Crocus Hour, page 1
The Crocus Hour
Charlotte Randall
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First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2008
Copyright © Charlotte Randall 2008
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ISBN 9781742288376
For Dinah
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my editor Jane Parkin and to Geoff Walker of Penguin Books.
Special thanks to Creative New Zealand, who supported this work so generously.
Part One
Chapter One
I first met Henry Davis in Crete in 1981. I was sitting at a table by the window of the village café when he got off the evening bus from Iraklion. He came into the café with his battered suitcases, dropped them on the floor and collapsed at a table as if exhausted. After a few moments of sitting with his eyes closed, he ordered coffee from the hovering proprietor, a slow and ancient Cretan who served his foreign customers with an unchanging expression of bewilderment as if he had no idea what any of them could possibly be doing there. When the coffee arrived Henry Davis sipped it slowly between long draughts of water.
I left the café before he did and found myself thinking about him as I walked up the hill to the private house where I had taken a room for the duration of my stay. I don’t recall what I thought; perhaps I reflected on the way he seemed at once so at home and so foreign. At any rate my interest was aroused and I was pleased to see him again at breakfast the next morning. He had already eaten and was roaming the café for a light for his cigarette when I took my usual seat. I jumped up with my lighter flaring, and after providing him with this insignificant favour he invited me to have coffee with him—how simply and with what innocence our vast entanglements begin.
The day although mild was wet, as many days had been that early spring, and I was pleased to have some brief diversion from my damp and solitary ramblings. We exchanged the usual information, our names and countries of origin, where we were staying and for how long. He said he would stay about a month, perhaps two. Maybe even three, he added between sips of coffee, and it was immediately obvious that he was a man without a timetable.
‘You’re a long way from home,’ I remarked, but he did not seem inclined to comment and our conversation turned to the work we did. Or in Henry’s case had done, because in the next sentence he declared that he no longer engaged in any activity that was such a profound waste of time. He smiled when he said this, as if acknowledging my unvoiced protestation that most of us need the money, not to mention something to do with our lives, and explained that he had taken early retirement. Before leaving he suggested a walk in the evening if the weather improved. Twilight, he said, when you can see the ghosts.
During the afternoon the weather did indeed improve, and I met Henry at the café in the early evening, when the sun had just set but the sky remained a light grey, and we started walking down the rutted street that led to the main road. I was not particularly fond of this route. The narrow lane that went up behind the village and through the orchards of blood oranges and fields of tethered goats was far prettier, but somehow it was Henry’s walk and his expression was resolute.
The sky darkened and it became that time of evening when you can’t always make out what is in front of you—is that a goat or a rock or simply a clump of grass grown tall and lush in the spring rains?
‘Do you see the two girls up ahead?’ Henry asked, and I peered long and hard but in vain. ‘They’re about seventeen. One is dark with olive skin, almost Greek-looking. The other has dark hair but very fair skin.’
‘What are they doing?’ I could see nobody at all and thought his answer might help me to pick out the invisible girls from the ever-darkening background.
‘They’re walking to Festos. Only for a short while because they don’t much like it there. Then they’re going on to Matala beach. Walking all the way, mind you. And all the way back.’
I was certain by now that there were no girls ahead of us and we walked on in silence while I pondered my reply. ‘Who are they?’ I asked at length.
Henry stopped walking as if this was the exact question he’d been expecting and it was important that he get the answer right. ‘The one on the left, the olive-skinned one, is my daughter. The other girl is her best friend. They’ve come here for a holiday.’
‘Well, why don’t you go and talk to them?’ I suggested with a laugh, but Henry was not at all amused.
‘Let’s go back,’ he said, wheeling around and walking off towards the lights of our village. I had to run to catch up with him, stumbling stupidly in several potholes as I did so.
Back at the café, Henry ordered coffees and raki, the latter arriving with a small dish of unshelled peanuts, and he talked for an hour in an amusing and urbane way, giving no hint at all that he had just been out in the dark seeing ghosts. And no hint that I might have disappointed him by not seeing them.
I have no idea why Henry used the word ghosts. It was never ghosts that he imagined he saw. His daughter’s letters had described in detail the excursions the two girls had made while staying in the village, and now everywhere he went Henry turned these memories into living bodies. What are they doing now? I would ask once our walks became regular. They are looking at the wild poppies in the fields, he would reply, or, They are stopping at the roadside café for coffee and cigarettes.
