Crocus Hour, page 23
‘So this is your room now,’ I commented.
She sat up. ‘It has been for quite a while.’
I looked around, taking in the pictures on the walls, the new pieces of furniture, the draped clothing.
Jane said, ‘When you’re young, you think the fact that you once had sex with someone means you have some kind of enduring special bond. As you get older, you realise nothing becomes more irrelevant more quickly.’
Henry bustled into the ensuing strained silence to announce that coffee had been set out in the sitting room. He licked his finger and held it in the air. ‘I detect wind from Antarctica.’
‘Jane has been telling me that sex is irrelevant,’ I informed him.
‘That’s not what I said,’ she objected.
I looked at Henry, hoping to inveigle his support, but he wore a serene and distant smile as if the skirmishes of the minions on the plains had been obscured by a thick mist.
‘I’ve taken a bach for a few days,’ he announced once we were drinking our coffee.
‘Somewhere near Erewhon?’ I asked.
‘Well, nearly everything is in that region,’ he replied.
Jane sighed loudly.
‘When Lord Byron was dying …’ Henry began.
Jane rolled her eyes.
‘Byron said, There are things that make the world dear to me, for the rest I am content to die. How many things were there and how much was the rest?’
‘You’re not dying,’ Jane retorted.
‘Probably only a very few things,’ Henry concluded. ‘He was wise beyond his years. Much of life is just the rest.’
Jane stood up to clear away the cups. ‘What Henry’s telling you is that the mountains around here are everything to him and he doesn’t give a fuck about anything else. But for some reason he can’t just say he’s taken a shack in the boondocks; he has to drag in Byron and death.’
Jane went out of the room with the tray and Henry said quietly, ‘I suppose I’m only trying to excuse my rather limited desires.’ Then he took out a cigarette, lit it and added, ‘But it’s good to know that the rich and famous think as you do. It makes you less afraid that life might have given you different lessons if only you’d had the money to bribe her.’
As it turned out, Henry did not take the road that led to Taaroa’s saw-toothed mountain but drove west across the plains to the Alps, a re-enactment of the journey he and I had made on my first visit. When we passed the river where we had discussed whether everything was water, Henry said that the current thought seemed to be that everything is light. Jane asserted that everything is not anything, and she hated the idea that everything was all joined together like one huge mucilaginous gob. Henry retorted that the way things were took no account of individual tastes and preferences, which was just as well since many otherwise smart people had steeped themselves so thoroughly in nihilism.
I recalled that on our last visit to the area the landscape had seemed threatening: one only had to imagine that due to some calamity the road had vanished to have a strong sense of impending doom, to fear that soon one would freeze to death as the last rays of the sun withdrew from the bleak valley between the mountains. Now in the height of a dry summer you could almost hear the parched earth splitting in the bony fields and waterfalls of scree collapsing into river beds of rock; but although the landscape suggested violence, it was of the hot and radiantly lit kind, and I had the feeling that one could wander for days, shirtless, surviving on trickles of river water, succulents and visions.
We stopped for lunch at a picnic area by a river. No sooner had we laid out the food than three, five, eight large birds emerged from the bush and made a curious forward-and-sideways dash for our table. Henry told me that these olive and scarlet creatures were called kea. Like a gang of hungry thugs they surrounded the table and stared hard as we sliced the bread and pared the cheese. But they soon lost patience with the crumbs we threw them, and jumped onto the table to snatch tidbits straight off our plates. Henry said keas were very curious, very adaptable in their dietary habits and had a great love of fat. To demonstrate the truth of these claims he brought out some dark chocolate. The gang was mesmerised. As he distributed tiny pieces of chocolate on the table top, the birds gobbled them up voraciously and then charged forward to attack the glinting foil in Henry’s hand.
Jane looked around at the dry ground, the parched hills, and ventured the opinion that in high summer parts of the landscape reminded her of certain areas outside Corinth. She said that before going to Crete she and Sally had spent several days travelling around the region with two men they met in Athens.
