Sofka Zinovieff - Putney

In Switzerland, he drank a beer, staring out at the looming, moonlit mountains. Daphne tasted her first cappuccino in northern Italy. In Yugoslavia they stopped at a roadside cafeteria outside Ljubljana that offered clean, spacious cloakrooms where they could wash. Beside the entrances to the men’s and women’s areas sat a beady-eyed crone under a framed portrait of Marshal Tito. She handed them a few pieces of lavatory paper each and Ralph gave her some small change. He washed using a lump of hard soap and dried himself by putting his shirt back on.

After their passports were inspected at the Greek border and the bus was waved through, there was a subdued cheer from the passengers, despite the fact that it was dawn and they had now been on the road for three days. A camaraderie had grown up amongst this disparate collection of people; they had seen each other sleeping and singing, eating and vomiting, quarrelling and kissing. Ralph and Daphne had sometimes spoken to their fellow travellers, but nobody quizzed them about their relationship or what they were doing there. Their cover story had been redundant. Ralph took photographs in the soft morning light, adding to his collection of Daphne asleep, Daphne with sunbeams in her hair, Daphne looking directly, provocatively into his lens. ‘I’m your slave,’ he told her. ‘I would do whatever you tell me to.’ She mocked him, ‘OK, slave, jump off the bus,’ but he saw her receive and comprehend his obeisance.

It was abominably hot in Athens and the bus station stank of exhaust fumes and roasting meat. The hippies, students, and even the Greek mother and her son, looked like refugees leaving a boat after a long voyage. They staggered slightly, as though their sea legs couldn’t adjust to dry land and peered around in bewilderment. Ralph felt exhausted and suggested they take a taxi to their hotel. Daphne gave the address to the driver, who drove frighteningly fast, swerving to avoid dogs and pedestrians and jumping red lights. The small hotel in Plaka was like a sanctuary, with its dark, cool reception hall and chlorine-mopped floor and an uncurious young man, who checked them into a twin room on the top floor. From their tiny balcony, a section of the Acropolis was visible between two neighbouring buildings. They pushed the single beds together, turned on the ceiling fan, closed the shutters and collapsed on to the coarse white sheets, plummeting instantly into magnificent sleep.

When he woke it was almost dark. Daphne was reading a book – he couldn’t see whether it was David Copperfield or The Exorcist , both of which she’d brought in her pack (his ambitious choice of The Idiot remained almost untouched at the bottom of his luggage). She had evidently taken a shower as her hair hung in damp curls and she was wearing a pair of utilitarian white underpants (her ‘no-entry knickers’, he teased) beneath a disintegrating Victorian lace camisole. She smiled at him. ‘I’m starving. Are you going to have a shower? Then we can go out and eat.’ There was a dingy bathroom along the corridor with a temperamental supply of water, but he returned from his cold shower renewed. He felt like a demigod – like Odysseus after he had bathed in a river and anointed himself with oil. Ready to fight or to fall in love with a sorceress.

The streets were crowded with people strolling slowly and they adopted the pace, ambling without a destination. The day’s burning heat had transformed into something gentler, though the paving stones and walls were still releasing their absorbed warmth into the cooler night air. They chose a small restaurant on the lower slopes of the Acropolis, and Daphne translated the waiter’s instructions to go through to the kitchen to look at the food. After some deliberation, they ordered stuffed tomatoes, fried calamari and some boiled bitter greens. The waiter brought retsina from the barrel in a tin jug, the yellow liquid pungently resinous and redolent of sun-warmed pine forests and petrol cans. ‘It improves with each sip,’ said Ralph, wincing.

Daphne drank some wine too, and on the way back to the hotel he watched her weaving to and fro across the narrow roads as if following her own invisible path. He admired her swaying, narrow-hipped figure and the muscular lightness of her limbs. She reminded him of a young leopard that was no longer a cub but hadn’t yet acquired the weight and bulk of an adult – poised at a fleeting yet perfect point. His pursuit of her and their union had the power of one of nature’s wonders, like salmon swimming upstream against the crashing river or birds flying thousands of miles. These things appear impossible, but they are not.

His hope was that this trip would be the opportunity for them to make love for the first time, but he suspected that tonight was not the night. It would be hard to summon the requisite patience he presumed this operation would require – not that he was highly experienced in deflowering virgins. He certainly didn’t believe in the sanctity of the maidenhead, but the prospect was daunting in its way. Loving Daphne enabled him to share experiences that were brand new – bright, shiny, unsullied – and this was intoxicating. It was like a return to his own youth and initiations. First orgasm, first travel abroad without parents, first time with a girl. Three days of messing around together on the bus had left him urgently in need of resolution, even if there had been a quick solitary wank in an unappealing lavatory in southern Yugoslavia.

Back in their room, she looked shy as though avoiding a moment of reckoning. She was often awkward before they began anything sexual and, to distract from this, he picked her up and bounced her like a bundle on to one of the beds. Tickling sometimes proved the way in, but today that didn’t seem necessary and he entwined himself in her smooth boy’s legs and drew her close. He pulled off her clothes and examined her breasts before he licked them – so recently swelled out of flatness, like an illusion. She didn’t resist when he removed her knickers. He rubbed his cock against her thigh, hoping she’d remember how he showed her. Her beloved monkey hands, so pretty, with their bitten nails and adorned with silver rings, sent him into a delirium. He realised it was selfish, but he allowed himself to forget about anything apart from speeding towards a final ecstasy. Nothing else mattered – not even Daphne.

When he opened his eyes, she was sitting upright, dark tresses around her face, cheeks prettily pink and an analytical expression as she examined the white spill rolling down her hands and dripping on to the bed. He clutched her wrist and smiled gratefully. ‘God, you’re lovely! I was like a volcano. Vesuvius erupting.’ Later, ‘Vesuvius’ became another word for their private lexicon. He lay back and heard her get up and leave the room, presumably to go to the bathroom. Before she returned, he had sunk to the ocean floor of sleep.

A luminous spring morning drenched the dull rows of semi-detached Edwardian houses in a rosy blush. Although she didn’t look forward to work, she enjoyed cycling there along the quiet back roads. There was enough of the incredible in her daily routines to make her thankful. She even appreciated school mornings with Libby, when she stumbled around in a muddle, attempting fruitlessly to assist her methodical daughter. For so long she had lived in dread of the unknown disaster that was sure to be lurking like a mugger around the next corner. In the past, tranquillity itself was a trigger for anxiety. So much did she expect disasters to befall her that she walked under ladders and stepped into roaring traffic, as if that would confuse vengeful gods. That was before Libby. Now, she admired the blossom in modest front gardens, inhaled the damp city air, pedalled hard and gave thanks.