Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

Charmian flaps her hands at the cat. ‘Tripodi, get down!’ She pulls her dark hair free of its shoelace.

She looks nervy, and so altered from the Charmian of Palace Court that I start to doubt my memories. She gives her hair a quick comb-through with her fingers.

‘Everyone got going early this morning. Zoe’s taken them for a hike to the beach at Limnioniza so George and I can make some sort of progress on this nightmare book of his,’ she tells me while Tripodi snakes around her bare legs.

‘Look, I brought everything I could find,’ I say, untying the string from the books and bathing in her smile. It had taken up most of her letter to me, her worries about the shortcomings of Shane and Martin’s school. Apparently Martin was wretched with the science teaching and, though they had Homer backwards and forwards, she felt they really ought to know their Shakespeare.

At the sight of the books she forgets her haste. She clears a space for them among the mess.

‘You darling, darling girl,’ she says as she swoops on my Latin primer.

She puts me in mind of a panther, the way she prowls and purrs, all proud posture and wide, high bones, her eyes slanting and well defined. I’ve brought meat to her cubs.

‘I found some of Bobby’s too. Here’s some of his O-level science ones and I apologise now for all my hopeless scribbles in the margins of The Tempest .’

Charmian wipes her eyes on her sleeve. It gives me an ache that her children’s education can reduce her to tears. Her children haven’t even cleared away their own breakfast things.

‘Oh, I am such a terrible sook!’ she says. ‘Anything can set me off.’

‘Charmian,’ I say. ‘Did you manage to find a house for us to rent?’

She appears not to have heard me as she springs on another book. ‘Oh, and Hoetzinger. Martin loves reading about the Middle Ages. It’s not so very different from the life we lead here, though I’m yet to see anyone’s head on a pike… and Bradley on Shakespearean tragedy; you have brought an oasis to a desert, Erica!’

Upstairs George is coughing and stomping.

‘Oh, but I can’t even offer you a coffee. I really must get back to the work. George has been finding this book so terribly impossible and now you’ve come across us in the middle of a breakthrough.’ She plants the briskest of kisses on my cheeks.

‘About the house,’ I try to insist, panic rising.

‘It’s tough on him that to write this book well means revisiting the trauma of his first nervous breakdown, so I’m sorry but we are rather governed by his flow.’

‘But the house?’ Is it rude to keep interrupting while she’s telling me about George’s book? Probably.

‘It’s set against a nightmare of a journey George made as a war correspondent in China. Now he’s stuck and I have to make him relive it, every heartbreaking mile of the famine road to Liuchow, and force him back among the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were all starving or dead and rotting where they’d fallen. Can you imagine dredging that up?’

‘It must be very depressing for you too.’

She frowns distractedly towards the hatch and shakes her head.

‘You’ve no idea. Sometimes I’m stamping my foot while he suffers, because I’m not getting on with my own work at all and my words will insist on bubbling up. But on a day like today my own book seems so trifling by comparison. If there’s a good novel from George it may save us. So every day I sit on a step beside him and painfully squeeze what he needs me to squeeze out of him until it’s down on paper. It’s better done before he hits the grog so please forgive me if I fly now.’

That smile, the house, the dog, the creative disarray; it all makes me swoon. There are pictures, icons, a bone-handled knife mounted above the door. Icarus flies; admirals line up along the wall.

I notice a familiar etching hanging from a nail above the piled-up sink. ‘That’s Rembrandt,’ I say. ‘Mum has the same one. The fat oriental merchant. Once she made me a hat like his, with a feather and a jewel…’

Charmian stops in her tracks. ‘Oh yes, it’s lovely, isn’t it? I’m glad Connie got to keep hers. Joel sweetly bought one for me when he bought hers—’

Her hand flies to her mouth. The space between us vibrates. I reach for the back of a chair. ‘Who is Joel?’

She wags a finger at the fat merchant.

‘I’m getting carried away because half my mind is upstairs with George’s book. I mean, of course, I bought it for her; it was from a place near the British Museum. I bought one for each of my women friends; this edition had somehow been nicked on the plate-mark so they’re worthless to a collector.’ Colour has rushed to her cheeks. ‘But, you know what? If a woman has to be stuck in the kitchen, it might as well be with a Rembrandt on the wall.’

She turns away and I follow her across the flagstones, across bright woven rugs. She throws open another set of shutters. In one corner a gilded birdcage spins from the ceiling, beneath it a covered well. Charmian perches on the lid. The birdcage is studded with glass jewels.

‘No birds, just the cage,’ she says, and I can see her thoughts gather as she fiddles with her rolled-up sleeves. The shirt is washed thin, white cotton, possibly one of his. Her shoulders are formed from noble bones and maybe that’s what makes her one of those women your eyes can’t help but drink in. Like Mum.

‘Was Joel her lover?’ I try to make it sound light but she’s not fooled, only shakes her head. Upstairs George is pacing up and down. I tell her about the money Mum left me, about the car, but Charmian simply raises an arched brow, says: ‘How very intriguing.’

‘George tells me he found you rooms at the Poseidon Hotel last night,’ she says.

I nod, blinking back tears, appalled at how powerfully I want her to hold me.

The birdcage throws colourful patterns to the wall, plants reach towards her from their pots, her skirt swishes as I trail her back to the kitchen.

‘It’s Easter Friday now, which is, you know, quite a thing here… so I’m sorry but I probably won’t get your keys until Christ has arisen. But it’s a nice house and not too many steps up from the port.’

I tell her it’s OK to wait though really I’m dreading Bobby. He’s already threatened to make me pay for everyone’s rooms at the Poseidon.

Charmian is saying, ‘You’ll have fun with the festival,’ but George is hollering, and she bolts again for the ladder. ‘I’m sorry. Inspiration is a flighty mistress.’

She turns with her foot on the first step, a hand to her heart. ‘And really, Erica, thank you for the books.’

I shrug, helplessly overcome with an impulse to do the washing-up. Something cracks. She swoops and throws her arms around me, pats my shoulder while I sniff back tears. Says: ‘Hell, you’re only a girl. Connie’s little pearl. You know that’s what she wanted to call you? She told me that your dad insisted on Erica…’

I am failing with words, failing not to cry; I manage only to wail about how beastly Bobby is being to me. I’ve made her shirt wet with my tears. She fetches me a soft cloth and a glass of water from an earthenware jug but as I blot my face and gulp at the water George again roars her name.

‘We’ve only got daylight to work in before Zoe gets back with the kids, but it’s Epitaphios tonight so we’ll see you at Kamini. It’s a lovely bay and you can walk with the procession from the village. It’ll be magical, I promise you, bring candles. Come here for dinner later,’ she says, her foot to the step. ‘But right now I have to wring some more words out of the poor blighter up there.’

I hear them talking as I turn to leave and she calls down, ‘Look, George says there’s no need for you to waste money on the hotel, you can doss up here for a couple of nights.’