans. The blondest boy, who looked only a little older than my son, swerved and crashed against the picket fence to get away from the others. One of the policemen spun around to admonish him but he was a fleet-footed sprite and was off, brown limbs flying. The other children had run out of steam, their armour clanking, the smallest boy calling his name. ‘Axel! Stop! Wait for us! Axel!’

I kept my eyes fixed on the child in his glinting carapace. He doubled back through the marketplace and, panting, joined a queue for ice cream halfway along the waterfront. I was out of breath. The taste of the creamy foulis flavour that Costas used to make came to my mouth but, instead of Costas’s wooden handcart, the ice cream was from a humming freezer plugged into what had been the chandler’s and now sold cigarettes and fading postcards.

The boy had his back to me, peering with one of the girls through the misted glass top. I dropped my bag, found my breath. He turned around when I said his name, and beneath the blond mop he had an anxious little face, but he was beautifully, luminously, unmistakably, her son.