I was staying at the time with an obese villager called Giorgis Skordalakis who owned a business in Athens. At the café on the evening of my arrival, Giorgis had intercepted my enquiry about pensions. Come to stay with me, he had invited, I have a very big house around the corner, also I speak English. Too embarrassed to refuse, I accepted his offer and obtained comfortable and free accommodation. But every evening I found myself under an obligation to sit up late talking with my host while consuming huge amounts of wine, brandy and chocolate-marbled halva. I took no interest in these tedious conversations until one evening Giorgis mentioned Henry Davis.
‘He is mad,’ Giorgis asserted, licking his fat fingers that dripped with gaudy rings. ‘He come here every year looking for his daughter. As if we are hiding her.’
‘He’s lost her?’
‘She go missing here a couple of years ago. How you say—vanish into thin air. The police never found nothing.’
‘Two girls simply vanished?’ I asked with some disbelief, since this was a village where everyone seemed to know everybody, see everything.
‘Not two,’ Giorgis replied, helping himself to more brandy, ‘The friend, she remained.’ He swirled the amber liquid in his balloon glass. ‘Pretty girls they were. Yes, very pretty.’
‘You met them?’
‘Oh yes, they stay in the pension across the street. Come, I show you.’ We went to the window and Giorgis drew back the curtains. ‘See, right over there. Stavros’s house. They have big room at the front. Next to the balcony.’ He dropped the curtain and lumbered back to his seat. He sliced himself another chunk of halva and said, ‘The village never stop talking about them from the minute they arrive. Of course, they are not speaking Greek, they are not hearing the talk. Very ignorant girls in general,’ he added after a moment.
‘In what way exactly?’
Giorgis shrugged expressively. ‘They do not hear the talk, they do not learn the ways, they run around all the time with men. Not in this village. This is very religious village. But the men from other villages, they put them down on the main road, then you hear the girls coming home very late singing.’
‘So a man took Henry’s daughter, do you think?’
‘Who knows? Why took? These foreign girls, you know how they are. Perhaps she run off with him.’ My host pulled himself unsteadily to his feet. ‘N ow, I must leave you. I am very tired. I am going in Athens in the morning. For a week, perhaps two. But please, make yourself comfortable. How you say—my home is your home.’
I slept quite late the next morning, managing to avoid my host before he left for the mainland. When I went down to the café for breakfast, Henry was about to leave on a walking trip to the ruins of Festos.
‘I’ll wait for you if you’d like to join me,’ he said.
‘No need to wait,’ I replied, and threw a coin into the self-service bread basket by the café door. I grabbed a sesame roll and we set off for the main road.
The road to Festos branched off from this main route and began climbing a hill. As we were walking up, I told Henry what my host had told me.
‘Oh Giorgis,’ Henry replied dismissively. ‘He’s the one who knows everything and nothing. Everything when it’s time to spread rumours, nothing when the police arrive.’
We walked on in silence for a few minutes. The day was an unexpectedly warm one and we were noticing our heavy clothes. ‘It always does this,’ Henry said, and stopped to wipe his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief. ‘Comes out hot when you least expect it. But pretty, isn’t it?’ He gestured down at the valley below the road. Indeed, the valley was green and lush and dotted with wildflowers, very unlike the sere plain it would shortly become.
While we were stopped, Henry put his hand in his trouser pocket and fished out a crumpled photograph. ‘Here they are,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘You already know which is which.’
‘I don’t know their names though,’ I replied as I scrutinised the heavily creased photograph.
‘My daughter’s name is Sarah. But in her teens, after reading some book or other, she started calling herself Sally. Her friend’s name is Jane. They used to walk up to Festos quite often. A Greek man here kept offering them larger and larger sums to come and speak proper English to the tourists in his souvenir shop. The girls just laughed at him. The money seemed like a pittance to them. No, you keep it,’ Henry said when I tried to hand the photo back. ‘It’ll give you something to look at when we talk about them.’
According to Henry the ruins of Festos had not impressed the girls. He said Sally wrote to him saying the ruins were little more than a heap of rubble but that they had had fun jumping from wall to crumbling wall before going on to Matala. ‘I like to stand here and watch them,’ Henry remarked, looking out at the field of piled stones. ‘I love to watch them leaping about in their light dresses. Oblivious, yes, but also innocent. Giorgis has no notion of female innocence. Neither did the old man in the souvenir shop. If you won’t work for me then marry me, he said to them. What are you running around loose for?’
‘Loose,’ I echoed.
‘Yes,’ Henry said. ‘To the men here the girls were like canaries out of their cages.’
‘It’s 1981 …’ I began.
