Crocus Hour, page 24
‘You didn’t need to add that last bit,’ Henry objected. ‘It was uncalled for.’
‘You call for it, Henry. With that look on your face. Like you’ve found the trail of breadcrumbs in the forest. But that trail was eaten by the birds long ago.’
Henry stood up, saying that as we had forgotten to bring a torch we should get back to the car before the sun set. I recall that I did not want to go. I believed that I would never enjoy such perfection again. It was more than the silken sheen of the water and the primeval lushness of the trees. I felt clothed in well-being as if in a suit of light.
On our way back to the car Jane began her story again. She said that the next morning the situation between Stephanos and herself quickly deteriorated. He said he wanted to show her a nicer room in his pension, one with a balcony that looked out over the town. Unable to think of a suitable excuse, she and Sally accompanied the men back to the locked and shuttered building. The room Stephanos showed them was indeed much better than the first. It was easy to imagine that in the height of summer its high ceilings and cool spaciousness might be considered very desirable. But now it seemed even more like a prison than the first room had.
Stephanos then wanted the girls to wait while he purchased an engagement ring at a jewellery shop some distance away. Where I come from the woman chooses the ring, Jane told him. Not here, Stephanos replied. Jane said she decided then and there that it was time for the charade to end. But when it became clear to him that she was actually breaking off the putative engagement, Stephanos became furious. They had all been standing in the frigid hallway but now, shouting in Greek, he pushed the girls back into the room.
‘I laughed,’ Jane said. ‘Whereupon he produced a large key and threatened to lock us in. I was astounded. Was he going to keep me locked up till I married him?’
‘And then?’ Henry asked.
‘I was wearing an expensive gold watch my father had given me as a present when I finished school. The back was engraved with considerable sentimental nonsense. I offered it to Stephanos as security. I pointed out that the watch was irreplaceable and it proved we wouldn’t run away.’
‘And he accepted?’
‘Immediately.’
‘And then?’ Henry pressed.
‘As soon as they were gone, we were out of the place and hitching back to Athens.’
By this time we had reached the car. We drove through the sunset to the bach Henry had rented. We unpacked the car in the dark and then prepared a meal. After the meal we sat in the warm dark on a deck over a ravine and drank coffee.
‘Sally could have run away to the pension in Corinth,’ Henry suddenly said as if he had been chewing this thought over for hours.
‘No,’ Jane replied angrily. ‘I gave the police in Crete that address.’
‘She could have run away with Nikolaos,’ he persisted. ‘To the Mani.’
‘To what? A lifetime of living among the stones like a lizard and dining on prickly pear?’
‘She could have laid low and then gone to Sydney.’
‘You know she lost her passport!’
Henry closed his eyes and, like an oracle facing the wrong way, his inner eye thus reading the past rather than the future, said slowly, ‘I see Sally going down the outdoor staircase to Stavros’s kitchen door. I see her knocking and finding that Lena is there alone. I see Lena inviting Sally in, two young girls together, no eyes, no wagging tongues. I see coffee, small diamond pastries, giggling, secrets composed of pointing and hand signals. I see Lena fetching the passport from the sideboard. I see Sally sliding it into her pocket.’
For a moment I was mesmerised. I too could see myself in Lena’s kitchen. I could see the coffee and the little cakes. But then my own fantasy replaced the rest of Henry’s vision. I could see myself sliding my arm around Lena’s slim waist; I could see my hand pushing back a strand of hair from her face. At once I could feel the years that separated us being compressed like the pleated bellows of an accordion. It was as if everything—Lena’s sweeping, my walks with Henry, Sally’s disappearance—had happened only yesterday.
I snapped out of my reverie when Jane threw the contents of her cup into the void and marched inside.
In the strained silence I thought again about Schrödinger’s cat.
