Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

I shook my head. ‘Oh, Marianne, I’m sorry.’

She fought her tears, attempted a smile. ‘It’s OK. Seeing you like this has made me remember how sweet it used to be. Too bad. He’s found himself a nice Jewish mare now…’ She checked herself, apologised for sounding bitter. ‘The last time he was here he gave me such a bad shock.’

She was pulling a small gold key that she wore around her neck back and forth along its chain while she spoke. A present from Leonard. The key to his heart, she told me with a sniff.

‘What sort of shock?’ I prompted.

‘He’d already had that woman in our house, but hey, who was I to complain about that? But that day it was like looking into the face of a ghost,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen him wrecked many times over the years, exhausted, empty, hallucinating. It was all of that but he’s never scared me before. When he walked off the boat I looked into his eyes and they were dead as the fish in that crate over there,’ she said, and threw her hands to her mouth. ‘Forgive me going on. We all got a bit tipsy this morning because of the terrible news. It’s George who is dead, poor soul,’ and the tears that had been wobbling spilled from her eyes.

‘George Johnston?’ It was absurd; surely he’d be along at any moment. I looked across the alley to Katsikas, longing for ten years to have fallen away, expecting him to be there, throwing down a brandy and roaring with laughter at his own story, making a toast, a cheque in the mail more potent than anything he could get at the pharmacy, his eyes tender with love. Calling her ‘Cliftie’. Chinking his glass to hers.

But Marianne was nodding and dabbing her eyes. ‘The TB finally did for him,’ she said. ‘We’ve been here since Lily got the call. I suppose it’s only right we got drunk in his memory.’

I thought of his swagger, his gunslinger’s grin. ‘Oh God. Poor Charmian. Has anyone spoken to her?’

Marianne blanched. Held up her hands. ‘Hey. You mean, you don’t know?’ Her mouth fell open.

I shook my head. ‘What?’

She picked up the bottle and refilled my glass. ‘Drink,’ she said.

‘Oh God, what?’

Again she gestured for me to drink. I took a gulp.

‘Charmian’s dead,’ she said. ‘She killed herself last summer.’

There was the hotel, the front desk, checking in, rickety stairs to my room. I had a glass of water in my hands. The room was sweltering. I could smell my own sweat. I cranked open the shutters to the balcony, threw myself on to the bed and let the great torrent of disbelief wash over me.

I tried to picture it, forced myself to make it real. Charmian, menopausal, lonely and despairing, George’s hatred too much to bear. Drunk, naturally. A bottle on the table, the glass in her hand half-empty. I could imagine her laughing bleakly while she wrote out the Keats. They were George’s sleeping pills, Marianne told me. A full prescription and the doctor said she had ceased without pain on the stroke of midnight, just as she promised him she would in her suicide note.

I unpacked my holdall, placed a picture of my son beside my bed, stared at it for I don’t know how long. I was thinking about the last time I’d seen her, calling her back to me on the pavement outside the Star and Garter and the rain that was starting to fall. Not many women could endure the pain of losing a child, she told me as we stood, drunk and unsteady, about to embrace for the final time. Did she imagine the same wasn’t true the other way around? It was hard to believe she’d inflict such unendurable pain upon her children. I went down the hall to splash my face with water, overcome with sudden rage and a need to escape.

There were throngs of tourists; the shops selling jewellery, sandals, sponges; the smell of frying fish too much for my stomach. My feet found their own way to Voulgaris Street and up the steps towards my old house, drawn on by a horrified fascination at just how painful I could make this. I was out of breath as I rounded the final twist, and there it was, with its windows shuttered and barred, the tips of almond trees just visible above the terrace wall. My heart was pounding. It seemed impossible that I had once run up and down these steps several times a day. I turned and looked across the familiar view, vandalised now by criss-crossing lines of wires scrawling all the way from the port, jumping out at me like graffiti. I sat down and put my face in my hands. There was cat shit all the way up the steps. I could hear buzzing flies and noticed the crucified remains of a rat among the roots of a fig tree, discarded cans in the dusty oleander bushes.

I remembered now. It was Marianne walked me back to the hotel, dealt with Sofia on the front desk, saw me to my room, poured me the water. She sat me down, like a dumbfounded child, on the edge of the bed while she knelt and unlaced my plimsolls. She told me Charmian’s suicide had been on the eve of publication of George’s new novel. Once again he had shamed her but this time he’d lain the blame for his oncoming death from tuberculosis on the stress of loving her.

‘It got very ugly between them here at the end; it seems like none of the marriages can survive Hydra,’ Marianne said. ‘To tell you the truth, the whole island couldn’t wait to see the back of the Johnstons. George was a skeleton, Charmian told anyone who would listen that he wouldn’t fuck her any more, for a long time she was madly in love with my friend Tony. They were drunk all the time, there were public fights, Leonard and Demetri used to have to carry George home.’ She showed me a scar, a small crescent above her top lip. ‘This is from when he threw a bowl of yoghurt at Charmian and a shard bounced up and cut my face.

‘They stayed too long,’ she said and I sat there numbly while she told me what she knew of the children. Martin wrote for a newspaper in Sydney. Can you believe Shane’s married? Jason was living in the countryside with his cousins. That a light as bright as Charmian could snuff itself out seemed impossible. Marianne left me crying, said she’d see me on the beach. As soon as she was gone I started to laugh. It seemed like the bleakest cosmic joke that I should hear of Charmian’s death as a sort of postscript to George’s, and on the day I finally made it back to the island of my dreams.

I was a fool to think of returning. The sun was beating and I needed water but, slave to an impulse a decade out of date, I kept climbing. The steps wound on, past ruins with rickety scaffolding, drilling and hammering, strings of donkeys loaded with pallets of bricks; thirst turning the spit in my mouth to paste.

I kept going, beyond the gorge to the top road where the ruins of Ghikas’s house crowned the hill, blackened arches like Gothic aqueducts across choppy charred timbers and collapsed floors. The path was peppered with black grains; burnt shutters still lay among the broken-down terracing and scorched scrub.

I walked straight past, like it would be bad luck to linger. I remembered with a shiver Leonard telling me that he had cursed the place.

There was nobody about; far below me the sea was as blue as enamel, the sun low enough in the sky to turn the bare boulders bronze. It lit the barley stubble of my valley, made gold-dust of the air. Donkeys threw long shadows among the scrub of its far terraces and the cockerels called as I settled on my familiar ridge. A muleteer came clattering, all hooves, dust and proud machismo, whiskers and waistcoat. A pair of curly-horned rams roped, one either side of his saddle, were bellowing, sheepdog yipping and mule trumpeting in protest. Once the hullaballoo faded, the silence came on all the greater for the violence of its interruption. I watched tiny jewelled beetles in the dust at my feet. I let myself weep about the end of my marriage, and I gulped the scented air.