One Boat

It appears that the poetic mood returned when I was back at the hotel. Observed from the balcony, the multicoloured bands of light, trembling in the harbour were appreciated, as was the disposition of the buildings. The terrain governed the settlement. Opposite the rise on which the hotel stood, the Ottoman castle occupied a corresponding hill. Between them, the plateia met the water at the semi-circle of the harbour, which aligned with the central axis of the town. I made a note of my predilection for symmetry – a mania, Tom once called it – an appealing quirk, then. Out in the bay, a single boat was moving – a ruby on the flat black water.

To end the day, messages from Tom. The campaign continued. He’d taken a book off the shelf that afternoon and a ticket had fallen out of it – the opera in Verona, in the Roman arena. That incredible night. Do you remember it? I remembered the night that had come to be known as the Incredible Night, and I remembered the ingredients of its incredibleness: the huge sound, the blazing stage, the heat, the Perseids flitting across the sky; and afterwards, the huge room, the huge bed, the golden brocade, the tall windows left open until the morning. Of course, I replied, then noted: A memory of no atmosphere. A scene observed – experienced by someone else. I possess it, but am not in it. Before I’d closed the notebook, another message arrived. Shifting into a philosophical register, Tom proposed that he had been on an excursion from himself, and wanted – desperately – to return to the right path. That was a hell of an excursion, I replied. I turned off the phone for the night and ran a shower. As the water ran, I was thinking of Tom – a particular day with Tom, a day of no definite date, a day on which nothing special occurred, but a day 15that arose of its own accord, with an emanation of happiness. A memory of contentment: sitting at the harbour at Lynmouth, voluptuously tired, after miles of walking. Some of that contentment was borrowed from the contentment of the present moment, but some belonged to the recovered day itself. Not excitement, but a more durable thing, or so it had seemed – a true companionship. And for a while, as the water ran over me, that companionship presented itself as something that might, after all, be recovered. A temptation. I allowed myself to succumb to it – or pretend to succumb – briefly, until a distraction intervened. Condensation had formed on the window of the bathroom. Half a dozen streaks in the lower part of the pane, fed by twice as many tributaries. I watched a droplet fattening at the top of the glass. Reaching critical mass, it fell, according to the laws of physics. It fell freely, until, inevitably, a few inches into its course, it touched one of the tributaries, and accelerated along the path to the bottom. The obviousness of it made me laugh. Alone, I laughed aloud.

Returning to the town, nine years later, more or less, I was staying in the same room – or the same room, modified. It was smarter now. Tones of sand and stone prevailed. Quantities of white-grey marble in the bathroom. Superior bedding and plusher towels. Absolutely nothing that might prompt any two-star feedback from the readily dissatisfied.

The view from the balcony was much the same, though the waterfront restaurants were more numerous now, and sleeker too. Tables were set all along the quayside, under a long canvas awning, of strong Greek blue. The place where I used to eat had been refurbished and renamed. I sat where I had sat on that very first night, arriving at the same hour. The sun was already behind the island; 16the colours on the water were darkening – they would have been beautiful, but I made no note of them. I read my book, looking up every ten minutes or so, for a sight of Petros, or Niko. Neither of them entered the scene. My father – I wrote in the notebook, to make some thoughts of him appear. What do I feel at this moment? Some guilt – a thin atmosphere of guilt. How to describe it? A glider, as the tow rope falls away, and then it’s just you and the air and silence. An approximate comparison. Empty air, with some guilt-vapour. After dinner, I took the same walk, to the end of the road, and still saw nobody I recognized. At the café, the waitress was not Xanthe.

Before turning out the light, I wrote: An image occurs to me – at the turn of the stairs, seeing his hand on the table, then Marion’s hand brushing across it – in that second, I understood. And: My mother died and I came here. My father dies, I come here. Tom might have seen evidence of the mania. More to it, of course. Petros, Niko, etc. Now what comes to mind? Those ghastly cats. I don’t want to be thinking of cats. I came to put my thoughts in order – as if thoughts were sheep to be rounded up and penned. Thoughts put themselves in order, or not.

II.

The first morning of the return. I sat on the balcony for a while, before going downstairs. A faint grain in the air of the bay, I wrote in the notebook. Quivering water, mild light. The business of the town has begun. Vans around the square. A small boat being winched out of the water, onto trestles. Two men on the quay – one of them Giorgos? Giorgos’s build, and stiff-kneed saunter. Already a message from Patrick: All good? Installed & feeling productive? He was thinking of me, he wanted me to know. I replied – All well. Notebook active. Then I put the phone on the bedside table, where it stayed for the day.

