‘Have you ever been to France?’ she asked idly. ‘We went there last year. It was the end of winter, and very cold, we had not thought of that. On our last day there, the sun came out. We went to Versailles, and it was spring just in one moment, with a bird singing. In the gardens of the palace there were such trees and flowers. Perhaps you need to come from a barren country like this to appreciate such things.’
‘Greece is not barren,’ I said.
She did not look at me. One eyebrow twitched in annoyance, and then she was smiling again.
‘But the flowers, they were magnificent.’
She cupped her hands before her face, delineating a wondrous bloom. I watched her silently, with a fist against my teeth. She went on,
‘And I bought one of those little books, to read about the king. When he was dying, he said how everyone had told him it was difficult to die, but no, he knew it was easy. The women were crying, and he told them that he was nothing, that they should not cry. And then he was afraid that he might cry himself, but he didn’t.
With her fingertip she traced designs on the table, vainly trying to capture the patterns of leafshadow.
‘And so the king died,’ she murmured.
I lifted my glass.
‘Long live the king.’
We drank; or at least, I did. She looked at my ironic smile, and did not seem to like it very much. But she laughed anyway.
The dull sound of an explosion came to us. A little cloud of dust floated half-way up the hillside behind us, another rose, and a moment later came the sound, crump. The taverna keeper, a burly old man in a cummerbund and a sailor’s cap, was drawing his boat up the beach. He jerked his head toward the hill, and called,
‘Some day he will blow us all up.’
He left the boat and came to our table, smoothing his heavy white moustache with the backs of his hands.
‘My son,’ he said, and laughed. ‘A grown man and he stays all day up there, playing with his fireworks.’
‘What is he doing?’ Helena asked.
The old man shrugged histrionically.
‘He says if we blow all the rocks away the olives will grow. Blow all the rocks away, have you ever heard such a thing?’
He shook his head, and tramped away into the taverna. Helena looked at me and smiled. She began to say something, but stopped, and bit her lip. We laughed, and fingered our glasses, and looked out over the bay. A breath of wind crossed the water, wrinkling it like shaken green silk, came on and stirred the leaves above us, stirred the reeds, the wild dry reeds.
‘There’s going to be a storm,’ I said.
She nodded. I went on.
‘I hate storms. Lord, there’s always something, something always happens, just when you think that you’ve found it.’
‘Found what?’
I took one of her cigarettes and lit it, and watched the smoke disperse.
‘The little thing,’ I murmured. ‘The little thing which means so much.’
She looked at me warily, somewhat distrustfully, annoyed, I thought, that I should compel her to question me. One cannot put very much poetry into a question, and the one who has the answer has also any mystery which may be around.
‘What is it?’ she asked, ‘this little thing.’
I grinned, and showed her my empty palms.
‘How would I know, not having found it yet?’
Her hands stirred on the table before her. She stood up, saying,
‘It’s time for my swim.’
She pulled off her trousers and her pullover, revealing an intricately made body covered in places by a tiny black bikini. If people really do gulp, as it is said they do, then I gulped. A dark cicatrice was inscribed under her left shoulder blade, which heightened the pale lucidity of her skin. She walked across the beach, hopping on the hot sand, and slipped into the sea. She was a good and graceful swimmer. From my pocket I took a scrap of paper and looked at it. When again I lifted my eyes, she had left the water, and stood now with her back toward me. The little waves lapped at her feet. For a time she stayed motionless, her face turned seaward, and then began to wade through the shallows. Her long hair hung down her back, and her shoulders gleamed. She came to where the sun burned on the water in a golden mist, and the light took her form and blurred its outline, so that she seemed to tremble on the brink of sea and light. She paused, and turned from the waist to look back at me, lifting her hand in a strange small gesture, languidly.
She came back to the table, tossing her head, running her fingers through her hair. Damp dark fern-strands gleamed in the pits of her arms.
‘Do you not swim?’ she asked.
I closed my mouth, and cleared my throat, and said,
‘No.’
She smiled, showing her small white teeth.
‘Another thing you fear, yes?’
She went and lay down in the sand beyond the shadow of the tree. After a while I followed her, and sat beside her on my heels. With her chin on her hands, she gazed at the white sand before her.
‘What do you write about?’ she asked.
‘Things.’
‘Not people?’
‘As seldom as I can.’
‘Tell me,’ she persisted.
I would say nothing. She frowned, and pushed damp hair away from her cheek with the pale soft underside of her wrist.
‘If I wrote, it would be about people.’
I shaded my eyes and looked out at the holy island on the sea.
‘Yes, I write about people too,’ I admitted. ‘But you have to be careful with them. They always want to have meanings, or be symbols, always something more than they are. They want to think, while all that matters is what happens in the little space between one person and the next.’
I bit my lip. She noticed nothing.
‘Like electricity and metal,’ she said, pleased with herself. ‘Or is it magnets? I never know. I shall buy one of your books.’
‘There is only one.’
‘Well I shall buy it, and if I do not understand it, then you can explain it to me.’
I shook my head and said solemnly,
‘That wouldn’t do at all, Mrs Kyd.’
I was eager to end the conversation. Helena sat up, and her swim suit sagged with the weight of damp sand which clung to it. Silver beads of water lay between her breasts. I left her, and went back to the table to finish my beer and curse at myself for a while, for no particular reason, apart from the eternal one of knowing myself to be a fool.
The afternoon went imperceptibly away into the enormous sky. The heatstorm raged briefly on the horizon, with lightning, and distant understated thunder. Nothing of that rage came to the beach but for a fitful murmuring of the olive tree, and a moment while the sea was alive with ghostly glimmers of phosphorescence. Helena put on her clothes, smiled at me, took up her bag, and started slowly away up the road with her head bent. The sun slipped down the sky above the headland, and the light ebbed on the beach. The old woman, sighing and nodding, came and asked me if I would take another drink, or a salad perhaps, a nice roasted fish. I thanked her, and refused, and went to the road. Purple shadows were flooding the sea. The wild reeds were clacking. There was the voice of the sea. I found her sitting on a low stone wall some distance up the hill. We said nothing, but moved away together. The sky turned through its colours, pale rose to blue, a wild soft purple shading to white on the horizon. The burnt barren fields around us were touched with gold, and the bushes gave up their shadows lingeringly from among the leaves and thorns. A cloud of white glittering light exploded slowly on the sea below us, as though a huge invisible hand had smacked its quiet surface. Somewhere a cock sent up a querulous and irritated squawk. We crossed the spine of the island. A fresh breeze sprang up, and a hawk climbed the liquid air.