Chapter Six
After we returned from the West Coast, we remained at home, making only day trips to the wilder beaches of the peninsula or to sere river valleys in the foothills of the mountains. My memory is replete with visions of blue skies and sea, of baked tracks and cabbage trees, of sheep wandering about on stony ground amidst tussock, wild roses and matagouri. Then one morning at breakfast Henry put down his empty coffee cup and said, ‘Today, Mesopotamia.’
My second trip through the Waste Lands was more interesting than the first because I knew what lay in store. I knew the plains would soon give way to a wild wind-buffeted landscape of soaring peaks. I knew, because the day was fine, that the light would be fierce, as if coming straight from the torch of a god unschooled in Christian modesty. When we made our first stop at a picnic table near a forest, I stepped out of the car into a great silence. I could hear everything: the bleating of lost sheep by the ford, the wingbeats of rare falcons, the crack and roar of distant avalanches, the heartbeats of minute pilgrims.
Soon after our stop the metal road became narrower and windier, with a precipitous drop on the right-hand side. Then we turned a corner to a sight that, to this day, is my vision of paradise—a fearsome paradise, to be sure, one that had banished human presence and the small scale it generally prefers. This paradise was forked, stretching for miles in two directions, both consisting of chains of blue-black mountains capped with fresh snow and disappearing into an unearthly light.
Thirty or forty kilometres up the road we came to the settlement of Mesopotamia. There was a scattering of houses, a school and an airfield. Near the school, which was located on a small hillock amongst pines, was a plaque where Butler’s house had once been. Standing in that spot, it seemed inconceivable that nearly one and a half centuries ago an Englishman had come here to take up farming. Even with a good car the area seemed remote. It was difficult to imagine him picking his way on horseback along the stony river edge, through the towering wild Irishman and spaniard, seeking safe places to cross the river.
Henry said that Butler had had a garden that provided fresh vegetables and flowers, and this was something else I found scarcely credible. That here in this bright hostility, with its endless cycle of wind, flood, snow and drought, anything but rocks and stones could have been conjured out of the recalcitrant earth. It was startling to think, Henry added, that by 1857 wool from sheep raised in the wider area had made its way down the torrent stream, across the buffeted plains and over the sea to London, there to be made into fine coats for corpulent gentlemen who rarely saw the light of day before lunch time.
There was not much we could do—no lake or nearby walking tracks—so we ambled for a time along the side of the metal road. The foreground was bleak: a small stream in an immense field dotted with rocks and stands of matagouri. But the backdrop of mountains was as splendid as Butler said it was. Henry waved his hand at the peaks and said that of course one could now go hiking, driving and flying amongst them, just as one could now go rafting on the river, but that it was easier to imagine the emotions of the first settlers if one simply stood and gazed. After gazing for a considerable time we had thermos tea while sitting on large rocks in the middle of the desiccated field. Although there was nobody about, I felt oddly conspicuous—as if we sat in the shaft of light from a god’s eye.
On our return journey along the metal road we stopped at a small church hidden in a grove of ancient exotics. Henry said that the church had been built in 1868 utilising stones from the river and limestone from a nearby sheep station. It was a sweet little thing, room sized, with half a dozen pews down each side and pretty stained-glass windows. Outside was the usual small chaos of old gravestones, an alarming proportion of which were those of children. The graveyard now looked out over orderly grass fields, but it was not difficult to picture a funeral procession of horses and drays wending its way amidst the cabbage trees, a long piercing ululation permanently suppressed in the parents of the corpse in the tiny coffin.
Before leaving the churchyard I had another of my brief pangs of regret, such as I’d occasionally had in the village in Crete, that I had not lived my life in a small, close-knit community. One in which people knew my name, knew my father’s and grandfather’s name, and which accepted without question or even invitation, in the same small church year after year, my presence at the many baptisms, weddings and funerals of the generations. For reasons I cannot explain, I felt that I might be more reconciled to the passage of my own life if I had been able to mark the passage of the lives of others, if I had stood in the snow at an old man’s burial, or kissed the cheek of a young spring bride, or dandled a new baby in the shade of the trees on a hot summer day. My Catholic mother would no doubt prefer to learn that this was primarily a religious feeling but it was not. It was a yearning to belong, not because of who I was or what I had made of myself but merely because I existed.