The new-look breakfast room was entirely white and fiercely lit, with natural light completely excluded, except for whatever leaked through from the reception area. Above the buffet, a screen showed a video, filmed by a drone. It swooped over the trees of the square and up to the castle, over the water to the half-moon beach, and on to the ruins of the Mycenaean palace, then suddenly we were inside the hotel, in the breakfast room, which could be easily transformed, we were shown, into a hall for conferences and presentations. There were no more than a dozen other people in the room, and nobody was paying any attention to the video.

In the corner was an unoccupied table, placed more or less where John had been sitting the first time I saw him. I was intrigued by him – he looked more like a business traveller than a tourist. The crisp white shirt, though tieless, was not a shirt for the beach, and the trousers were evidently part of a suit. Eating his breakfast, he looked up several times, without seeming to see what was in front of him – as one might glance vacantly out of a window because the window happened to be there, not 18because anything of interest was to be seen outside. He had no map or guidebook. There was an air of preoccupation. A problem or a situation was being considered, it appeared. Something less severe than a crisis. Perhaps he was preparing himself for a meeting. He applied himself fastidiously to the consumption of his breakfast. The components – cereal, juice, coffee, milk, rolls, honey, butter – were placed in an arc around the plate. He cut a roll carefully in half and spread the butter as though every square centimetre of the bread had to be covered evenly. He took no apparent interest in the other guests, but there was a moment, as I was looking in his direction, when he glanced to the side, as if sensing that he was being watched, and our eyes met. He nodded, as one might nod to acknowledge someone in a concert audience – a woman for whom you had held the door open on coming in, say. Something like that. There was nothing to note in his response. It was not a greeting.

♦

The dive centre was still in operation two doors down from the hotel, and the poster in the window was more or less the same as before. I scanned it line by line, picture by picture, as if by some kind of sympathetic magic the first encounter with Niko could be revived. After a minute, I was no longer properly looking at what was in front of me – I was trying to remember exactly how it had happened, and then I became aware that I was being watched from inside the office, where a man who was not familiar to me was sitting at the desk, smiling in my direction. He made a tentative beckoning gesture, with a querying look, to which I raised a hand, then moved on, down the slope, to the square. Giorgos’s café had some customers but 19Xanthe was not to be seen. I walked on, out of town, to Petros’s garage. A house now stood where the garage had been. It was definitely the same spot – I remembered the church, the view of the conical hill, the aqueduct. An element of the return, a major element, had been removed, it seemed. A huge reversal, right at the start.

I wandered back, taking a whimsical route, dawdling along streets I hadn’t seen before – this was the only reason to follow them. The disappointment dwindled as I walked. I could pursue the story of Petros by other means. Descending towards the square, I turned left to take a less direct route to the waterfront. Children were swimming in the water in front of the restaurants and jumping off the long concrete platform. Almost empty-headed, I watched them for a while. The Ottoman castle had opened for the day, so I went up and wandered around the fortifications for an hour. I would have tested myself on the history, I imagine. What could I remember? What can I remember now? Built by the Ottomans; captured by the Venetians; recaptured; occupied by the Russians at some point – not sure when or why; reverted to the Ottomans; a massacre during the War of Independence; the French were somehow in residence for a time; then the town began to grow outside the fortress walls.

A museum had been built inside the castle since I was last there. I applied myself to every exhibit and caption – Wringing every last drop, I wrote in the evening. As though preparing for examination, I studied the Linear B inscriptions – Two hours later, almost every fact forgotten. I went up onto the walls and surveyed the bay at length; I sat in the church, once the mosque; I returned to the walls. A space was available for thinking, but nothing was taking advantage of the vacancy. The brain sending out an open invitation, but getting no responses, I wrote. More a case of 20coming to terms than truly thinking? Not like Wittgenstein and his hut on the fjord. Not genuine solid thought. Mere mulling.

Late morning, I came to the square again, in need of refreshment. The temperature had risen steeply. Deep in the shade, an empty table at Giorgos’s. Before, I had sat there at least once every day, for the unspectacular spectacle of small-town life. I would have been pleased with myself for that small phrase. I would pass a week or more here, I had thought, and my mind would settle in the sunlight, the warmth, the cleansing air, the rhythm of the days, the atmosphere of this society. Nothing would happen, I thought. Now I retook my seat. A delighted toddler was staggering towards the monument, his mother advancing in a crouch behind him, arms outstretched, at the ready. A man took a light from another’s cigarette, and they shook hands. An elderly gent seemed to be perplexed by a printed item that he had trapped with his stick. And then I heard ‘Hello’, and it was Xanthe, arms crossed over a tray that she was holding to her chest. In the interim, her hair had become more glorious still – a thick cascade of various mahogany-proximate tones, full of twists like a flow through rapids. She was a little fuller of figure now, and the fullness was an enhancement. The complexion was still without blemish, and the beauty of those eyes – amber, deep-set – even stronger than I remembered.