‘You never told me that,’ Henry said.
‘Should I have?’ she asked.
Henry began to pack up the picnic. The ever-vigilant keas spied a new picnic being brought out of a car that was parked under trees a short way off and went rushing over to it like a gang of small pirates.
In the car Jane volunteered the information that she and Sally had been walking down a crowded street in Athens when the two men she’d referred to had simply fallen into step with them. One had lived in America for a long time and spoke English, she said. Proper English, not the weird Gringlish that was pervasive in the region. He had introduced himself to her while his friend, who spoke no English at all, made incompetent overtures to Sally.
‘What were their names?’ Henry asked.
‘The one who talked to me was Stephanos. His friend was called Nikolaos.’
Jane said that the men invited them to a doughnut café. It was packed and everyone in the dining room had the same dish brought to them—a pyramid of doughnuts sprinkled with sesame seeds and swimming in honey.
‘Did you like these men?’ Henry asked impatiently.
‘Not at all. Well, Nikolaos seemed harmless and had a certain measure of Greek charm. But Stephanos was a bully.’
Jane said she and Sally ate several platefuls of doughnuts and drank many small cups of grossly over-sweetened Greek coffee. During this protracted session of eating and drinking, she had time to scrutinise Stephanos more carefully. He wore an open shirt and a gold medallion; he wore many gold rings and a gold watch, and pulled out a gold cigarette lighter to light his Marlboro. A man with gold accessories, she concluded, has no taste and is never to be trusted.
‘I thought girls liked gold!’ I exclaimed.
‘As far as men are concerned we like it in the bank.’
Jane admitted that Stephanos soon baffled her. She presumed that after the doughnuts he would suggest going somewhere private, perhaps back to the girls’ budget hotel, where the men would embark on a course of clumsy seduction. But this didn’t happen; instead Stephanos took them all on a sightseeing tour of Athens and, later on, to dinner at a reasonable restaurant. By the end of the evening, she said, she had formed a bantering, semi-flirtatious relationship with him, irksome to the degree that she loathed him.
It was not difficult for me to picture this particular version of human intimacy. I stared hard out of the car window and we continued our journey in silence, soon arriving at the zigzag. There was no swirling mist, only long, lunar slopes of scree and the eerie sound of loose rocks tumbling into the void. Henry remarked that owing to erosion by earthquakes and flooding the road had been cut ever further back into the hillside and was now nearly twenty metres higher and sixty-five metres further back than it had been several decades ago. Since this approach to the problem of the eroding road could not continue for ever, and in fact had already reached its practical limit, a viaduct had been planned. This viaduct would be built along the upper river bed, bypassing the zigzag altogether. So feast your eyes, Henry instructed, because the murderous realm of Taaroa will be no more.
Henry added that since the area of land we were now travelling across was one of the most earthquake-prone in the country, the viaduct would be built to withstand seismic forces some forty percent higher than the usual maximum. Furthermore, a portion of the road near Starvation Point would be roofed so that drivers might take shelter from rock avalanches, during which boulders as big as buses bounced down the slopes like rubber balls. So, he concluded, one should not expect that this journey would ever become a truly tame affair and he hoped to be still alive when these marvels of engineering had finally been completed.
‘You’re not dying, Henry,’ Jane said.
‘Tell me more about those men,’ Henry replied.
Jane said that before they separated for the night, Stephanos asked if she and Sally would like to go to Corinth to visit his pension. He said that it was locked up because it was not yet the tourist season, but that it was still pretty and if they liked it enough they could take up a room in it for free. Jane said she and Sally remained open-minded as to whether they might want to take up residence in one room in an otherwise locked and empty hotel but nevertheless agreed to accompany the men on the trip the following day.