As we returned across the plains I reflected that Jane would have laughed me to scorn if I had voiced my thoughts in the graveyard. I have no doubt that she would have said that one of the greatest benefits of modern life is how easy it is to get away from your family.
The rest of my time with Henry and Jane flew by. During the final week of my stay, Jane went to visit friends in Sydney, thus sparing me the difficulty of parting from her. On the morning of her departure, however, she got up early and took a taxi to the airport. I had assumed Henry and I would be driving her, and I was taken aback to realise that I would not see her again before I too left the country. Left to our own devices, Henry pottered around the garden and I relaxed, sometimes in the courtyard of the herb garden and sometimes on the verandah. It ran along two sides of the house, and as the day progressed one had only to move a few metres at a time in order to secure the desired sun or shade. Henry would join me at regular intervals, bringing iced drinks or hot coffee, his cigarettes and his obsessions.
I recall that when I jokingly accused him of being even more monkish than before, he again expressed his disapproval that medieval monks had not been grateful for their lives in the world. He told me that it did not seem likely that even hypocritical gratitude had anything to do with the monks’ prayers in those times. All their prayers were to save from the agonising fires of eternity their own souls, and the souls of the kings and aristocracy who were their patrons, and possibly, just possibly, the souls of certain celibate laymen, while the souls of the countless nobodies involved in growing food and raising children, in building simple dwellings and going back and forth from the markets—in short, everybody undertaking the real and essential business of the world—could all go to hell in a handcart.
I laughed when Henry said this but objected that surely the peasants would not have tolerated, let alone supported, such prejudice against themselves. Henry demurred: in some medieval centuries it was held to be doubtful whether anyone but a monk had more than a fair chance of going to heaven. Hence the aristocracy’s fervour in establishing and maintaining monastic houses, and the laypersons’ and peasants’ willingness to perform regular daily tasks in them, so that the houses seemed to be the lucky recipients of both capital and slavery. And, he added, although such generosity and endeavour might seem illogical, given the slight chance of success, the human being ever strives to propitiate the gatekeepers of the afterlife, be they monks, mystics or visionaries—or one of any number of shamans or charlatans who claim to be able to ensure that your immortal spirit, or that of someone you love, will live for ever and not be consigned to the real or metaphorical flames.
‘As for me,’ he added after I had thought for a while about what he had said, ‘it has been enough.’
‘What has?’
He made a sweeping gesture that took in the house and the garden, and for all I know the plains, rivers, bush and mountains, and said, ‘All this.’
‘But what about Sally?’ I asked in spite of myself.
‘There’s still time,’ he assured me.
Just now I have finally concluded to my own satisfaction my long research on the subject of the Children of God. I have been helped by the Internet, of course, a tool unavailable to Henry at the time when he was searching for information on the cult’s philosophies, locations and recruitment practices. A widely publicised investigation into the sexual abuse of children blew open the cult’s secretive world, and practices thus exposed have been confirmed by adults born and reared in its dark embrace. I am stunned by what I have read, and not least by the stories of those who tried to escape. Backsliders were moved from house to house, finally fetching up in redneck deserts where they knew nobody, where their dependence on ‘The Family’—as it had now been rebranded—was multiplied tenfold. Successful escapees told horror stories of having to beg for food and clothing, of being forced into arranged marriages, and of being sent to recruit new victims using their sex organs. How many girls failed to get away? I wondered. How many found they couldn’t leave their children and remain in hostile backwaters, permanently dismayed at how easy it is to ruin one’s life?