‘You are back,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘And you?’

‘Also good.’

‘You look it,’ I told her, overly gratified at having been recognized.

‘Thank you,’ she said. Her demeanour was different. Before, I had noted a tension in her gaze, and what I took to be an underlying melancholy – sullenness, even – with a 21glaze of brightness on top. It took some effort for her to be sunny with the customers, I felt. I had observed her: it wasn’t just that it took some effort to be sunny with me. A number of times I glimpsed her off-guard, collecting a tray from the bar, or waiting for more customers and watching the strollers passing, and what I often saw was an expression that I had summarized as brooding. It went well with those remarkable eyes. She would make a wonderful killer, I noted one day. Now, at first resighting, she was more at ease, as might have been expected, given the additional years. No effort was visible in the smile and the way she moved was a little looser, slower. Now I noticed the gold ring, but did not remark on it.

Taking a chance, I asked after her father.

He too was well. Last year he had been unwell for a while, but now everything was OK. Her parents were not working so much now. ‘I’m in charge,’ she told me, raising her eyebrows as if to say: ‘Isn’t that a surprise?’ She gestured towards the café’s shopfront. ‘I made big changes,’ she said proudly. ‘As you can see.’ The café was completely indistinguishable from the café that I recalled. It took me a second or two to understand. This style of joke, from Xanthe, was something new. ‘Welcome back,’ she said, straight-faced, then took my order.

I took the book out of the bag, and the notebook and pen. The splendid Xanthe! Now the boss, I wrote. And married. There’s something in her manner – something specific to us – to me & her. And as I was writing this, an idea arose, a melodramatic idea, but effective, like a jingle that hooks you despite its inanity: Ring + (maybe) wry look in the eye = wife of Niko?? Before she came back, I shut the notebook and opened the paperback.

‘Another book,’ she said, amused. ‘Always a book.’

On request, I showed her the cover. First time round, I 22had brought the Odyssey, and Xanthe had guessed I was a professor. Unaccompanied, reading Homer and making notes – I was not obviously a person on holiday, or having fun, for that matter.

The Iliad was ‘super-boring’, said Xanthe. ‘All fighting, fighting, fighting. Blood and smashed teeth.’

‘There’s a great deal of blood,’ I agreed. ‘And loads of broken teeth.’

‘Stupid big boys with spears.’

‘Nobody’s guilty of overthinking, certainly,’ I said. Then, on the second beat: ‘I like that in a man.’ This produced an uncertain look, and a small laugh.

Another table required her attention. I read a page or two before she came back. We talked about her father’s health for a while, but nothing about her own life, so the barely credible conjecture about herself and Niko became slightly more credible. ‘Nothing much changes,’ she said at one point, and I took this as a cue to ask about Petros. I had seen that the garage was no longer there, I told her. Had Petros left? No, he was still around, she answered, and he still had a garage, on the same road. I had given up too soon, that’s all. If I’d walked another five minutes, past the school, I would have found it. Then she said: ‘Your other friend is still here too.’ I thought I saw the beginnings of a smirk, and it irked me, a little, this touch of condescension from a woman young enough to be a niece, if not a daughter. Niko, she informed me, was married to the woman who ran the shop in the far corner of the square, the one that sold a lot of stuff for tourists. Xanthe pointed to it. ‘Her name is Arina,’ she said. ‘She’s very nice.’ Another development of the story was immediately forthcoming. ‘Your old friend, the car man, he pretends he is a poet now,’ she told me. He hadn’t stopped fixing cars, but he was writing poems in his spare time. 23‘Really,’ she said, widening those lovely eyes. Evidently it was risible, the very idea of a mechanic-poet. Worse – such was the self-delusion of the mechanic-poet, he had even paid to have his poems printed in a ‘sort of book’. Should one feel inclined, one could buy a copy at the shop of ‘Mrs Niko’ – she kept it with the guidebooks. It was hard to miss, Xanthe said – the cover was bright blue and it had a terrible drawing of the bay on the cover. ‘Terrible poems, terrible drawing,’ she said. Maybe Petros had done the drawing himself. It wouldn’t surprise her.