The four of them set off about mid-morning. The day was leaden. Stephanos proudly pointed out places of interest and every so often stopped to enable them to admire some piece of scenery or other. Jane said she and Sally remained unimpressed. Eventually they arrived at the pension, a pretty white building with French-blue shutters. It was much larger than they had imagined, and cold because the central heating had been turned off. The thought of taking a room in such a deserted place was too dreary to contemplate.
Jane commented that there was something strange about the way Stephanos acted. He kept disappearing. First he had to rush off to get the keys—but wouldn’t a man who owned a pension have the keys with him?—then he kept rushing off while they were looking around the building. She said that during one of his mysterious departures she and Sally stated, virtually simultaneously, that a room in the pension was out of the question. She was too disturbed by the landlord’s behaviour and Sally disliked the place.
Refusing to commit themselves to taking a room, they returned to the car for the proposed sightseeing trip of Corinth. Jane said she now recalled little about this trip except that the area seemed dreary and industrialised, and the café in which they had their evening meal was one of the most primitive kind, with a pitted concrete floor and walls in the shade of old blood. It was nearly empty, and because of the poorly lit and lugubrious atmosphere it was easy to imagine that right after eating the patrons would be taken out and shot.
‘Didn’t you see the Temple of Apollo?’ Henry interrupted.
‘We didn’t see any ruins at all,’ Jane replied.
Henry shook his head and turned his attention back to the road.
Jane said that towards the end of the evening, by which time he was quite drunk, Stephanos put his arm around her and tried to kiss her. She shoved him off. He began slapping her and then punched her in the face. She was so shocked, she said, she couldn’t keep the tears from running down her cheeks. Stephanos proceeded to make abject apologies—and concluded with a proposal of marriage.
‘Marriage?’ I echoed.
‘The farmer doesn’t care whether the ewe and the ram like each other,’ Jane explained. ‘They’re simply performing a function. And that’s how Stephanos approached the problem of getting a wife. Just find a female. But, having lived in America for so long, he was one of the few who didn’t want the daughter of a half-literate peasant.’
‘And Nikolaos—did he propose to Sally?’ Henry asked.
‘No. It turned out that charming and sneaky Nikolaos was already married.’
‘So why d’you think Stephanos didn’t pick Sally?’ Henry inquired. ‘In the first place, I mean?’
Jane looked at Henry disdainfully. ‘Why should he?’
Henry abruptly realised what he had said.
‘It’s as simple as this,’ Jane explained as Henry went a bit pink. ‘I was the one walking beside him when he fell into step with us.’
While I tried to digest the idea of such a lack of discrimination, Jane said that once Stephanos had made his proposal his strange behaviour at the pension immediately became clear. She believed he did not own it, at best had shared ownership with someone else—his parents or brothers or a close male friend, to whom he had to run to fetch the keys, and to whom he had to keep running back in case he or they suddenly arrived to scupper his plans of appearing rich to his future bride-to be.
‘He thought you’d marry him if you believed he owned a pension?’ I asked in disbelief.
‘It would be funny if it wasn’t so stupid,’ Jane replied. ‘When girls like us agree to marriage, we do it for love.’
The sneer in her voice when she said this smote every noun: girls, marriage, love. The whole lot of them were scorned into a smoking heap on the ground.
By this time we were coming down from the pass into beautiful weather. Henry remarked that he had rarely seen such perfection on this side of the island; that even in summer clouds often hovered about the mountain tops or vaporous mists rose up from the rivers. We turned off and drove along a valley dotted with old cottages. On one front verandah I saw a tethered goat chomping on the high grass that edged the peeling hovel; another was inhabited by a small flock of sheep, some sunbathing on the porch while others contemplated the scenery out of the broken windows. Here again was Crete writ antipodean: less hot, more lush, and far more recent, but everywhere there were the same signs of hard lives, of livelihoods scratched straight out of the earth.
