Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

‘Dead, and all by their own hands,’ Marianne was saying and I told her how years before, in London, my mother had suspected Charmian might kill herself and had confiscated her sleeping pills.

‘Shane and now Martin, it’s too much. I think the children paid the price for our freedom, really I do,’ Marianne said as we started walking back through the lanes. I thought about the relatively boring safety of my own childhood and the sacrifice my mother made to provide it. I had met her lover, the good doctor Joe Leitz, by then. His club had dim lighting, strong whisky macs, low-slung leather furniture. I made up my face and hair to look like her, made him clutch at his heart when I entered the room. His pass was gallant and, mortifyingly, exactly what I had hoped for.

Marianne was talking about Axel Joachim. ‘You remember, he was such a sensitive child, so intelligent; maybe I should have given him a more stable upbringing.’ Her voice was quiet and miserable. She reached for my hand. ‘You know, since his relapse last year, the doctors say he will never live a normal life.’

There were rumours. I had hoped with all my heart they weren’t true. I didn’t want her to think people had been talking behind her back.

Her shoulders had become hunched with the years, her breathing wheezy. She retreated inside her shawl. ‘He was desperately unhappy at every school I sent him to. After Summerhill, New York and then Switzerland, he couldn’t fit in anywhere, so when he was fifteen I let his father take him travelling to India. I should never have let him go. I mean, his father was almost a stranger to him. I wasn’t there to protect him when crazy, idiot Axel gave him LSD…’

‘Oh, Marianne, I’m sorry…’

‘And now our special boy has been in one clinic or another for most of his life. I think every parent should know about this, Erica,’ she said and her eyes were pleading. ‘You should write this for the newspaper. For some fragile souls just one trip can turn out to be a cul-de-sac in hell.’

I thought of Axel Joachim, the day I left my son at her house, wondered if he hadn’t already been on the path. The girl Victoria had been rather bossy and, having despatched my son with the coffee, told me it was best if I went away and fetched him around sundown, when there was a chance Marianne might be back.

I left a copy of The Female Eunuch I’d brought as a present for Marianne. I’ve no idea if she read it because I managed to avoid her for the rest of that summer.

Marianne still hadn’t returned when Dinos and I came back for my son. Victoria seemed a little dazed and I think it was only the sight of us standing there reminded her there were kids in the house.

‘You know, I didn’t come to Greece to be Marianne’s babysitter. It’s like she has some sort of tunnel vision. She doesn’t see her son, or even his need for food. Her sights are set only on this French photographer she chases on his merry cha-cha around the island.’

I found my son with Axel Joachim in his den on the top floor. The air was thick with dope, the shutters unopened, the box of Risk still in its cellophane. There was music blaring from a radio, screaming guitars, overflowing ashtrays. Axel Joachim sat cross-legged and skinny on his bed, wearing only his underpants and a string of glass beads. A single icon of Saint Thaddaeus was hanging at an angle off the wall. Axel Joachim had a fat spliff between his fingers, his shaved head thrown back from the rigours of air guitar, and was having such a ball he hadn’t noticed that my darling boy had passed out on the floor.

For years after that Dinos and I had a back and forth time of it. My heart ached more acutely each time I went away, but my son belonged both with me and with his father in London. I joined a housing association in Notting Hill, sharpened my pen and my wits with jobs at Spare Rib and Time Out . At home I placed a gardenia and a little sandwich on a desk where I blackened pages of my own, and another decade passed with the island and Dinos existing mainly in my dreams.

These days, when I’m alone at the crest of my valley, I don’t often cry. It’s still as inviting of introspection as the first time I sat down, there’s no vista more peaceful, but it’s not a place for tears any more. Halfway down the far hill a tumbledown shack with chickens and netting is the only addition; breezes still ripple the silver lake of olive trees in its hollow. The sun has come streaming from the clouds and I can smell the good earth and feel its warmth on my face.

I despair of every tear I cried for Jimmy Jones, at my younger self’s blind desperation, and then I chuckle to think how scary he must have found my attempts to steer him down the aisle. But in 1960, which in reality was almost half a decade before the sixties began, how was a rudderless, motherless girl to know lust from love – or, as Marianne once remarked, love from service?

Marianne may have been a poor role model but for a while Charmian really had been the mother I needed. I remember she came looking for me the night after Jimmy Jones fled, when I thought the whole island might dissolve in my tears.

I was winded with misery and shock. Dusk was descending. She had brought whisky and figs and sat down beside me, hugging her legs through her skirt. My eyes were puffy and sore. Her concern was balm more soothing than the pills Bobby had been making me swallow.

When I asked her how she knew where to find me, she unscrewed the top of the whisky and took a gulp before answering. ‘It’s very strange, isn’t it? It’s almost as though there’s some sort of thread that pulls at me. I wish I could explain it,’ and she took another swallow, and gave me a troubled and troubling smile.

I told her my intention was to follow Jimmy back to London and demand a showdown and she hooted with derision. I sniffed and snivelled while she painted a picture for me of my life as Jimmy’s wife, told me it was a blessing I’d seen his true colours.

‘Think how your mother was tied to that kitchen in Bayswater. Darling, I know she dreamt of something less earthbound than housemaid’s knee for you…’

The last of the sun bled into the sea; the purple twilight was balmy. ‘Before George became ill we used to walk together up here in the gloaming. We used to sit right here with a bottle of wine and plan the next day’s writing…’ She gave me a broken smile. ‘I wish I could feel again the enchantment, everything golden, thistledown and barley, stone and dust, the life we’d made…’ and she sighed as though all her dreams had already been dreamt.

She shook herself out of it, gathered me closer, kissed the top of my head. ‘Darling, don’t waste your tears on that very ordinary boy,’ she said, and the combination of the whisky on her breath and her warm scent made me forget that I was completely alone. She rocked me in her arms while one by one the stars lit the sky.

I used to think it was one-way, my hunger for Charmian. Once Bobby had put it into my head that I was an annoying mosquito, I watched myself carefully. I tried not to be greedy but she gave herself generously. She caught me when Jimmy threw me away, steered me through bad times with Bobby, came back from Piraeus with a white leather-bound notebook and insisted I write every day. She fed me Brahms and crab sandwiches while she nagged about contraception, and took me so often under her wing. Wrung-out, hung-over, tired or just hungry, there was always a haven at the house by the well.

She’s with me still in the tea towel I keep draped at my shoulder, the shoelace I use to tie back my hair; she’s with me in the food that I cook and on every page that I have fought to blacken.

A few years after Martin’s death a friend of Dinos’s in Australia sent a news clipping that made me feel so peculiar I had to lie down halfway through reading it. Jennifer . Did I only imagine she’d called me that name on occasions? I still can’t be sure but I do think I picked up on something.