Henry held up his hand and said the year didn’t matter. That only the long slow journey of each of the parties to this particular point in time could explain why Cretan men disapproved of free canaries.
‘But the girls were ahistorical. When they looked at this …’ Henry gestured with both hands at the ruins that spread for a considerable distance in front of us ‘… they just saw old stuff. Not the place the Cretans’ journey began.’
Henry turned away from the leaping girls and began to walk back towards the road. I ran to catch up with him, and as we walked together he said, ‘The girls took to wearing wedding rings. Cheap things they got at the market in Mires. They didn’t understand that this shocked the peasants even more. To them, the wedding rings indicated the girls had run away from their husbands. But shall we take the bus? It’s rather a long way to Matala. And if you don’t mind, on the way we’ll visit an Orthodox church.’
I can no longer recall how far the church was from Festos nor how long we waited for the next bus after visiting it. But I am certain that the buses were few and far between and we spent rather a long while standing in the tiny roadside church.
‘I used to come here when it happened,’ Henry said as we stood in that strange light that looked as if a sunset had been captured and imprisoned within the church’s walls. ‘I came to Crete as soon as I heard. The police were doing a lousy job. In between talking to everybody and going over all the details again and again with Jane, I would come here just to have some peace.’
There was no doubt that the little church, no bigger than a small sitting room, had an affecting serenity, as if someone with infinitely cool hands had put one of them against your burning forehead and in a voice like running water had invited you to stop and rest.
‘The girls used to come here too,’ Henry said, and then frowned. ‘Don’t think I’m completely infatuated with them. They were ignorant in many ways. Important ways. They thought the Cretans were Catholics. They thought this little beauty was quite risible—the wrong size, too personal, too homely. They ridiculed the icons and the superstitious offerings the peasants would leave, portions of food and whatnot. They are daughters of a stern Presbyterian God who accepts no gifts lest they obligate Him.’
‘Where is Jane now?’ I asked after a few minutes’ silent contemplation.
‘Sydney, last I heard.’ Henry stood up. ‘Shall we go on to Matala?’
The next thing I remember was having a meal at one of the seaside cafés at Matala beach. The open-air portion of the café extended out over the water, and the waves rushed in and gurgled and sucked beneath our feet. It was a beautiful day. The first really hot day since my arrival at the beginning of February. We had fried fish and Greek salad and of course bread. We drank retsina. After my second or third glass of the awful wine, I recall a moment of perfect happiness, one of those exquisite and fragile moments that are already coming apart the minute you notice them. As if noticing dilutes the attention from which they are created.
‘No matter what Giorgis might have told you, the girls didn’t drink,’ Henry said, polishing off his fish. ‘Not when there were just the two of them. Having lunch here in this café, for example, which they did dozens of times. The proprietor at the time mentioned the fact repeatedly when I questioned him. No retsina, he said, shaking his head emphatically, no ouzo. Papastratos, moussaka, cake. Always cake. The proprietor thought the girls were on drugs. He thought they were hippies. Of course they weren’t. Hippie culture, of the advanced American kind, had hardly penetrated the backwaters they grew up in. In fact, the proprietor’s idea of the girls was just another example of their mutual incomprehension.’ Henry pushed away his plate and lit a cigarette. ‘The hippies live in those caves up there in the hillside. After lunch we’ll climb up and have a look at them.’
After lunch we did indeed climb up and inspect the hillside caves which, as I recall, stank of urine, dampness and old smoke, and which were littered with empty cigarette packets and food detritus. Several contained elementary bedding, candles in bottles and large backpacks, in spite of a conspicuous and poetically misspelt sign warning that overnight camping was forbidden. Henry regarded the caves with an expression of disgust on his face, and said, ‘I’ve always hated the hypocrisy of hippies. They express contempt for profit yet they want everything for free. But only people with excess can keep on giving everything away for nothing. The peasants here have no excess to give. So the hippies live for free in their tourist attractions and are slowly destroying them.’
We climbed down again to the sand and went to look at the village. There were a few ramshackle shops selling cheap jewellery and roach holders, string bags and cheesecloth dresses, as well as a dark bar from which rock music boomed, and several cafés offering the same basic menu.
‘It was here that the girls decided to go overland back to Australia,’ Henry informed me as we looked around. ‘Until a hippie told them they couldn’t get through Afghanistan because there was a war on. And neither could they go through Iran because of the revolution. Actually, the girls were a little bewildered because they hadn’t known those particular places were on the route.’ Henry emitted a mirthless laugh.