Again Xanthe was summoned to another table. Most were in use now and I was sitting in the midst of half a dozen conversations, none of them in English. I was immersed in the life of the town, a life to which I had only the most limited access. There was more than a little self-congratulation in this, in having chosen a place that was not a resort, and in resisting the fantasy that some sort of special relationship was being formed. I was nothing to these people; almost nothing. I listened but understood nothing that was being said around me. It was unavailable to me, but I was finding it pleasurable to move upon the surface, I noted. I put the book aside and listened, and as I listened the figure of my former husband appeared, only a memory of him, almost bleached of all emotional colour: Tom with me, at a table similar to the one at which I was sitting, in another small town, in the south of France, two tourists surrounded by other tourists, several of them likewise English-speakers, some of them talking loudly, most of them not, but Tom could hear nearly everything, the eavesdropper extraordinaire, relaying a disagreement that was happening four tables away, and a young girl’s delight at what she had seen that afternoon, and more, as though he had set microphones among the leaves of the plane tree under which we were all sitting, and then 24lifting a finger and cocking an ear, because a birdsong had entered the sound-picture, and he could name it, of course, because he could remember them all, as he could remember the music that he had recorded, whereas to my ears so many warbles and tweets were indistinguishable. And from the eavesdropping my mind slipped into another scene, a generic scene rather than one particular moment, and in that scene he was sitting beside me, in a concert hall, listening, leaning forward slightly, as he often did, with fingers meshed, listening acutely, not merely receiving the music, but reaching into it, concentrating as I might concentrate on a page of a document, whereas I was a recipient rather than a reader of the music that was being performed, taking it in as one might take in the view of a landscape or a perfume, and I think it came to trouble me, that my enjoyment was more superficial than was my husband’s, that he heard gradations of tone that I could not, just as some people can detect and identify a dozen intermingled elements in a perfume that to others is a single pleasing scent, and no matter that the very idea of ‘depth’, as he said, made no sense when the subject was the experience of sound, just as it would make no sense to say that person X saw crimson or cobalt more deeply than person Y, nevertheless it was in terms of depth that I tended to think of it, as if musical sounds were something like the sea, and I remained in the shallows, or on the surface, looking down, sometimes marvelling, but never within it. Thinking of T, the sound-gourmet, the eavesdropper extraordinaire, I wrote, and then something that had come back to me: T walking around that room/hall in Venice – where exactly?? – clicking his fingers to demonstrate the acoustics and I couldn’t hear the things that he was hearing. Some tenderness in this recollection. And I made a note of a middle-aged couple at a neighbouring café. 25Now, only a few weeks later, I have barely any memory of them, though it seems they reminded me of my father and Marion, not because their faces bore any resemblance to the faces of my father and Marion, but because they were wearing closely harmonized outfits – white polo shirt + chinos; white blouse + sand-coloured skirt – and the way she looked around as he sorted out the coins. Seeing them, I felt a weak resurgence of the Marion reaction, the low-voltage panic I sometimes felt when left alone with Marion, a woman I found as dull as she found me hard, I’m sure, or unspontaneous. An effort was needed to make conversation with her, to simulate affection or interest. I was uncharitable, I know. I have been uncharitable, in many situations. Professionally, that has been no handicap. My father, I hope, had no idea of the effort it took. Always so straight, so dependable – I would never have been suspected of dissembling, I wrote, at the café table. Which was the point at which, I think, I became aware of the impression I was making – specifically, of the scrutiny being transmitted from an adjacent family. And I wondered: was it the case that I had some need to be observed in this way, writing – thinking deeply, apparently – at a café table, as though at work in my room at home, while others were relaxing and enjoying what was around them? ‘Is she a writer?’ Is this what I want people to ask themselves?

I packed up and pushed back the chair, and Xanthe raised a hand in goodbye, and at exactly that moment a white van with a big blue turtle painted on the side drove down the side of the square. ‘There he is,’ Xanthe called out, pointing, and I glimpsed the driver’s profile. I looked back to Xanthe and she acted out a small pantomime, nipping her lower lip with her teeth and smiling as she shrugged and raised her hands, open-palmed, in a moment of mock hopelessness or consternation. Now I 26understood the situation, or thought I did: we were allies, of a kind, because we had made the same mistake, she was telling me – but the mistake had been fun, hadn’t it?

Now I had to go to Arina’s shop immediately. The book was easily found, a shallow stack of four copies, beside a carousel of postcards. The drawing on the cover was obviously not the work of a professional, but it was recognizable as a view of the bay from the castle walls. The fishing boat looked more like a toy on a floor than a real boat on water, and the scale wasn’t quite right. Not absolutely terrible, though. The title was hand-drawn, elegantly, in a style that looked like an old Greek inscription. I would need Xanthe’s assistance to read it. I flicked through the pages, and saw on every page a scattering of words, all in thick type, often the same word repeated, amid a lot of blank space, or interspersed with other repeated words, in small blocks of type, or columns, or sometimes scattered in a pattern, like little pictures in a scrapbook. There seemed to be no sentences, but I understood not a word of it. The woman behind the counter seemed pleased by my choice: assuming that I had bought a book that I was equipped to understand, she said something that had the tone of a commendation