Henry sniffed when I voiced my thoughts, and replied that in 1865 Hokitika, a place not far off, had been the pivotal town of a gold rush. The river port had been crowded with sailing ships from California, Victoria and New South Wales; and mining towns, many of which boasted twenty, thirty, even fifty hotels, had spread rapidly through the bush and up the coast, These hotels had imported troupes of dancing girls, by which he did not mean harlots engaged to cancan with their skirts over their heads, but somewhat more respectable women who had been hired to waltz with the swarms of lonely men. Gold dredging, sawmilling, coal mining and farming had replaced gold mining rather quickly, but these were hardly pursuits that could be described as scratching.
‘No,’ Jane contributed, ‘the men didn’t scratch—they left. As well you know, Henry. This coast has been exporting its youth for decades.’
By this time we had turned off again and were proceeding along a dirt road beside a lake. Huge gnarled trees waded in the silky water. We travelled for a time through the deep gloom of a forest, emerging again into the bright late-afternoon sun. We parked and then, walking, wading and swimming, we made our way along the lake edge to a tiny bay where we smoked with our backs to a lush grove of tree ferns, palms and ancient natives garlanded with epiphytes.
‘So what happened after the marriage proposal?’ Henry asked.
Jane said that they all went to a hotel. The men didn’t seem to care what Nikolaos’s wife might think about her husband staying away overnight. She and Sally slept in one room, the men in another. Jane said that although she was prepared to sleep with Stephanos in order to keep the peace, he adopted the sentimental position of wanting to wait until he had bought an engagement ring.
‘They’re kind of primitive, the men in these cultures,’ she said. ‘Who they do and don’t sleep with is nothing to do with natural attraction and affection. He wanted to marry me, so now it was necessary to force me into the position of pretend village virgin.’
Jane said that the next day Stephanos announced that he didn’t want to drive back to Athens, he wanted to go on a day trip. When she asked him why he didn’t have to go to work, he told her that she had seen for herself that his pension was shut. They set off from the hotel and drove for hours through the barest, starkest hills imaginable. The landscape was barren and the wind bone-chilling. After hours of driving they came to a village on the water. There was a ramshackle hotel that was officially closed, but a woman there cooked them a meal on a grill over the fireplace. Jane described her as dark and wizened, and silent to the point of menace. She didn’t smile. She grilled the goat chops with unparalleled resentment and joylessness. And she served them warmed and spiced retsina that was hideous.
‘Then we had to pay her!’ Jane exclaimed. ‘I remember our shock. There hadn’t been any menu, any agreement. We thought the old hag was a friend of Stephanos’s. We thought we were being given hospitality.’ Jane spat out the last word as if it were disgusting in her mouth. ‘But you soon learn that in those sorts of places hospitality is only a thing for men.’
The trip continued. They came to ever more frightful villages, deserted and bleak, with thick village walls and rudimentary hovels made of stones. Stones that looked as if they had been collected from the fields and simply piled up. Occasionally they stopped to inspect abandoned dwellings. Some of these were very tall, veritable fortresses, with numerous tiny windows that hardly let in any light. They weren’t for light, Stephanos told them, they were for guns. In many of these villages the only people they saw were old men who sat outside the primitive cafés and leaned on their crooks.
‘We had our evening meal in a private house,’ Jane said. ‘But by then we were well on our way back to Corinth. It was a proper house. There were lace curtains and an embroidered tablecloth. Stephanos introduced me as his fiancée. But no one sat down with us, and again we had to pay …’ Her expression was harder to decipher now, but she looked as if she was ruminating on an injustice, perhaps realising for the first time that a man had exploited his friendship with her in order to redistribute her apparent wealth among his own tribe.
‘We stayed in the hotel again that night,’ she continued. ‘At some point during the day Sally and I’d had a chance to discuss things out of earshot. I told her I was completely sick of the situation and was leaving by bus in the morning. Sally was happy to agree. She said Nikolaos was sweet but not her type. That is, not the sort who’d live on the dole in Sydney and eat bean sprouts.’