I suppose some people are terrified of freedom, Jane wrote when we discussed the subject by email. Just when girls like us could leave home and lead our own lives for the first time, another monster rose up, its matted hair and bloody teeth disguised in cheesecloth and love beads. To be told what to do: is that what people discover they most want when they are finally free?
Or, she conjectured, is it that they do not fully appreciate the freedom they might be granted and are already greedy for more? Imagine soaring away, not only from convention but from the now conventional unconventions; imagine soaring on a prayer, a seed, a fast. But pure, pregnant and hungry you are obliterated; you became nothing but a small explosion in the abject oblivion of numbers.
It was in this context, she added, that Henry always talked about the revolution in Iran which, if you recall, began a short time before Sally and I went to Crete. Of course, we didn’t know about it and I doubt we would have cared much if we had. The men with binoculars on the hill at Agia Galini were prehistoric enough for us—although, as Henry frequently pointed out, those men were more correctly described as rooted in history, not prehistoric. At any rate, the revolution would have seemed inexplicable to us amidst the rock music, drugs and pervasive tourist nudity. So it was startling for me to discover that the move from Shah to Ayatollah had been couched in the language of freedom. Independence, freedom and the Islamic Republic, chanted the Iranian demonstrators. Independence, freedom and the Children of God, chanted Sally.
In my reply to Jane I said that she could never be certain that Sally had made that choice. For a start, it had only been Henry’s invention that she regained her passport. Jane agreed but said that a scenario that often played itself out in her head was of Sally falling into the clutches of an equivalent evil during her flight from the cult. For some reason, she said, her vision of this event was always set in the Australian outback.
Sally would be hitchhiking on one of those long straight roads of rammed red earth in the middle of nowhere, roads bisecting arid plains of stunted bush and huge kangaroos and leading straight into a sunset of bleeding yellow and purple. She would climb into a beaten-up ute in some garment that scarcely covered her and trustingly inform the unshaven driver with bloodshot eyes that no one in Australia, indeed in the whole world, knew where she was at that precise moment. The man would smile a little crazily and offer her a snack from the shiny packet in his lap. She would hesitate—and accept. This would be her moment of triumph, the moment when all the threads of her life came together, the moment when she finally became Sally Davis in an orgasm of complete freedom. She would plunge in her hand and bring out a fistful of roasted nuts. As soon as she had finished eating, the driver would pull over to rape her by the side of the road and then, taking in his hands the threads of her life, would use them to strangle her.
After he had driven off, nothing would remain in that place but the lingering perfume of patchouli oil.
In 1996 Jane sent me an invitation to her wedding, which I was unable to attend, and a year or two later sent a letter announcing the birth of her daughter. Less than six months after the birth, Henry wrote to say that the drongo husband had moved out and things had returned to normal, albeit either he or Jane was always up at night, pacing the long hallway with the screaming infant who they dearly hoped would not turn out to be a small and swaddled version of Jane’s father, now passed on to the great reckoning. Henry added wryly that he’d never imagined he was the kind of man who would end up with such a family, neither of them blood relations and both acquired more or less by accident, just as one might mistakenly pick up the wrong suitcases from an airport carousel.
Jane sent photographs of her daughter at birth, a year old, two, three, and described the slow decline in Henry’s health following a series of minor strokes. She said he had taken to sitting in the garden as much as working in it. She said that whenever she took a cup of tea or coffee out to the bench in the walk, he would blink as if he had just been brought out into the sunlight from the long dark corridors of the underworld. The other day, she continued, he had said, ‘I thought I would have been older than this when I died.’
I said, ‘You never know, Henry, you might go on like this for years.’
‘Is that meant to cheer me up?’ he asked.
‘Trying to cheer up old people is a waste of time,’ I replied without thinking.
He laughed and patted my hand. ‘That’s my girl.’ Then he added, ‘But you do cheer me up. Just by being here. That’s all there is in the end, these brief visits from the living. And don’t let any senile old bed-wetter tell you otherwise.’
